Thomas Cook

by Jill Hamilton

  In November 1888, John Mason purchased the funicular railway up Mt Vesuvius, which had been opened eight years earlier10 to a wave of international press attention and the celebrated song ‘Funiculì-Funiculà’. It brought enormous numbers of customers, but it also brought problems. When the demands of local guides were not met, John Mason found he had a burnt-out station, a cut track and a carriage cast down the abyss.

  Before Thomas returned to the Nile in 1888, he wrote to John Mason saying, ‘I do most earnestly desire to go up the Nile as far as Luxor or Aswan. I hope . . . that I may have the pleasure of one trip more, in the course of which I can tell my friends where they land and what they should see, for . . . I feel as if I know everything by heart and memory.’ Accompanied by another staunch Temperance supporter, Miss Lines, who had been with him on his trip to Egypt eighteen years earlier, plus another old-timer, Miss Frewin, who had also gone with him to Palestine during the early years, as well as her sister and his ‘friend and neighbour Mr. Glasgow’, Thomas, at the age of seventy-seven, now made his last trip to Jerusalem. His friends, he said, ‘considering my impaired sight, thought it almost reckless for me to take a long journey into foreign lands’. It was his farewell to his beloved Palestine and Egypt.

  Having travelled by train to Venice, the trio then sailed over the Adriatic and Mediterranean to Alexandria, where Thomas was pleased to have ‘a pleasant interview with the Khedive’. They eventually landed in Jaffa on 1 April ready to be present at the twenty-fifth anniversary of Miss Arnott’s Tabeetha Mission School, for which Thomas had done so much. They then proceeded to Jericho, the Jordan, Bethlehem and Jerusalem for two weeks. Even though Thomas’s face was now wrinkled and craggy and his gait slow, all the locals recognised him, rushing up to him with enthusiastic greetings in Arabic.

  Then the sad day came when Thomas knew he had to bid goodbye to Jerusalem forever. Often groping his way in the grey darkness of his diminishing sight, he had to step back, but never was an exit more reluctant. With sadness, he left the familiar and spacious area around King David’s Tower close to the Jaffa Gate, near Jerusalem’s ancient walls. No more would he hear the echoing chants of the muezzin calling Muslims to prayer five times a day to the many mosques, nor the clatter of hooves of the donkeys on the steep cobbled paths. His last souvenir was a wooden crate of simple biblical fruit for the children at the Baptist Sunday school in Archdeacon Lane, Leicester, so they could eat ‘figs from the Holy Land’.

  From the Mount of Olives, where tourists go to view the entire city, he looked down over the Old City of Jerusalem, but all beyond were blurs and hazy shapes. In his mind, though, he could still see everything; the glistening dome of the Mosque of Omar, the crenellated walls with their twelve gates and the ancient gnarled trees. He would return via the Jaffa Gate, not the closer Eastern Gate, which had remained shut for over 2,000 years. Then the party rode down the steep winding hills to Jaffa. The weather was unusually stormy for April, as Thomas wrote: ‘we had to remain a week in consequence of stormy weather, which prevented our embarkation.’ He then described a young Arab girl, Labeebeh, whom he befriended: ‘The week was profitably spent in many ways, and . . . I made the acquaintance of an interesting Syrian maid, who had been taught and was now a teacher in Miss Arnott’s School. This young lady expressed a strong desire to see England . . .’ Having booked her onto one of the ‘great Orient Steamers’, he then returned to England via Athens, Corfu, Trieste and Venice to Mayence, where his party took a steamer on the Rhine, and landed at Cologne, and then travelled to England via Calais.

  Thomas was hardly home before he was off again, on his ‘annual visit to the Highlands’ with different friends. Labeebeh arrived in Edinburgh in early June and would stay by his side for nearly six months. Some people might think that taking a pretty young Syrian girl home was an old man’s dream, but in reality it was the gesture of a Christian, and his longing to bring a little of the Holy Land back to Leicester. Many a traveller before, including Captain Cook, had brought home a ‘sample native’. Labeebeh appears to have been a brief attempt to find a stand-in daughter.

