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Tourism is now the
world’s largest industry. Little, though, is generally known about
its pioneer, Thomas Cook, the man who revolutionized travel,
invented package holidays and brought mobility to the masses. The
sex, alcohol, over-spending, indolent leisure and extravagance that
are now so happily associated with much of the holiday industry
would have horrified him. Few people know of his pre-occupation with
God, the East Midlands and the Holy Land, his determination to
improve the lot of the working classes or his abhorrence of beer
houses, pubs and gin palaces. In the nineteenth century, no
priest, no minister, in any country, did more than this diminutive
former preacher to shape both Evangelical contact and Protestant
attitudes to Palestine. He brought the largest number of British
people there since either the Crusades or the pilgrimages in the
Middle Ages. By opening up Palestine to tourism, Cook provided a way
for the British to reconnect with their religious roots.
Cook’s work was
impelled by religion. After his baptism at the Baptist chapel in his
childhood village of Melbourne, Derbyshire, at the age of seventeen
in 1826, the Bible was the well-spring of his life, and after taking
the Pledge at the age of twenty-four in 1833, Temperance was the
catalyst. Indeed, religion gave him drive and purpose. Cut-price
package tourism became a social mission, something elevating and
educating.
Read the preview and chapter one
of Thomas Cook the Holiday King
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(Sutton
£20) to be published in
January 2005
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