The Liberals, who were then a bulwark against the Catholic Church in Britain, rejoiced in the victory of Italian nationalism and longed for the decline of the temporal power of the Pope.20 Crowds surged forward to touch Garibaldi as he rode in a state procession and afterwards thousands of children lined the streets and chanted, ‘We’ll get a rope | And hang the Pope: | So up with Garibaldi!’ One ‘victory fighter’ absent from the parade, though, was Giuseppe Mazzini who lived near the Fulham Road, an easy walk from the home of his friend Thomas Carlyle. He had distanced himself from Garibaldi’s movement, disgusted at his monarchist tendencies and his need for royal ritual and splendour.
In July, only six months after Garibaldi’s visit to London, Thomas crossed the Alps into Italy, anticipating expansion, as he put it, ‘to this land of natural beauty, art and music’. Having managed a good reduction of fares on condition that there were not less than fifty in a party, he inaugurated a series of tourist tickets, which combined most of the railways, steamboats and diligences. ‘These’, Thomas said, ‘were the first circular tickets issued in this country . . .’ His party of more than ninety ended up going from the Coliseum in Rome, the catacombs and places connected with the romance of Keats, Shelley, Browning and Byron on to Naples, Pompeii and Mt Vesuvius. As Thomas wrote, ‘In 1864 . . . I had the pleasure of conducting two Italian parties – one as far as Florence and Leghorn, and the other to Rome, Naples, &c. This arrangement was supplemental to my Swiss Tours, and the combined results of the trips to Switzerland and Italy gave a total of about 1100 tourists. My Swiss Tickets grew in favour with the public, and while the number of tickets issued was double that of the previous year, about half as many [again] as in 1863 availed themselves of my personal company on their travels.’
In each group there was usually someone who detested the Italian fare. Unable to eat such exotic dishes as octopus stewed in its own ink, let alone spaghetti, they longed for stodgy steak-and-kidney pie. Other irritations were also the inevitable mosquitoes and fleas, some of which responded to ‘Keating’s Persian Insect Destroying Powder’ advertised in the Excursionist as ‘unrivalled in destroying fleas, bugs, emmets, flies, cockroaches, beetles, gnats, mosquitoes, moths in furs, and every other species of insect in all stages of metamorphosis. A small quantity of it placed in the crevices of a bedstead will destroy bugs . . . It is indispensable to Travellers by rail or steamboat and visitors to the seaside . . .’
Even though, as Thomas said, for several years ‘our way was through brigand-infested districts, when military escorts protected us’, Italy was a source of warmth, health and sensuous inspiration for many English writers, and those who could afford to spend time there, including such writers as Robert Browning and his ailing wife, Elizabeth. The possessive attitude of the English towards Italy then is illustrated by Browning:
Italy, my Italy!
. . . Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, ‘Italy’.
Such lovers old are I and she
So it always was, so shall ever be!21
There were now so many English people living on both the Mediterranean coast and the hinterland that the area had been given to the Bishop of Gibraltar as a new diocese in 1842, and Anglican churches were built everywhere from Nice, Monte Carlo and Cairns to San Remo. Some churches became such little pockets of England that they assumed the air of consulates.
Meanwhile, Thomas had changed the adversity of a closed door in Scotland into a thriving industry. His trips to Switzerland were altering the country’s economy and the use of its snow-covered foothills and mountains. No longer were they just used as marginal agricultural land. Simple wooden homes expanded into guest chalets and hotels to accommodate not only Thomas’s visitors but also the thousands of others who independently, or with other tour companies, followed his routes.
TWENTY-THREE
America at Last!
