Thomas Cook (18 page)

No expense was spared. Both buildings were the first premises in Leicester to have piped water, which came from the new reservoir at Thornton, a village to the north-west, but plumbing and drainage were still in their infancy. Hot water had to be carried in jugs up three or four flights of stairs by maids to washstands – as did a yellow tin bath. All these refinements, as well as the building costs and land, totalled between £3,500 and £5,000. The large house would be modern and easy to clean. Good ventilation and an up-to-date kitchen and laundry meant that the smells of drying clothes, hot bread or cabbage would not float through the upper rooms.

Everything was growing, but there was one element missing which had contributed to Thomas’s success with the exhibition traffic: John Mason. This absence though was more to do with a personality clash than an inability for Thomas to pay a wage. But the end of the year saw even bigger issues of the
Excursionist
being circulated. Its readers were offered at least twelve tours, some of which were escorted, and circular train and boat tickets to Ireland and a new handbook. But the ‘Emerald Isle’, with its lack of prosperity, fierce religious conflict and political troubles, never found the place in Thomas’s heart that Scotland had. For Thomas, Scotland had the advantages of a booming printing trade, ancient and new Protestant kirks bursting with evangelical fervour linked to worldwide missionary activity
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– and trips did not involve a rough night crossing over the Irish Sea with the boat heaving sickeningly and the passengers thrown off balance. Thomas, though, did his best to promote Ireland. Many of his advertisements, at this stage, were more than a little flowery: ‘From Derby to Dublin and back for 13
s
! is an astounding announcement; and the artisan and mechanic classes may now regale their spirits with the pleasure libations of travel.’ In another article he cautioned readers about the impositions of ‘Irish car-drivers . . . as jovial a set of Jehus as ever took a whip in hand’.
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Dublin, with its well-proportioned Georgian terraces, still had the appearance of a late eighteenth-century city, but Ireland, the first country where potatoes had become a major food source, was in a pitiful state following the Potato Famine. The potato crop had first failed in 1845 because of blight, the fungus
Phytophthora infestans
, then again in 1846 and in 1848, the year in which Thomas had started tours to Ireland. People in western Ireland literally had nothing to eat, some surviving on weeds and grass. Out of a population of eight million, over a million died of starvation, while others perished in the dirty and overcrowded sailing ships which took a million survivors to America and Australia.

General interest in horticulture increased so much that Thomas continued to promote tickets for trains to annual harvest home and Michaelmas fairs, such as the Great Onion Fair at Birmingham on 30 September 1852, an ancient annual fair comparable to Nottingham’s Goose Fair. In the old Bull Ring area,
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onions of every description and size were displayed near theatrical booths, funfairs and menageries. Frivolity was such that the fairs were later moved from the centre of town because of ‘shouting hobbledehoys, screaming girls, drunken men and shouting women, swarming in their hundreds . . . the public houses packed and customers having to fight their way in and out, the floors swimming in spilt beer; the general proceedings offering a spectacle of debauchery, drunkenness noise and blaspheming!’
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Thomas maintained this riotous event in his annual schedule – as is seen by colourful posters.
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The fact that he was now including such destinations shows that he had relaxed some of his straight-laced attitudes even more. One reason for finding a middle ground was the need to pay his mortgage, another was the realisation that if he let personal scruples interfere, his lead in the travel business would be overtaken. Competition was appearing from all directions, so it was always reassuring when his position was recognised by some of the highest in the land. After the death of the 83-year-old Duke of Wellington on 14 September 1852 at Walmer Castle, Thomas was asked by some railway companies to bring crowds for his lying-in-state and the funeral procession.
¹⁰
The Iron Duke was to have one of the great pageants of the century – Britain’s first public-event funeral. Careful embalming and the use of formaldehyde gave the organisers two months in which to stage-manage every detail. Just as it had broken all records with the biggest exhibition in history the previous year, the government would put on the grandest funeral ever held in the British Isles. Previously, the most expensive funeral London had ever witnessed had been on 23 November 1658 – Oliver Cromwell’s seven-hour funeral procession, to Westminster Abbey, modelled on that of the King of Spain.

