Thomas Cook

by Jill Hamilton

  Three of the destinations which Cook promoted with such fervour were well known because of the Bible: the Nile, so associated with Moses; the Jordan, which had become synonymous with Jesus; and the Tiber, which witnessed the expansion of the Christian Church. It was almost as if there was an invisible triangle connecting the three rivers which became part of his adult life. Five of Cook’s most profound religious moments were near rivers and waterways. The first was when he was seventeen, when, near the River Trent in Derbyshire, he was plunged in the baptism bath in the Baptist Chapel in Melbourne, near his home. His second was at the age of thirty-five on the edge of the Grand Union Canal. His third was in 1869 while escorting the first package tour of English tourists to the Middle East, when he immersed himself in the Jordan in Palestine in the heart of the Holy Land where John the Baptist baptised Jesus. The fourth was the Nile, where he promoted trips as a tourist destination and explored places immortalised by Moses and Tutankhamen, and the fifth was setting up the first Baptist mission in history in Rome near the banks of the Tiber. Here he followed in the footsteps of Peter and Paul, who had made Rome into the cradle of Christianity.

  It took Cook four careers and sixty years – as a carpenter, a printer, a preacher and a travel organiser – before he stood on the edges of the Jordan. By then this man, who had failed to acquire the finer arts of riding or ballroom dancing and who could not speak more than a few phrases in Arabic, could serenely lead a caravan of baggage camels, horses and donkeys, make himself heard and understood above all the noise and commotion, and, with only the help of men who knew no clocks and whose hours and minutes were regulated by the sun, the moon and the stars, get his tours to run with European punctuality.

  TWO

  A Nonconformist Childhood

  Hedges so thick they seemed prehistoric had grown tall to shelter men and animals from the ferocious winter weather whose winds often blew low through the pretty little Domesday village of Melbourne, seven-and-a-half miles south-east from Derby, south-west of the Pennines. In 1807, winter arrived hastily after the long days of summer. There was snow in November. It melted away, but, as usual, from late November to early March, life was hard and there were few luxuries. Owning a pig was one of them. Happiness for labourers could often be measured by how many they owned.1 When a man could not find enough for his family to eat, the pig would be sold. The money helped pay off debts and bought shoes, clothing and perhaps, in the spring, piglets and hens. Most labourers had a decent potato patch. Leeks, parsnips, turnips, cabbages, beans, peas, spinach, rhubarb, parsley, lavender, rosemary and other herbs were lovingly tended. There were usually a few apple and plum trees. Many men, permanently in debt, relied on pigs, extra harvest earnings and income from their wives’ looms to make ends meet.

  Nearly every dwelling had its loom. For centuries wool had been spun in farmhouses and village homes by women and children, but now the wool went directly to the huge newly built woollen mills just a little smaller than the large new sawmills. Beyond them was the land which yielded wheat, barley, fodder, turnips and the seemingly ever-damp grass for the flocks of sheep. Cared for by shepherds with their crooks and guarded by Border collies, they were the real wealth. Everywhere, the hedges, more than any building, gave a feeling of permanence and of man’s unending struggle with the elements. Many had been grown to enclose open fields, commons and waste land and to absorb it into both farms and estates. Between 1750 and 1830 approximately 6.8 million acres in England were brought into private cultivation as a result of Enclosure Acts.2 The soil was rich, renowned for its market gardens, yet scarcity coexisted with earthly abundance. Abject, hopeless poverty contrasted with the lives of the gentry and aristocracy.

  Forebears of many labourers and tradesmen had been living near and around the area before the Civil War, before the Norman Conquest, back to the times when the Celts worshipped pagan gods, in circles of stones under the stars.