  Labeebeh and he went everywhere from Oban, to Iona, to Inverness, to Perth. Before crossing the border they visited Sir Walter Scott’s house, Abbotsford, before returning to Thorncroft. In a circular sent to ‘numerous friends, especially those who were with us in Scotland’, he announced celebrations for his eightieth birthday:

  On 12th of November, it is my intention again to take Labeebeh to London, and offer to friends there the opportunity and privilege of meeting her on that day at Parson’s Temperance Hotel, 59, Great Russell Street. Invited friends and guests will take tea together there at six o’clock on the evening of that day. The chief part of the following day will be spent in London, and we then return to Leicester. The remainder of the week will be devoted to a Conversazione at the Memorial Hall, which was built in memory of my departed daughter . . . During the time allotted to refreshments some beautiful specimens of Needlework executed by Labeebeh during her visit to Thorncroft . . . will be shown in the Memorial Room; and there will also be shown specimens of Agricultural Implements used in the East, which have been manufactured by a youth in connection with Miss Arnott’s School. At seven o’clock addresses will be delivered by H. Lankester . . . Suitable hymns will be sung. Wednesday, November 21st will be spent at my home at Thorncroft, and the eve of my 80th birthday will be spent in suitable exercises. On Thursday, November 22nd, I propose, with a few friends who may choose to accompany me, to go with Labeebeh to Liverpool, and see her embark there for Jaffa on board the S.S. Britannia, which is advertised to sail on the 23rd inst.

  Activities filling Thomas’s months and days for the next two years are not recorded – his diaries have disappeared. But much time was spent doing what he could to help the Baptist Union and spreading ‘the word’. He also had the satisfaction of seeing the youngest of his three grandsons educated at Mill Hill school in London, but sadly he did not spend time with them or his two granddaughters.

  The year 1891 was marked by three remarkable achievements. First, in July the Golden Jubilee11 was celebrated to mark the fiftieth year of Thomas Cook & Son; secondly, over sixty years after he had left Melbourne, Thomas unveiled the memorial cottages there, bringing his life full circle; and, thirdly, his Cook’s Tourist Handbook for Palestine and Syria was published, with its references to biblical sites and their scriptural references, designed to be read on horseback or by a flickering lamp in a tent.12

  Thomas was not one of the 300 guests in London at the lavish celebrations at the Hotel Metropole for the Jubilee banquet. Excuses were given. Presiding over the long table and its silver table centre, with the loftiness of an aristocrat, John Mason gave a speech in which he told of Thomas’s frailty. This, though, was dramatised and inaccurate. His remark that Thomas had not recognised John Mason’s voice implied that Thomas may have also been suffering from failing mental powers, but this was not the case. Thomas travelled frequently to Melbourne and wrote or dictated an admirable series of circulars and reminiscences.

  Then, as always, the problem was that John Mason, a man who always liked being in full control, never liked sharing the limelight with anyone, let alone his father. In one of the speeches he boasted how his personal management had been the turning point in the firm’s fortunes: ‘In 1865 the whole personnel of the business consisted of Thomas Cook, myself, two assistants and one messenger . . . In 1880 we had a staff of 1,714 permanent salaried members. In addition it required 978 persons, chiefly Arabs, to work our business in Egypt and Palestine . . . we have 45 distinct banking accounts; and either as our own property or under rental or lease we have 84 offices worked by salaried staff of the firm, and in addition 85 agencies.’

  An extract from a letter from Gladstone was also read out aloud. Having given excuses for being unable to attend he wrote: ‘I do not regard your festival as a mere celebration of commercial success . . . I conceive that the idea which your house was, I believe,
the first to conceive and patiently to work out, has distinctly placed you in the rank of public benefactors; and the competitors who have sprung or may yet spring up around you are so many additional witnesses to the real greatness of the service you have rendered . . .’

  Regardless of his diminishing sight and physical infirmities, Thomas’s last autumn was happy. Although the rift with his son was still there, the bitterness lessened. The return of the old injury from childhood to his leg caused possible gangrene and much pain, so that he was seldom able to take long walks, but he managed to get around. Gladstone was setting a remarkable example of being sprightly at a year younger than Thomas. He looked as if he would be celebrating his eightieth birthday at 10 Downing Street, as once again the whole country was split over Ireland.

