Thomas Cook (15 page)

Well before Christmas optimistic sentences flew from Thomas’s pen: ‘The year 1847 opened more auspiciously for Scotland, and I had that summer three large excursions, the railways from York to Berwick to Edinburgh being available.’ This sudden jump in trade was despite the discomfort of train journeys – well illustrated by Frederic Chopin’s descriptions of his trips the following year. Henry Broadwood, the maker of fine pianos, booked a ticket for Chopin and three others for the arduous twelve-hour journey from Euston to Edinburgh: one extra seat for his legs, one for his new servant Daniel and one for his pianist/manager. In October, when returning to London, the rail link over the Tyne was still not completed on the east-coast route, so he was forced, as Thomas’s tourists often were, to walk across the bridge at Berwick.

After one of these journeys north, Thomas, with a large party, followed the Queen and Prince Albert. Travelling across moors, around estuaries, sea cliffs, beaches and rocks, and on perilous routes by sea and land, his group were five days behind the Queen – sailing around Bute, along the Crinan Canal and from the Atlantic coast to Oban. From there, like the Queen, they went to the islands of Staffa and Iona, circumnavigating the island of Mull, and afterwards visited Glencoe and Fort William and went on the Caledonian Canal to Inverness. Being in the wake of a royal party set an example which would be repeated.

Thomas’s empathy with the mysterious islands of Iona and Staffa matched that of Mendelssohn. The appeal of seeing the graves of warrior kings, ecclesiastical dignitaries and many a shipwrecked mariner was sadly contrasted with the poverty of the inhabitants. Mendelssohn’s gift to the people there was his
Hebrides
Overture or
Fingal’s Cave
,
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a musical celebration of its wild shores. He wrote after his tour in 1829: ‘. . . many huts without roofs, many unfinished, with crumbling walls, many ruins of burnt houses; and even these inhabited spots are but sparingly scattered over the country. Long before you arrive at a place you hear it talked of; the rest is heath, with red or brown heather, withered fir stumps, and white stones, or black moors where they shoot grouse. Now and then you find beautiful parks, but deserted, and broad lakes, but without boats, the roads a solitude . . .’

Thomas tried to help the islanders in practical ways. After one trip he took up the cause of ‘the Social Condition of the people of the Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland’, saying that it was ‘impossible for tourists visiting the Hebridean district to be indifferent to, or unmoved by, the symptoms of destitution and distress’. He argued that the large parties going to Staffa and Iona with him ‘frequently evinced a kind and sympathetic regard for the isolated and suffering inhabitants of that interesting island, where learning and piety, thirteen hundred years ago, concentrated their sway and diffused their influence, and where still remain relics of ecclesiastical, monarchical, and chieftain greatness’.

Scottish history, from real life and from romantic novels, came to life for Thomas through places, scenery and such characters as Rob Roy MacGregor, Flora MacDonald, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the feuds and raids with Borderers, Lowlanders or Islemen. Novelty was found in everything, from the fauna with its Highland cattle to the exquisite flora, especially the dwarf Arctic birch,
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which runs in and out of the heather, and the dwarf willow.
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There were few railways in Scotland then, so, when not travelling in ferries, Thomas took tourists in coaches on the many roads that crisscrossed the country, extensions of the military routes built by the English after Culloden.

‘The great Highland coach road between Inverness, Dunkeld, and Perth became a favourite route long ere the first sod of a railway was turned,’ wrote Thomas. He also took tourists on the roads between Inverness and Aberdeen, the Deeside, by Balmoral, Braemar, Spital or Glenshee, Blairgowrie, Aberfeldy, and to all points of the Highland roads to Inverary, Glencoe, etc. He explained the arrangements:

Here were commenced my first great combinations of special tickets for circular tours, but still the privileges were restricted to the large excursion parties that I took from England, for whom I got very great reductions of fares, and before the termination of the decade now under review I frequently took to Scotland as many as 5,000 visitors in a season. From every part of England visitors came to the Midland Counties to join in with my Scottish excursion, immense numbers falling in with me en route. I had generally to take two, and sometimes three special trains from Newcastle. On the opening of the Caledonian line, I began to work alternately over the east coast and west coast routes, but the popular way was by Newcastle and Berwick. Every new season my plans had to be submitted to the committees that controlled Scotch traffic, but for a number of years I had no great difficulty, so popular and successful were the excursions.

