Thomas Cook (27 page)

According to
The Times
of 13 September 1870, Thomas was in Paris at the time when the Prussians surrounded the city. As revolt broke out and the proclamation of the Third Republic was declared, he witnessed the hurried preparations to blow up two bridges on the Seine to halt the Prussian advance, but, anticipating the isolation of Paris, he did not stay for more than a few days. After he departed, the Prussians, seeking to starve the inhabitants of the city into surrender, cut all communications. A vicious and bloodthirsty streak was revealed in Bismarck, who ordered the most ruthless measures to starve the Parisians into submission.
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They, though, held out. Trees in the Champs Elysées were felled for firewood, the animals of the zoo, even the monkeys and zebras, were stewed and eaten, streets were blocked with barricades, Napoleon’s column in the Place Vendôme was crashed to the ground and the Tuileries brought to ruins.

At Metz, the French troops, starving and weak, withstood the siege for ten weeks until 29 October when they were taken into captivity. Paris, though, lasted for another three months. Three days later, on Tuesday 31 January, John Mason was on his way to Paris. When, after arriving on the Newhaven–Dieppe ferry, he found there were no trains, he went via a circuitous route, by horse and foot, eventually walking into Paris ‘by the Avenue of the Grand Army . . . During my two days . . . I lived pretty much as the besieged residents . . . My friends told me the bread was at its worst, but I did not consider it much worse than the coarse oat-cake of the Scotch highlands; the horse-flesh soup was excellent . . . My return journey from Paris was made in 30 hours, particulars of which I have given in the London daily papers . . .’

John Mason was only in London a few days before he was ready to depart again with 150 tourists, eager to be on the fringes of the aftermath of war. The visit was fortunately brief, for on 17 March the Parisians began to rebel again, forming the Paris Commune on 26 March. Until June, when the treaty was signed in Versailles, Paris was again cut off and once again the railways were closed to passenger traffic. British and American tourists, eager to get to Paris, found they could go with John Mason, who, once again, using all forms of transport, re-entered Paris on the heels of the French troops.
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This war was expected to damage tourism for the Cooks, but, contrarily, encouraged it. The demand for circuitous tickets which allowed travellers to reach the South of France and the Italian Mediterranean resorts by bypassing the belligerent countries was enormous. Archibald Tait, the Archbishop of Canterbury, purchased tickets for this roundabout route to San Remo to convalesce after a series of heart attacks and a cataleptic seizure. Thomas volunteered to escort him. Far from being the stereotypical plump, red-faced bishop, the archbishop held progressive views and had suffered much sadness in his life. Fifteen years earlier, five of his seven children had died from scarlet fever in the space of a month. Now, as the most important man in the Church of England, to be escorted by a passionate Nonconformist was unexpected, but the archbishop’s attitude was broader than most of his predecessors. Indeed, five years later he was widely criticised for holding a meeting of Nonconformist ministers at Lambeth Palace.

Tait’s sister, Lady Wake, who wrote a biography of the archbishop in 1876, described Thomas during their journey across France to Italy:

a quiet, middle-aged man very much like a home-staying, retired tradesman was pointed out to me, walking up and down the station with his hands in his pocket, seemingly taking notice of no one. He could not speak a word of any language but his own. How then did he accomplish all these wonders? He had agents in every town, and one line from him could always settle every difficulty and arrange every convenience. On our first crossing to Ostend, one of my boxes, not having been put under his care, disappeared . . . after having performed a tour through Europe by itself, it joined us at San Remo, where the whole party in due time established themselves at the Hotel de Londres; and there Cook left us. We found a great difference on our return to England without his magic wand to clear the way . . .

At the end of the war John Mason took a party of American freemasons to Paris and began another continuing section of the family business, American tourist traffic.

A consequence of the Franco-Prussian war was the fall of Rome. Napoleon, needing all his army to fight the Germans, had earlier been forced to withdraw his troops from Rome. For centuries Baptists and other Nonconformists had looked away from this papal enclave, but, after the final battle between the Italian troops and the Pope on 20 September 1870, British Methodists had been at the gates, ready to enter with wheelbarrows of Italian Bibles.