  Old age had not dulled Thomas’s desire to help the poor. Far from forsaking his roots, he enjoyed the role of the local boy made good when he returned to Melbourne. Following philanthropists who had built tenements in London, he started planning a project on the hill, just two streets away from Quick Close, at a slightly lower level than the High Street but above green fields. Land was purchased and an up-to-the-minute architect was engaged to make drawings for a block of fourteen memorial cottages, a Baptist mission hall13 and four holiday flats for Baptist ministers, with a bakehouse, laundry and wash-house and a spacious mission hall on which a pale green and cream 8-inch-wide border below the ceiling was painted and stencilled with a William Morris-inspired motif. Each flat would be furnished and fully equipped and rented at fourpence a week to ‘poor and deserving people belonging to the Baptist denomination’. Another flat was for a caretaker and another three, named the Houses of Call, were reserved for Thomas and friends when visiting Melbourne and as holiday homes for pastors and their families – with the proviso that they conducted services in the mission hall.14

  Before the building was finished, a lovely garden was planted in the front, crowded with hardy flowers, such as hollyhocks, roses, campanulas, peonies, pinks, Michaelmas daises and polyanthus. An organ was then installed so there would be always be music to accompany hymns. Bearing the names of his daughter and his wife, the cottages are also an unspoken memorial to his youth. The circle of his life was now complete. At last he had a bed and base, a little home of his very own, in Melbourne. And it was all new, clean, warm, modern and up-to-date.

  Every detail was arranged by Thomas. He was giving something back to the church which had encompassed every part of his life. The Barton Church Magazine15 described the gala opening on 10 March with a description of weather which must have reminded Thomas of the hardships of his youth: ‘a keen wind and numberless snowflakes dancing in the air – the outermost fringe of the fierce blizzard then ranging over land and sea.’ His old friend John Earp, who had climbed through the chapel windows at dawn with him over fifty years earlier, was there. Like Thomas, his career as a preacher had also been brief, but it had given him the confidence to become a wool buyer and maltster. The old Baptist chapel down the road was not forgotten. As a former printer and publisher, Thomas gave a tall bookcase similar to the ones he had already given to the chapels at Barton and Market Harborough.

  Thomas’s support of the Liberal Party was constant. The National Temperance Federation, which had been formed in 1884, was becoming more and more closely associated with the Liberals, whereas the Conservative Party still appeared to be aligned with the interests of the drink trade. Thomas hurried from his flat in Melbourne to Leicester on 13 July 1892 to cast his vote at the polls for the local Liberal candidate.16 Two days later, on 15 July, Thomas Cooper, one of the old leaders of the Chartist Movement, died in Lincoln. Three days after that, on 18 July, Thomas lay on his deathbed at Thorncroft, London Road, Leicester, aged eighty-three. ‘My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever’ (Psalm 73: 25). Comfort came from the words of his favourite hymn, ‘Forever with the Lord’. A sudden pain and paralysis on his side hit him after supper around 8p.m. Friends and staff passed in and out of the room. Lankester was called.

  Thomas left the world with a prayer in his heart and, one assumes, the knowledge that ‘man has been brought nearer to God’, with a vision of Jerusalem and the Jordan.17 An obituary in the Leicester Chronicle made the pertinent remark, ‘The total blindness which overcame him did not affect his spirits or prevent him from making an excursion to the Holy Land.’18

  The son of the minister, Albert Bishop, described the music and gloom in the dark chapel after mourners had filed past Cook’s coffin on 25 July in the Archdeacon Lane chapel: ‘I could almost hear the beat of the wings of the Dark Angel of Death and catch a glimpse of the white wings of the Angel of Light as he carried the soul of the Departed to Him who made us all leave this Earth-bound place for another life elsewhere.’ The minister, remembering Thomas’s soup kitchens and cost-price potato seeds for men with allotments, emphasised that he had become a champion for the weak and poor ‘in the times of terrible distress in Leicester fifty years ago’.19

  The draped hearse was drawn by six black horses adorned with plumes of black feathers. Behind, the mayor, Alderman Thomas Wright, headed the procession of twelve horse-drawn carriages. Making its way to the north-east corner of Welford cemetery, the mourners were led by the Cook family, headed by three grandchildren. John Mason, though, was absent. His excuse was that he could not return in time from a trip to Norway, although there was a gap of nearly a week between the death and the funeral. Thomas had eschewed being buried with his parents in the chapel yard in Melbourne where the soft green grass, violets and daisies grew over the old coffins. In Leicester, marble covered the tomb of Annie and Marianne, giving an air of perpetuity and importance – as did the nearby tombstones of Thomas’s old mentors – Winks was just 30 yards away and Ellis was 50 yards away. Only Annie, Marianne and Thomas lie there together. When John died nine years later, he chose to be buried in a vault lined with ivy and white lilies in the Anglican section on the other side of Welford Road Cemetery. He had become a member of the Church of England. In a similar way to the children of so many financially successful Nonconformists, he enjoyed the status of being a pillar of the established Church.