  Horseshoes and little silver balls spelt out the names and date on the wedding cake, which was waiting to be cut. Soon the couple would come up the hill from the church past the tall holly hedges. The wedding of John Cook, a 22-year-old3 labourer, to Elizabeth Perkins was taking place at the parish church of St Michael. John Cook’s family had lived in Melbourne for at least four generations. After the Marriage Act4 of 1753, marriage ceremonies could be performed only by clergymen of the Church of England, or by Quakers and Jews. Apart from the religious humiliation of having to marry in the church they defied, Nonconformists had the hardship of paying fees to the Anglican minister.5 Elizabeth had not been taught to write, so she had to mark the wedding register with a cross. If the family tree in the Cook archives is accurate, she was just over twenty. It gives a date of 1788, but no source.6 As John Cook had hesitated about entering the state of matrimony, her spinsterhood was underscored by her two younger sisters who had married earlier, becoming Ann Pegg and Alice Beresford.

  After the wedding in the icy church in February 1808, just as the daffodils and early irises were pushing through the earth, the happy pair did not move in with John Cook’s parents, William and Mary Cook, as was often customary, but rented the narrow picturesque tumbledown cottage at 9 Quick Close, on the highest crest of the hill of the village. If it had fallen down, it would not have been missed. In such cottages, the earth floors at the back ‘heaved’ in winter. From the street there was a panoramic view, but the house caught the winds and gales, which hissed rain down the chimney, rattled shutters and banged doors. It was a stiff climb up from the curving High Street with its pubs, chapels, shops, millers, brewers, maltsters, boot makers, grocers, butchers, bakers, blacksmith and flour dressers and dealers, though not as steep as the climb up from Melbourne Hall on flat ground near the lake.

  Nine months after the wedding, on 22 November 1808, Thomas, the only child of the marriage, was born with a sturdy body and short legs that would remain spindly all his life. The birth was noted in the blank leaf between the Old and New Testament in the old family Bible which Elizabeth, as the eldest child, had inherited. Due to her lack of schooling, the words were penned in the neat hand of a stranger: ‘On the 22nd day of November, 1808, at five o’clock in the morning, Thomas Cook was born in Melbourne.’ As if to give symmetry to the pattern in his life, his birth coincided with the exhibition in London of the first steam locomotive and open carriage on rails by Richard Trevithick, the Cornish mining engineer, inventor of the steam engine.7 Thomas’s birth also coincided with another in Paris, that of Louis Napoleon (who would become Napoleon III), the son of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother, Louis, and Josephine’s daughter, Hortense. The activities of Louis Napoleon would impact on Thomas’s life, as would those of William Gladstone, who was born the following year, and of Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was born the year before Thomas.

  War formed a backdrop to Thomas’s childhood. With the exception of the period of the Peace of Amiens in 1803, the British had been waging war against the French since 1793.8 Thomas’s birth was at the height of Britain’s long era of war, in the year that Wellington’s soldiers began their fight against Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée in the Peninsular War in Spain, the year that Napoleon – branded in English villages as ‘Boney’ the ogre – had reached his zenith.

  The war brought an exotic touch to daily life in remote and inaccessible Melbourne. A proportion of the 122,000 French prisoners of war9 were interned in the neighbouring town of Ashbyde-la-Zouch. With them came the sound of foreign tongues, the exoticism of the Continent and the constant reminder of the threat of invasion, something which had not been felt in England since the Spanish Armada. When Thomas was born, about 460,000 men had enrolled as volunteers in the home militia, including the volunteer infantry first raised in Derbyshire during 1803. As in the rest of Britain, each able-bodied man was trained in his spare time ready to defend hearth, home and country if invaded. In Melbourne, while there had been much improvisation with weapons, the brass band was so well equipped that there could have been rivalry about who
was to beat the drum.10 At the slightest excuse it struck up a tune, creating such an impression on young Thomas that he later used bands to give gaiety and style to his early tours.

  In 1812, when Thomas was just three years old, a calamity with far-reaching repercussions altered the rural calm of the Cook family. John Cook died. There was little sign of God’s Grace and no pennies or pounds for a gravestone. But despite few chapels being permitted to have their own burial grounds he was buried behind the Baptist chapel. The days after Thomas’s father’s death were crammed with people with red eyes, tears and the imagery of hell and the demonic.11 Death was seen as the transition to a new life in Heaven, but the mourning period was long, gloomy, dark and anxious. There was scarcely money for food or rent.