Taking large numbers of tourists overseas was full of problems, and germs. However, nothing obstructed Thomas’s plans – not even the lack of amenities, such as public toilet facilities at destinations, let alone flush lavatories, running water, hot water, restaurants or quick communications. Railway carriages usually had no facilities such as restaurants or lavatories. Hygiene was often basic or nonexistent; the need to wash hands was not established until Joseph Lister proved his germ theory in 1867. Many places washed dishes in cold water,1 and fleas, another source of disease, often accompanied passengers. Even primitive domestic refrigeration or ice-boxes were not common until the end of the century, so the freshness of food was a concern for travellers. With no telephones, reservations and messages had to be by letter. Weeks could pass waiting for confirmations. The electric telegraph, inaugurated in 1843 between Paddington and West Drayton, was not practical for another two years; the first underwater cable from England to France was not completed until 1851. Another decade passed before cables were laid across the Atlantic in 1866. Cables to Australia followed in 1872. Telegrams and cables were expensive and were used solely for special messages and events. Writing letters by hand was laborious, and typewriters were not in general use until the end of the 1870s. There was no commercial telephone service in London until 1879, nor long-distance calls to Paris until 1891. All this meant that Thomas’s office work was time-consuming, as were his marketing and advertising to attract passengers.
Women were one of the mainstays of Thomas’s overseas trips. Hordes of females lacking an escort – some spinsters, others widows – purchased his excursion tickets. As it was then socially unacceptable for any woman with aspirations to being ‘a young lady’ to travel without a chaperone, and walking in the streets alone was unwise, women outnumbered men on the majority of the earlier trips. His tours offered a safety umbrella to single women asserting their independence and exploring the world. Long journeys were said to be morally, physically and sexually dangerous. Thomas wrote:
the oft-reiterated question: Is it safe and proper for ladies to join in Highland tours? . . . of the thousands of tourists who have travelled with us, the majority have been ladies. In family parties, the preponderance is generally on the feminine side; but there are also great numbers of ladies who start alone, and always meet with agreeable company and get through without any particular inconvenience or discomfort . . . As to their energy, bravery, and endurance of toil, as a rule they are fully equal to those of the opposite sex, whilst many of them frequently put to shame the ‘masculine’ effeminates.
. . . The trappings of prevailing fashion may sometimes perplex them in climbing . . . and amongst rude blocks of granite and basalt; but there is a large class, who, defiant of fashion or customs . . . push their way through all difficulties . . .
Thomas was no ‘ladies’ man’. His mother, wife and daughter were the only women close to him, but his ability to listen and his extraordinary patience meant that, according to a journalist later writing in the Daily News:2
Unprotected females confide in him . . . hypochondriacs tell him of their complaints; foolish travellers look to him to redeem their errors; stingy ones ask him how eighteen pence can be procured for a shilling; would-be dandies ask his opinion about dress; would-be connoisseurs show him the art treasures they have picked up; the cantankerous refer their quarrels to him, and the vacuous inflict on him their imbecility; but the great conductor never flinches.
This was just one portion of Thomas’s growing business which was becoming too much for one man to run. The volume of people was burgeoning, so that in 1864, two years after Thomas had moved to London, he pleaded with John Mason, then working as a printer, to come into partnership. A realist, John Mason wrote that they had been unable to agree on matters in the past,3 so why would their relationship improve? Thomas promised him more autonomy and, with his usual ebullience, talked him into being manager of a new London headquarters. The frustrations of the past would be forgotten; John Mason would control the new office.4 Every penny that Thomas owned was put into purchasing 98 Fleet S
treet, on the corner of Bride Lane.
Thomas was now in Fleet Street, the mecca of the newspaper, publishing and literary world. As always, he liked mixing with other printers and publishers, but not in their usual meeting places, El Vino or the bar of the Olde Cheshire Cheese, famed for visitors in the past, such as Dickens, Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope. Later, John Mason, a teetotaller from birth, appalled by habits in Fleet Street, started a teetotal club for pressmen in the upper part of the building. Despite the enthusiasm of its manager, a Yorkshire Quaker, it was sparsely attended and lost so much money that it was closed after a few years.5 Thomas described John Mason’s return to the fold with warm words:
An important event in 1864 was the adhesion of my son to the work which had been the study, the hobby, and the labour of a solo for twenty-three previous years. When very young, my son had worked with me in various ways; but he left me to go into the Midland Railway Office, and to take charge of the company’s excursion business. He afterwards spent a number of years in mercantile operations of considerable magnitude. His return to my aid liberated me from details of office work, and enabled me to carry out foreign schemes of long projection, in both the Eastern and Western hemispheres.