  Thomas might have been the world’s best-known railway excursion and tourist pioneer, but he was no millionaire. Time after time, profits had been given away to the poor or to religious establishments and he had subsidised many of his beloved tours to the Holy Land. He had handed over more money than he saved. Having also in 1879 let John be the ‘holder of all the capital in the business’, he left just £2,731 gross. His home in Leicester was sold to a member of the Ellis family.20 When John Mason died seven years later he left an estate of around £700,000 – another example of the triumph of town over the country, of industrial riches over land.21

  The Leicester Daily Post of 20 July reported that Gladstone, a man also driven by religious conviction, praised Cook: ‘thousands and thousands of the inhabitants of these islands who never would for a moment have passed beyond its shores, have been able to go and return in safety and comfort, and with great enjoyment, great refreshment, and great improvement to themselves.’22 A few days after Thomas’s death, Gladstone, the old warrior, won the general election, becoming prime minister for the fourth time. Gladstone’s cabinet contained two of Britain’s first Nonconformist prime ministers – Henry Campbell-Bannerman as Secretary for War and Herbert Asquith23 at the Home Office. Another Baptist, David Lloyd George, the MP for Caernarvon Boroughs, who was waiting in the wings, would be Britain’s third Nonconformist prime minister.

  Thomas had received no state honours during his lifetime, and there were none now. But he had founded both a dynasty and the most familiar name in the British travel business. It is strange that he is seldom grouped with other self-made Nonconformists of the mid-nineteenth century who set up companies which continue today, such as Boot (chemist shops), Cadbury (chocolate), Fry (chocolate), Wills (tobacco), Rowntree (toffees and sweets), Morley (hos
iery), Clark (shoes), Barclay (banking) and Lever (soap).

  Unlike many newly enriched tradesmen in industrial England who were not satisfied until they found themselves accepted by the gentry, Thomas had remained a strictly urban man, ignoring the process of gentrification. He never got beyond the lower middle class. However, by breaking down ‘the barriers of prejudice’24 and using class boundaries as hurdles to be leapt over, he had opened the doors for people from every walk of life to venture out on Grand Tours, making travel no longer a daunting experience.

  His lasting memorials are worldwide and his face is on all Thomas Cook traveller’s cheques, although it is usually his name that is remembered, not his face. Just over a century after his death in Leicester, a bronze statue of Thomas wearing a frock coat and carrying a rolled umbrella and suitcase was erected outside London Road Railway Station.

  A month after Thomas’s death two things occurred that would have given him pleasure: John Mason became president of the Leicester Temperance Society; then in August, tours to the Holy Land were given another boost when the railroad from Jaffa to Jerusalem was completed. Trains ran in each direction daily, and carried an increasing number of pilgrims and tourists.

  Thomas made travelling easier and cheaper for Europeans, Americans, Indians, Australians and New Zealanders of all classes. There had been tours before but few which included advance tickets for transportation, food and sightseeing for such large numbers. As Clement E. Stretton said, Thomas was ‘the first person to hire a special train at his own risk, sell railway tickets to the public, and personally travel with the train to look after the comfort of his passengers’.25

  When Thomas was born, most power had rested with the upper classes, but now the new middle classes were snapping at their heels. Class divides were lessening. The two-party system had emerged, and both parties drew their voters from across all classes.26 Nothing exemplified the new tolerance more than the larger-than-life bronze statue of the old champion of the Dissenters, Oliver Cromwell, unveiled in 1899 outside the House of Commons. He was now also seen as a champion of parliamentary democracy – part of the new Liberal interpretation of history. Plans to erect the statue had been passed during the premiership of Rosebery, the second Liberal prime minister, who was also said to have secretly paid for it.