  That summer saw the preparations for the big ‘waltzing ball’ at Melbourne Hall. With its wild woods and deer parks, summer balls and winter shooting parties, it was a house where people came and went but seldom stayed for long – another world, one physically near by, seen every day, but closed to the villagers. Lady Melbourne was a formidable political hostess, so the house was animated by annual events in the Summer Season. Villagers were curious to know if her erratic daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline Lamb, who had been the celebrated mistress of Lord Byron, was at the house party.

  Then things changed. Just after the harvest, banns were again displayed and read in Melbourne church. Black clothes were discarded, along with the grim mourning that weighed so heavily in the household. The curtains were opened and light was allowed into the downstairs room; the mood lifted from lamentations to celebrations. A new man, James Smithard, was to take the place of John Cook in the life of Elizabeth. This husband-to-be is listed in the church register as having previously married someone called Ann Hollingsworth in March 1802. Now, in September 1812, the bells of St Michael’s pealed over and over again as Elizabeth’s relations sat in the pews and benches to watch her stand beside the pulpit and again utter the words ‘with my body I thee worship’. Friends who were reluctant to take part in any Anglican service yet again waited outside.

  Afterwards, Elizabeth walked up the hill with her new husband. Smithard came to live in Elizabeth’s crammed labourer’s abode. Sleeping in the room where his wife’s former husband had died only months earlier could not have been a romantic start to marriage. Barely nine months had passed before a half-brother, James, arrived. Another five years were to pass before the cradle was pulled out again, for Simeon in 1818, but Thomas remained his mother’s favourite. Many stepfathers would have looked on a lively three-year-old as an intruder, but Smithard was a kind man. He later used some of his wages to pay school fees for Thomas, who was showing much promise. Perhaps, like his grandfather, after whom he had been named, Thomas might become a Baptist pastor. A few streets away from home, the school room was dominated by the squeak of white chalk on a large blackboard, the creaking hinges of desk lids, the choruses of boys chanting tables parrot-fashion and the stifled yawns of those taking dictation or copying out long lists of difficult-to-spell words. The rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic were inculcated by three men of stern integrity and religious character – T. Pickering, John Smith and Joseph Tagg. Punishments ranged from standing in the corner to the cane. Good penmanship was essential and pages of fine, slanted writing were copied. Anyone could start a school, and many fell by the wayside, but sixteen years after Thomas had put down his slate Tagg’s school was still listed.

  At school Thomas showed little aptitude for intellectual pursuits, but his urge to learn and teach went deep, and pamphlets and books to help further his grounding in English were borrowed. The education of those fortunate enough to have any schooling was basic and hardly went beyond the three R’s plus religious instruction. In many schools like Thomas’s, the primer was the Bible. Teachers, avoiding the cost of extra books, could be confident that it would be the one book in the homes of most pupils. School began and ended with the reading of the Bible, often the Old Testament.

  This narrow education, lacking any intellectual aspirations, could have been a handicap, but for Thomas the emphasis on the Bible was an advantage. Nobody could match him on either the Old or the New Testament. This would be of much use to him half a century later when taking tourists around the Holy Land. On the other hand, the travel articles he wrote in his own newspapers, most of which have a freshness and the indefinable air of the amateur, have sometimes been criticised as falling into ‘the unctuous style of the sermon’,12 as his style was influenced by his Bible readings.

  In the cloth-producing towns of England, such as Melbourne, tallow candles, lanterns lit by whale oil to read by, books, tin soldiers, paintboxes and most toys, apart from rag dolls, marbles and skipping ropes, were luxuries for most children. Bunyan’s works were acceptable but novels were still frowned upon. The one book in most homes was the Bible or a cheap reprint with quaint woodcuts of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a book which added a dimension to both travelling and pilgrimages. Bunyan’s prose, especially about the divided self, good and evil, love and hate, Heaven and Hell, had been kept alive in cottages and chapels. He was claimed as a former Baptist. His allegory was written during his six-months’ solitude in a ‘dark, dreary, dungeon’, when he had been imprisoned yet again after English bishops were ordered to penalise anyone failing to come to Communion at their parish church. Thousands had been arrested.