The old fear of insolvency made Thomas turn part of the new offices into a travel shop. Customers could purchase baggage and items such as rugs, hats, telescopes, footwear, guide books, water purifiers, the old staple Keating’s Persian Insect Destroying Powder and an adapted Gladstone bag with a rope and pulley inside which could be a fire escape in an emergency.6 John Mason and his wife moved into rooms upstairs, part of which, as in the previous four Cook homes, became a Temperance boarding house/hotel. One sadness that year was the death of Paxton at his solid Victorian villa on Sydenham Hill, close to where his masterpiece, the Crystal Palace, had been re-erected. Six years previously Paxton’s mentor, the Duke of Devonshire, had died, after having virtually moved in with the Paxtons.
During 1865, after he had widened his reputation by taking over 1,600 passengers to Switzerland, Thomas weighed up the advantages of going to either the Holy Land or America. Despite being fifty-seven, his energy was boundless. When the summer season was over, he took some tourists across the Alps and also escorted two trips to Rome and Naples. Then he suddenly decided to go to America, where the Civil War had just finished. So, sixteen years after his visit to Liverpool to arrange tours to the United States, on 29 November he boarded the small cramped City of Boston.
As Thomas was sailing across the Atlantic, the Palestine Exploration Fund was being set up in London. It was less than four years since Albert’s death and although Victoria, a heartbroken widow, had gone into seclusion, she agreed to be its patron. On 12 May, in the ‘Jerusalem Chamber’ at Westminster Abbey, where Henry IV had died in 1413, the new committee made it known that the prestigious society would investigate the archaeology, geography, geology and natural history of Palestine and map the whole country, while verifying the sites in the Bible. This overlapped with the Royal Engineers’ mapping expedition, for which the Turkish authorities offered protection, as the men investigated a stretch from Mount Lebanon, Nazareth and the Jezreel Valley to the hills of Samaria and Jerusalem.
Thomas, who was not a good sailor, stood on the deck of the steamer. Steamships were not yet stabilised and seasickness was common. Since 1838, when the first coal-powered paddle steamship, the Sirius, had made the journey, the sailing time between England and America had dropped to about fourteen or even twelve-and-a-half days,7 but luxury had not yet arrived. Cats were a necessity, as mice abounded; hungry rats from the holds often ran down corridors. Cockroaches, too, scuttled into corners. Bedlinen was not changed during the voyage. But standards were improving. Thomas, who hoped to ‘arrange Excursions to and from the United States and Canada’, carried a letter from John Bright, written in Rochdale: ‘from all I have heard of you, I feel the greatest confidence in your power to carry out your undertaking to the satisfaction of those who confide in you.’8
Abraham Lincoln, the leader of the northern states and sixteenth president of the United States, had been assassinated eight months earlier, his death adding to the bitterness of the four years of fighting. In a similar way to Thomas’s tours to France, which had started after France’s participation in the Crimean War, his tours to the United States began after the American Civil War. Over 600,000 people had been killed, but now there were peace and an upsurge in both Temperance and economic activity, including the building of more railways. The American Temperance Society9 had been set up a few years before the first one in England, and by the 1850s thirteen states had forbidden the sale of liquor and there were moves to start a Prohibition Party. Passionate teetotalers, like John D. Rockefeller, a Baptist, sponsored anti-drink lecture tours.
Letters written home to Marianne during the tour show that Thomas’s religious priorities were unwavering. From New York he emphasised a sermon at a Baptist chapel in Brooklyn. The letter also related how ‘pained’ he was by ‘the Exposition of the 4th Commandment’ in a new book, Dale on the Ten Commandments,10 sent to him by the author, which promoted the advantages of extending public entertainment on Sundays.