Until then, there were no churches of their own faith in Rome. In Italy, by contrast, once the Pope’s territories had shrunk to what was behind the walls of the Vatican, a wide range of Nonconformist religions had been able to build churches and run missions.

Rome was now the capital of unified Italy and it was no longer dangerous to be a non-Catholic proselytising another religion. As in the rest of Italy, permission was given for non-Roman Catholic churches to be built, and Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians, like the leaders of other denominations, rushed to purchase or rent property for church buildings. Christian services were recited in Italian in some churches instead of the Latin of Roman Catholic services.
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Thomas, more than proud that he was behind the setting up of the first General Baptist Mission in Rome,
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described his own role: ‘The Mission at Rome was originated by myself, and I was mainly influenced in my efforts in connection therewith by comparing the simplicity of the early Baptist disciples in Rome with the General Baptists of the Midland counties in England.’
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At first, though, the Baptist mission was in rented premises. A building boom in Rome following 20 September meant that prices were soaring and buying a property was no longer straightforward as some changed hands so quickly that their titles were not registered properly. Most of the earliest temporary Protestant churches were in the so-called ‘Quarter of the Foreigners’, which then extended in a triangle from Piazza del Popolo to Piazza Venezia – from the Tiber to the Spanish Steps. These new churches joined the already well established English places which had already become landmarks: Babington’s Tea Rooms, the Keats–Shelley house, the Church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, the setting for a scene in Browning’s
The Ring and the Book
, the artists’ quarter, many British antique shops on Via del Babuino and the historic coffee bar of Café Greco.
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Initially, two Baptist missions opened, one in Piazza San Lorenzo in Lucina and the other, with which Thomas was connected, closer to the Coliseum near the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. The first Baptist missionary to be appointed there, in 1873, the Revd N.H. Shaw, the former pastor of Dewsbury Baptist Church, managed very quickly to convert a Roman Catholic priest, Cavaliere Paulo Grassi, the incumbent of a nearby church, who became known in the mission, somewhat condescendingly, as a ‘native preacher’. Thomas described his own role with the Mission in Rome, saying that it

was originated by myself, and I was mainly influenced in my efforts in connection therewith by comparing the simplicity of the early Baptist disciples in Rome with the General Baptists of the Midland counties in England. Having the privilege of attending the Communion Service of the Church at Rome, then under the care of the Rev Dr Cote, and subsequently with the Church formed by Mr Wall, I was impressed with the earnestness and simplicity of manner which characterized the members of those infant Churches; and I then pleaded through the [General Baptist] Magazine and in public associations for the establishment of a General Baptist Mission in Rome. The result of those appeals and efforts led to the purchase of premises, and the erection of a chapel and minister’s residence at a cost of several thousands of pounds.
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T
homas, as always, encouraged people to have contact with the biblical past, places linked to the lives of the prophets, apostles and Jesus.
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In Palestine, tourists could touch the ruins of the magnificent buildings put up during the reign of King Herod and see the terraced gardens with their olive trees, wild figs, worn stones, rosemary and vines while on their way to Bethlehem. Visitors to Damascus were reminded that in the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament there is a description of a battle fought there by Abraham. Thomas proudly wrote in his travel newspaper, the
Excursionist
: ‘The educational and social results of these four years of Eastern travel have been most encouraging. A new incentive to scriptural investigation has been created and fostered; “The Land and the Book” have been brought into familiar juxtaposition, and their analogies have been better comprehended; and under the general influence of sacred scenes and repeated sites of biblical events, inquiring and believing spirits have held sweet counsel with each other.’

