Thomas Cook is a forgotten hero of his age. This
book commemorates the 150th anniversary of his first overseas
conducted tour in 1855. Driven by his religious faith, Cook founded
a major industry, one that is now one of the world’s biggest
sectors. In the UK alone, it is the third largest industry, worth
over £75 billion a year. When Cook was born in 1808, the term
‘tourism’ had not been invented. Leisure in distant places was
mostly an unknown experience – as was staying in hotels or eating in
restaurants. Poor men made journeys only when necessary; poor women
usually stayed at home. Yet, by the time Cook died in 1892,
travelling abroad had become part of modern life. The number of
travellers from England who steamed across the Channel to the
continent via ports with railway connections grew from 165,000 in
1850 to 951,000 by 1899.
It was not until Cook started his cheap overseas
tours in 1855 that workers, let alone women, had the opportunity to
go abroad easily. His group packages gave them an umbrella under
which it was safer to explore foreign places. Just how revolutionary
this was can be seen by looking at the small numbers of women who
had braved sailing boats in the previous four centuries.
Cook’s career in travel began with the burgeoning
of rail and steam transport in 1841; he died just as the
combustion-engine era was about to take off. Since Cook’s death in
1892 modes of travel have changed enormously, but not the basic
methods, organisation and marketing that he championed. A printer by
trade, he knew the potential of advertising, promotions and travel
writing – even starting the first regular monthly travel newspaper
in 1851. Nearly every trip was promoted in advance with posters and
leaflets, and each tourist was given historical and practical
information to animate places en route and destinations. The one
thing, though, that would startle this man who left school at ten
years old would be the university degrees in tourism and the many
Professors of Tourism and Leisure Management. As degrees in
different aspects of the travel industry have expanded, the Thomas
Cook Archives in Peterborough have been mined by research students.
Like them, I have relied heavily on this invaluable resource. This
book, though, was neither commissioned nor subsidised by the famous
travel agency that Cook started. It springs entirely from my
interest in how he opened up the Middle East, especially the Holy
Land and Egypt, to tourism.
Three times a week, when walking to the School of
Oriental and African Studies in London, I walk past the site of
Cook’s former house in Great Russell Street, opposite the British
Museum, and I never fail to recall Cook’s tenacity and ability to
keep going despite terrible reverses. The man who boasted that he
had escorted over a million tourists without mishap witnessed the
death of his only daughter at home because he personally misjudged
the safety of a gas boiler. That was on top of having become
estranged from his only son – but if he had lived longer he would
have had the satisfaction of seeing that his name continued as a
household word, synonymous with popular tourism; and that the
Baptist chapel that he worked so hard to open in Rome in the 1870s
is still well attended.
Jill Hamilton
Chelsea, November 2004.
To travel is to feed the mind, humanize the soul,
and rub off the rust of circumstance – to travel is to read the last
new book, enjoy to its full the blessings of invention – to travel
is to have Nature’s plan and her high works simplified, and her
broad features of hill and dale, mountain and flood, spread like a
map at one’s feet – to travel is to dispel the mists of fable and
clear the mind of prejudice taught from babyhood, and facilitate
perfectness of seeing eye to eye. Who would not travel at a penny
per mile.
Tourism is now among the world’s largest
industries, but little is known about its greatest pioneer, Thomas
Cook, the father of tourism. He revolutionised travel, invented
package holidays and brought mobility to the masses.1 The sex,
alcohol, overspending, indolent leisure and extravagance that are
now associated with much of the holiday industry would horrify him.
Few know of his preoccupation with God, Rome and the Holy Land, or
of his determination to improve the lot of the working classes, let
alone his abhorrence of beer houses, pubs and gin palaces. In the
nineteenth century no priest, or minister, did more than this
diminutive former preacher to shape Protestant attitudes to
Palestine. By opening up Palestine to tourism, Cook deliberately
offered the British people a way to reconnect with their religious
roots. From 1869 onwards he brought the largest number of British to
the Holy Land since the Crusader armies and private parties of
pilgrims in the Middle Ages. In 1976 a BBC documentary on Cook asked
the question, ‘But what made him do it? This strait-laced provincial
missionary – what drove him on? What fired his abundant energy?’ The
following chapters attempt to give fresh insights into Cook – and,
so that he, too, can have his voice, extracts from his voluminous
writings are included in the appendix. His life gives a vivid
picture of the influence of Nonconformity in England in the
nineteenth century and the way it helped the slow march to a fairer
society and democracy. Success for Cook was integrated with the
collective power of the Nonconformists, many of whose ancestors had
suffered the rack, the dungeon and the scaffold both during and
after the Reformation.
Cook’s near-forty-year career was full of leaps
and contradictions, but he himself changed little. He never lost his
Derbyshire accent, his fidgetiness or the habit of walking with his
hands thrust into his pockets. Sometimes, when listening, he put his
hands together and twirled his thumbs over one another.2 One writer
described Cook in Paris ‘answering questions and swallowing coffee
with a rapid dexterity worthy of a Chinese juggler’.3 Another
writer, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sister, described him in 1871
as ‘a home-staying, retired tradesman’. Failings in etiquette and
his ‘northerness’ were compensated by his foresight, patience and
the ability of a stage entertainer to hold a crowd and impart
excitement.