  During Thomas’s second year at school, before the long summer holidays and harvest, the fateful battle of Waterloo was fought between Napoleon and Wellington, the ‘Iron Duke’ in Belgium during the weekend of 15–18 June. For a few hours Britain stood still to rejoice in a victory which had taken roughly twenty-five years. Up and down the country, guns thundered and bonfires were lit. Horrific stories of 50,000 human corpses, almost stripped bare on the battlefield, were imprinted on Thomas.

  The expected upturn in England’s fortunes following Waterloo did not materialise as foreign markets failed to buy sufficient British goods. There was fear of the Poor House, the Debtors’ Prison or bankruptcy as the country plunged into depression. On top of this, 400,000 demobilised soldiers looking for work swamped the job market. A series of thin harvests led to bread riots and hunger for millions, while unemployment and inflation worsened the poverty among the ragged and hungry poor and food, shelter, blankets, clothes and a few shillings became a priority.

  On 28 January 1817, before the Prince Regent opened parliament, reformers presented petitions with half a million signatures. Safely inside the House of Commons the Prince condemned ‘those exciting a spirit of sedition and violence’, but outside the crowd waited. Thousands hissed and booed as he drove up the Mall, stones flew and two bullets shattered the windows of his carriage. Committees found evidence of revolutionary movements in London and in the factory slums of Lancashire, Leicestershire, Derby, Nottingham and Glasgow. Unrest was aggravated by growing numbers of jobless men, pitiful wages, long hours, appalling conditions, child labour and near starvation. Repeated riots and demonstrations upset life in both agricultural and industrial districts. A month after this attempt on the Prince Regent’s life, a nervous government suspended habeas corpus so that any person under suspicion could be thrown into prison without trial. Further restrictive acts, including the prohibition of seditious meetings, were passed. Times were dangerous and hard, but churches and chapels thrived and multiplied as they have never done before or since. As religion, in all its many aspects, was embedded in the life of nineteenth-century England and permeated many aspects, including politics, and was the mainstay of Thomas’s life, a separate chapter is devoted to the background of his Baptist religion.

  THREE

  The Protestant Ethic

  An e at the end of Melbourne was still optional, and in Pigot’s Commercial Directory of Derbyshire it was still minus the e. Just as Melbourne was then spelt in two different ways, there were two main communities in the area, the Anglicans and the Nonconformists. No building in Melbourne competed w
ith the church of St Michael, which, with its tall cliff-like walls, was so large that it had the air of being a small cathedral. After its completion in about 1120, St Michael’s was used as a royal chapel by Henry I, then given by him to the Bishopric of Carlisle. It became a refuge for bishops when fleeing border incursions. For 700 years St Michael’s had been the focus of the area. Now, though, it was no longer a symbol of unity in Melbourne. The Evangelical revival, with its new and reinvigorated Anglicanism, had conversely encouraged more villagers to attend the Nonconformist chapels. Each Sunday there were fewer villagers sitting in front of the fearsome old church columns with its capitals of a grinning cat, snarling dog and an ostrich.

  Elizabeth’s father, Thomas Perkins from Hinckley, in Leicestershire, had been a ‘hell-fire’ preacher, a man of boiling enthusiasms who electrified his congregation. With fire and brimstone sermons and talk of the Devil, he filled the hastily built chapel. Thomas Budge, a former Melbourne Baptist minister, described Perkins as a man who, ‘in tones of thunder, hurled verses and paragraphs of the sacred writings like huge boulders to crush down all opponents’. Perkins was converted in the Leicestershire village of Barton-in-the-Beans by the ‘Barton Preachers’ – Evangelical revivalists, a splinter group started by a steward to Selina, Countess of Huntingdon. Selina, one of John Wesley’s active supporters, had sold jewels to build sixty-four chapels and a training college for chaplains for her own Connexion, a sect of the Calvinist Methodists, distinct from Wesley’s followers.1 Perkins moved to Melbourne to ‘spread the word’ in 1760, the year that George III came to the throne. Ten years later he walked 180 miles to a meeting in Whitechapel, London, which resulted in the breakaway New Connexion of General Baptists.