T
he year 1848, the year the potato crop failed in Ireland for the third time, was a year of revolutions. Crop failures throughout Europe from 1845 onwards, aggravated by industrial depression in towns, created a fertile atmosphere for revolt. Trouble erupted in Austria, Poland, Prussia, Hungary, Sicily, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, France, Piedmont, Venetia and Greece. Britain was the only major European nation, except Russia, to escape some sort of rebellion in that dramatic year. But the government was nervous, and with renewed vigour it countered the efforts of agitators.

Times were again really bad for many, including Thomas in Leicester: ‘1848 was a blank in my Railway Excursions,’ he wrote, ‘owing to the unwillingness of Companies to negotiate.’ He was suffering from his recent bankruptcy and the railway companies’ decision to run excursions themselves. Many now employed excursion managers so they could bypass outside agents like Thomas, whose arrangements with the railways were not long term, so he had no comeback. Thomas’s plans for the Scottish tours had been approved each season by the committees that controlled traffic in Scotland, so it had always been a hand-to-mouth affair. Nor did he have a monopoly of the trade, as there were now other excursion operators, some good, some inefficient, but all ready to take away his customers. Just as Scotland was the mainstay of his operations, in return dozens of Scottish hotels and boarding houses relied on his trade. Many of them, pretty little places covered in roses and honeysuckle tucked away in the hills, changed hands.

Now, after being a celebrated railway excursionist, Thomas had the indignity of going back to horse-drawn carriages. It would be several years before he got into his stride again. Unwilling to abandon his touring company, Thomas organised ‘numerous Coach Trips to Belvoir Castle, Melbourne Gardens, &c. &c.’, mostly in Leicestershire and nearby counties. Oddly enough, Thomas never took tours to Bosworth Field, where the final battle of the Wars of the Roses had ended with Richard III slain by Henry Tudor’s army.
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Thomas’s bumper coach visits to ancestral homes were a century, almost to the year, before their large-scale opening up after the Second World War. In the 1940s and 1950s, when the Marquis of Bath charged tourists a shilling to enter Longleat, or the Duke of Bedford a similar sum to enter Woburn, it was seen as an innovation. Long forgotten were the many stately homes that had earlier allowed visitors. The visitors, though, were usually not members of the working class. The Elizabethan home of the Devonshires, Chatsworth, in the 1760s had welcomed guests on ‘two public days in a week’, and the ‘strangers’ book’ at Wilton, in 1776, listed 2,324 visitors. By the 1790s, Woburn restricted visitors to Mondays, yet other grand houses continued to receive visitors by the hundreds. Housekeepers pocketed so many tips from visitors that Horace Walpole joked that he was tempted to marry the housekeeper of Strawberry Hill, his stuccoed and battlemented pseudo castle at Twickenham.
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Until the time of Thomas’s day trippers, no entrance fees were fixed,
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but, seeing the market potential of stately homes and gardens, Thomas blazed a trail. Increased numbers of paying visitors were a symbol of social change, something which many owners, even those who opened their houses and gardens, feared. The Duke of Devonshire, known as the ‘bachelor Duke’, was an exception.

A lonely man hampered by poor hearing, he became close to two architects, Jeffrey Wyattville and Joseph Paxton. With them he created magnificent settings for his newly acquired paintings and antiques at Chatsworth, in the heart of the Peak District National Park, reputedly the finest stately home in Britain. Like many avid collectors, the Duke enjoyed displaying his collections, so the powdered footmen of Chatsworth opened the stately doors to Thomas’s tourists. With awe the visitors ascended the main staircase to the majestic statue of Mercury and stood enthralled under the richly painted ceilings. Room after room, including the new long wing designed by Wyattville, was crammed with portraits in ornate gilt frames and one of Europe’s finest collections of drawings. One sumptuous suite had, between 1570 and 1581, housed Victoria’s ancestor, Mary Queen of Scots, for eleven of the long years of melancholy captivity imposed on her by her cousin Elizabeth. By visiting Chatsworth, once again, Thomas was following the footsteps of Victoria and Albert, who had stayed there in 1843. Lord Melbourne, who had also been invited, had left an unhappy man. Victoria had few minutes to spare to talk to him and found him duller than ever.
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More exciting than the house, for some, were Chatsworth’s 105 acres of gardens. Here they could see tall palm trees and exotic lilies from South America inside Paxton’s massive Great Conservatory – ‘the great stove’, at the time the largest glass building in the world. One water lily had such large leaves that a child could float on it.