The following year the Palestine arrangements were put on a new basis. An office was set up at Jaffa to receive and make bookings and itineraries for tourists to travel to Jerusalem and other places. Clients had the choice of booking hotels or hiring horses and tents. The new office opened in the modern part of the port, near large shops, a German bank, schools and town gardens with a bandstand. Among the German and Turkish residents were Baron Ustinov (grandfather of the actor Peter Ustinov), who owned the Park Hotel in Auerbach Street with a rooftop overlooking the sea.
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When the Palestine tours were extended to the Houran and the Land of Moab, Thomas was pleased that they received letters signed by sheikhs, including the Sheikh of Petra, and Bedouin associates assuring the dragoman contractor of the protection and safety of their parties. Thomas also had the offer of a clergyman in the Lebanon to accompany a party to the Houran. Tourists could follow in the footsteps of the Babylonians, Assyrians, Jews, Arabs, Persians, Greeks, Roman legions and Crusaders: ‘. . . from Cairo to Sinai, and from Petra to Moab and Bashan, the way is open for arrangements under direction of Mr Howard . . .’

On 26 September 1872, Thomas set off on his inaugural 212-day, 270-guinea ‘Round the World’ tour. With a party of ‘four from Great Britain, one Russian, one Greek, and four Americans’ he sailed west from Liverpool to New York on a 29,000-mile journey that was to take over six months. A hundred years earlier, during his voyage on the
Endeavour
, another Cook, Captain James Cook, navigator and explorer, had been the first captain to circumnavigate the world in a westerly direction and the first to circumnavigate the world in both directions. Now Thomas would head a tour which would do likewise. The trip also fulfilled Thomas’s hope to be acknowledged as a writer as his essays and articles appeared in
The Times
(see Appendix). This enlarged version of the Grand Tour, described by Thomas as his ‘crowning achievement’, anticipated Phineas Fogg in Jules Verne’s bestselling book
Round the World in Eighty Days
, and shrank the horror of distance of crossing oceans, showing that such a trip could become a pleasurable excursion.

When they crossed the United States – by train with a few connecting stage coaches – in one of his regular Sunday letters home Thomas had much to say about his thrifty laundry arrangements: ‘My Very own Marianne, I intended to enclose you, as a curiosity, my Salt Lake washing bill but don’t know what has become of it. The items were three undershirts, two flannel so called “large articles”; twenty five collars, front cuffs and handkerchiefs – all for the sum of $4.30 . . . That was my only “wash up” since I left home and I don’t think I will wash again until we reach British India.’

As he would not be in India until after Christmas and he had left Salt Lake City in late October, this was a gap of eight weeks between washing his clothes. The eight-month trip included a twenty-four-day trip on the paddle-steamer
The Colorado
, crossing the Pacific from San Francisco to Japan, a distance of 5,250 miles. After a quick tour of Japan, China and India, Thomas finally touched down at Aden. Australia was not on the itinerary. Many meant to go, but only the most determined endured the salt beef and the waves before improved liners shortened the distance and passengers did not have to share cabins with cockroaches.

The final leg of the journey took Thomas through the Suez Canal. The Cook office in Cairo was serving the thousands of people who each year were sailing through Suez en route to the East. Cooks offered three routes from London to Cairo: via Gibraltar by sea; via the Orient Express to Istanbul and then by sea; and across Europe to Brindisi by rail and then by Austrian Lloyd steamer to Alexandria. Not all British holidaymakers though travelled with Thomas Cook & Son – one then staying at Thebes was the scientist Thomas Huxley, ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, promoter of Darwin’s theories, who had invented the word ‘agnostic’.

In Egypt, Thomas saw that John Mason had established the reputation of Thomas Cook & Son as one of the top tourist operators in the world. John Mason’s abilities were also involved in another innovation of Thomas Cook & Son,
Cook’s Continental Time Tables and Tourist’s Handbook
, which listed, in infinite detail, all the main railway, diligence and steamship routes across Europe.
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Other ground-breaking improvements were perfected by John Mason. Inclusive tours paid for in advance together with hotel coupons to cover the cost of hotel rooms and meals made it unnecessary for tourists to carry large sums of foreign currencies. His ‘Circular Notes’,
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launched in 1874, were the forerunners of traveller’s cheques which allowed tourists to obtain currency in exchange for a paper note. So huge was the demand for these that Cook’s Banking and Exchange Department was opened in 1878. Oscar Wilde paid the firm of Thomas Cook the compliment that ‘they wire money like angels’.