Thomas, a Sabbath Observance man, stressed the importance of remembering ‘the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work . . .’ (Exodus 20: 7–10). The growth of Sunday railway excursions was not something promoted by him.
In the depth of winter Thomas took trains across America, ‘travelling over 4,000 miles of Railroads’, enjoying the novelty of their corridors, lavatories, iced water dispensers and sleeping berths – facilities and comforts unheard of then on British or European trains. But they were slow. He visited Toronto and other parts of Canada, the Western States and the Central Districts of Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, Niagara Falls, Chicago, Detroit, New York and Massachusetts. Just as he had diverted to Waterloo on a tour to Belgium, he visited the battlefields of the Civil War. Despite the long journey across America Thomas failed to make any firm plans, but within less than six months John Mason was escorting an exploratory group from New York to Washington, Niagara, Chicago, the Mammoth Caves of Kentucky and the deserted battlefields of Virginia with ‘skulls, arms, and legs all bleaching in the sun’. Ignoring the difficulties, Thomas wrote ‘and thus was inaugurated the first system of Tours to and through America’. He explained: ‘In the following winter my son again crossed the Atlantic, with the view of promoting travel to the Paris Exhibition. He thought he had laid his plans securely, and several great companies promised their aid in giving effect to the arrangements; but our plans were again thwarted, after printing thousands of posters and tens of thousands of explanatory bills.’11
Back in England times were again troubled. In Hyde Park, in July, Reform Act agitators demonstrated. Railings were torn down and the old eighteenth-century fear of the mob revived. The government realised that reform was urgent. So, thirty-five years after the Great Reform Bill, the franchise was about to be extended.
TWENTY-FOUR
For ‘All the People!’
In the eighteenth century, British tourists, whose ears were offended by the sound of lower-class and Cockney accents when abroad, had made condescending remarks about fellow countrymen travelling abroad being vulgar. Even in the twenty-first century, snide remarks are often levelled at either groups or classes, whether Americans, Germans, Japanese and the Dutch, or at ‘ignorant masses’ flocking to Majorca or the Costa del Sol, eating fish and chips, buying English newspapers and complaining about each other. The attacks, though, peaked when Thomas was making it possible for the mill-hand, the hairdresser’s assistant, the labourer and the jobbing builder to save up and have holidays overseas.
Sophisticated tourists were noting that the highways of the world were becoming somewhat overtrodden. Growing groups of trippers to Italy, Switzerland and Scotland were seen as trespassers, spoil
ing the very ambience which made these destinations sought after. Many mourned the days when travel was the prerogative of the cultured and wealthy. As the horizons and numbers of British tourists broadened, so did criticism levied at ‘common’ tourists visiting Scotland and the Lake District. The Poet Laureate, William Wordsworth, in 1844, was most displeased about the groups of people delivered by railways to the Lake District. In his sonnet ‘On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway’, he queried,
Is then no nook of English ground secure
From rash assault?
. . . . .
Given to the pausing traveller’s rapturous glance:
Plead for thy peace, thou beautiful romance . . .1
Unmoved by the argument that large numbers of factory workers would be able to escape the horrors of their urban existence with trips to the Lake District, Wordsworth complained of the same intrusion described in his poem ‘Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways’. While George Cruickshank parodied Cockney tourists with good-natured humour in his cartoons, John Ruskin used venom, saying that the Lake District had become a ‘steam merry-go-round’ and that ‘stupid herds of modern tourists’ were dumped at Keswick and the shores of Windermere ‘like coals from a sack’.2 Later, Henry James deplored the ‘cockneyfication’ of romantic sites’.3
Thomas reacted to complaints about the rise of the lower-class tourist as if he was the spokesman for the entire class. One article in his Excursionist referred to those critics ‘who affect to treat with disdain those who occupy a lower sphere than themselves, and then . . . think that places of rare interest should be excluded from the gaze of the common people, and be kept only for the interest of the “select” of society’.4
Thomas Cook Page 17