Paxton, born into poverty in 1803 in Milton-Bryant near Woburn in Bedfordshire, had left school at fifteen. His first job, like Thomas’s, was as a garden boy, but in the Horticultural Society’s Chiswick Gardens beside the Duke’s garden at Chiswick House. When Thomas first went to Chatsworth in 1847, Paxton had become the controller of most of the affairs of the Duke, having worked for him twenty-one years. Paxton seemed to bring prosperity to much that he touched – even his railway shares. Unlike thousands of unlucky investors in trains, he chose the Midland Railway and as the company grew he became one of its active directors under the chairmanship of Ellis. Meetings between Thomas and Paxton on the visits in 1847 are not recorded, but it is more than likely that they discussed arrangements. In just three years’ time, Paxton would be the catalyst for Thomas as a tour operator.

Another obvious stately home to put on the new itinerary was Melbourne Hall. None of Thomas’s family had lived in the village for over thirty years, but its hold on him had never ceased. Unlike Chatsworth, Melbourne Hall remained out of reach. Only the romantically landscaped grounds were to be open. Nobody could step inside the ancient house, but Thomas would be allowed to stroll through the gates, once closed to him. Again, the sun shone on 10 August when Thomas, leading nine horse-drawn carriages carrying 109 passengers, set off from Leicester. From the gentle rolling hills, they diverted past the wild expanses of Charnwood Forest with its rocky crags. The horses pulled the coaches up a steep hill to Mount St Bernard Abbey,
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the first Roman Catholic abbey built in England since the Reformation. It had almost been a celebration of the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829 and had been conceived as an act of reparation for the destruction of the monasteries in general at the time of the Reformation.

Unlike many Nonconformists then, who were intolerant of both Catholics and ‘popery’, Thomas did not hold an inveterate hostility. As he had not made any prior arrangements to visit the abbey, it seems that it may have been the result of last-minute urging by someone in the party. Even though the monks would not allow Thomas and his trippers entry, their excuse was music to Thomas’s ears. A party who had visited the previous day had misbehaved with ‘exhibitions of intemperance, insulting observations, and acts of willful damage to the property’.
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With a little persuasion permission was given for the men with Thomas, but not the women, to enter the abbey. But the inspection was brief, as, by mid-day, the coach party had to be at Melbourne, where a ‘powerful brass band of eighteen’ was waiting to greet them in the centre of the town.

The excitement of the arrival in Melbourne, with loud music and speeches, heightened the mood of the visitors. In contrast, the visit to the gardens at Melbourne Hall was a timid affair with no refreshments and no repast. But Thomas could now wander beneath the leafy arches of the trees, walk through the world’s longest yew tunnel, continue down the long parterres, sit beside the winged statues set in alcoves of more clipped yew hedges and gaze at the iron arbour with the fanciful title of the Birdcage.

Two weeks later, on 29 August, another stately home was on Thomas’s schedule. A well-advertised ‘Pleasure Party’ arrived at the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir Castle, which dates from the eleventh century, not far from Melton Mowbray, famed for its pork pies. Thomas’s visitors were allowed to tour inside the castle, and again they benefited from a threepenny guide, the
Hand-Book of Belvoir Castle
, from the presses in Granby Street. Packed with facts about history and architecture, the booklet also told visitors ‘how to behave in the castle and grounds’ and, in a patronising tone, instructing them to observe the niceties of polite society:

It is very seldom indeed that the privileges extended to visitors of the mansions of the nobility are abused; but to the shame of some rude folk from Lincolnshire, there had been just causes of complaint at Belvoir Castle: some large parties have behaved indecorously, and they have to some extent prejudiced the visits of other large companies. Conduct of this sort is abominable, and cannot be too strongly reprobated. We are sure that Leicester visitors will not
knowingly
commit the slightest infraction on the rules of good behaviour, and all we desire of them is to observe the ‘notices’ which hang in the different apartments of the Castle; and in the promenades through the surrounding walks, to satisfy themselves with observations, and not damage in the slightest degree shrubs or flowers, or deface by writing, seats, walls, statues, or any objects of interest. A word to the wise is enough.