Cook always felt that God was on his side. All his
life he retained the traits of many Baptists – that is, a horror of
self-indulgence, debts of any sort or extravagance. Faith sustained
him when he was attacked in the press by upper-class critics trying
to stem the tide of travellers to ‘their’ resorts. Ever resourceful,
Cook actually prospered from their condemnation. When his ‘hordes’
began pouring into the tourist destinations of the more affluent,
Cook looked to faraway places to find untrammelled havens. So, while
more tourists went to places like Morecambe, Blackpool and Ramsgate,
the middle classes were exploring the Continent and Middle East –
with Cook.
Cook was impelled by religion. Devotion to God,
prayer and the Bible fired his imagination and provided him with his
daily strength. He also drew inspiration from two other features of
the Victorian era – railways and respectability. Scope came from the
spreading of the railways. Integrity came from Temperance, which
epitomised the ideals of self-control and self-denial and fitted in
with nineteenth century prudery and decorum. To these can be added
resolution and reliability. Finally, there was music. Often bands
with drums and trumpets beat out rousing tunes on his excursions.
Cook’s life was no fairy-tale rags to riches story
of a man rising effortlessly from obscurity. In his case, nights
filled with letter writing, accounts and editing frequently followed
days of sustained effort. Even when short of sleep, he often had to
reverse mishaps, but somehow he coped with the misadventures of
travel – missed connections, broken-down trains, fierce storms at
sea, hotels with double bookings and lost luggage. When things went
wrong Cook relied on the ethos of self-help so characteristic of the
nineteenth century and religious stoicism. But his ability to remain
unruffled meant that he could have prearranged trips to see
stampeding elephants. Whether facing insurgent warfare or the perils
of the Swiss Alps, customers felt safe.
His assets in the travel business were his career
as a printer and his marketing skills combined with rigorous
self-discipline, attention to detail and an ability to coordinate
transport and ground arrangements. Sophisticated marketing, whether
persuading people of the evils of alcohol or the advantages of
taking a train trip, was at the forefront of all his businesses.
With his own printing presses and the help of just a few
apprentices, he could quickly turn out stacks of cheap-to-produce
leaflets, posters and flyers. Today, marketing is a subject in the
curriculum of universities, but Cook acquired his know-how first by
selling cabbages, turnips and other vegetables at Derby market, then
by learning how to attract converts when earning his living
proselytising for the Baptists, and he finally perfected his skills
during his near twenty years as a publisher of Temperance
literature. He made sure that newspapers and leaflets heightened the
anticipation about coming excursions, and that destinations were
made more fascinating by guidebooks and itineraries with potted
histories.
Cook’s dazzling progress coincided with the most
action-packed period of parliamentary change in England. He started
out as an itinerant Baptist lay preacher at the age of nineteen in
1828, the year of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. His
time as a self-employed cabinet-maker began in the year of the Great
Reform Act, which extended the franchise to all ‘ten-pound
householders’. He reached his goal of escorting trips to the Holy
Land the year after the much-awaited passage of the second Reform
Bill of 1867, which was also the golden moment of Nonconformity and
Evangelicalism in English politics. Politics may sound a far cry
from Cook sending thousands of holiday-makers off to criss-cross the
earth’s surface, but much reform, like Cook’s early trips, was
driven by the same ascendancy of religious ferment.
A leading anti-Corn Law campaigner, Cook promoted
‘the poor man’s bread’, the Big Loaf and aid to the starving. He
enjoyed the struggle in the 1840s tremendously. Born eight years
into the beginning of the century and dying eight years before its
end, he spanned the nineteenth century and was typical of those who
were entrenched in Nonconformist religion.4 At a time when reform
was a key political slogan, Cook was one of the voices in the large
groups of Nonconformist Liberals who cried out for education, the
disestablishment of the Church of England, an end to church tithes
and Free Trade.
While religion gave Cook drive and purpose, the
Bible was the wellspring of his life, and, after he had taken the
Pledge at the age of twenty-four in 1833, Temperance was the
catalyst.5 Cut-price package tourism became a social mission.
Because travel freed people and widened their social circles, he
wanted to help the poor to ‘go beyond’, get out of their rut, escape
the confines of their own homes and fleetingly forget the dreariness
of their lives by awakening their minds. Most people in his village
seldom travelled further than thirty miles at the most, yet Cook
took his name to the ends of the earth, turning it into one of the
most easily recognised trademarks in the world. The phrase ‘Cook’s
Tour’ entered the English language. He made both scenic beauty and
history, combined with trouble-free travelling, a saleable
commodity.
The following chapters, while unveiling a
little-known side of this ‘pioneer of convenient travel’, give an
idea of the extraordinary extent to which religion, then one of the
driving forces of the age,6 dominated the lives and politics of so
many. The contribution of Nonconformity in the nineteenth century,
together with the mutual support given by its members, was enormous.
Apart from Joseph Paxton, nearly every helping hand extended to Cook
in his first fifty years belonged to a Nonconformist.
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.