Now, nearly two centuries later, on 18 November 1852, over half a million men and women came to see another procession of ‘unexampled magnificence’. Twelve black horses with black plumes pulled the black-draped hearse, following Wellington’s empty-saddled horse with Wellington’s black boots turned in the stirrups, in the traditional manner of funeral parades. The bells of St Paul’s started their sonorous tolling; the streets were sombre. Black crepe even covered the muffled drums of the military bands which accompanied the solemn procession on its way from Chelsea Hospital to St Paul’s Cathedral where the duke was interred beside Napoleon’s other foe, Nelson. It augured well that Thomas was involved in what turned out to be a dress rehearsal for royal spectaculars.

In Leicester, come rain or shine, the building of Thomas’s hotel and Temperance Hall went on at a frenzied pace. The hotel was the first of the two buildings to be finished. With much excitement the Cook family moved into the house that would remain the nucleus of their peripatetic family life for the next ten years. John Mason frequently spent long periods in Derby with his grandmother, who set such an example of hard work. Annie, with dark eyes as brown and as lively as Thomas’s, was now nearly seven. With her eagerness to learn and her mischievous laughter, from the time she was a toddler Annie was Thomas’s favourite. When he returned home at night the mood of the house lifted. But, like the household accounts, which were written up every night with each penny scrupulously accounted for, her childhood was ordered and predictable. She could never roam in the nearby country lanes and fields with other children, climb fences and trees or run wild. Instead, she was expected to help her mother in running the hotel and to spend many hours practising the piano or speaking French. She was adored and cosseted by her parents, but, compared with the rough and tumble school days of her brother, who had frequently laboured through the night, her life was easy but dull. Despite the drudgery of checking that the bedrooms had been properly cleaned, the never-ending laundry and the counting of the sheets and assorted linen, her days were a little too protected and organised. Sheltered by her parents, young Annie passed into her teens. She also fulfilled the role of buffer, as Thomas and Marianne both focused on her, and were seldom really alone together.

On 7 May 1853, advertisements for ‘The New Temperance Hotel, Granby Street’
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were followed by notices offering tickets for two shillings each for a public breakfast in the Temperance Hall. No other building in Leicester then had such facilities: a library, a lecture room, a hundred-foot-long hall, a gallery which seated 1,700 people with space for a magnificent orchestra above the stage, a committee room plus various other rooms. Here people could have everything – except a glass of wine.

Among those who inaugurated this temple of Temperance were shopkeepers and craftsmen, factory owners and factory workers, farmers and agricultural labourers, Catholics and Quakers, Baptists and Anglicans. Temperance followers, like the members of YMCA clubs, crossed the rigid lines that separated churches and social classes and widened the limited spheres of many different cross-sections of society. Rain on the opening day did not deter the curious crowds, many of whom had arrived in special trains. Thomas was praised in the many speeches. Another guest was Henry Lankester, the Cook family doctor and surgeon to the Midland Railway Company, sixteen years younger than Thomas, who had moved from Poole and built up a large practice in the town. Like many of Thomas’s friends he was a Nonconformist, a Liberal and an anti-drink campaigner.

Thomas advertised his hotel, saying, ‘This new and beautiful edifice . . . with adaptation to the special character of hotel business . . . comprises commercial-room, dining-room, coffee-room, sitting-rooms, and numerous bedrooms, all newly furnished in style corresponding with the general appearance of the house . . .’ Just how much he had gained by compromising and finding the middle ground is seen in his arrangements for ‘those to whom tobacco-smoking may be offensive are free from the annoyance, a Room being appropriated to the use of smokers’.

‘Mine host’ was more and more absent, leaving the running of the hotel in the capable hands of Marianne. Each spring and summer Thomas was now spending at least two months in Scotland, shepherding nearly 5,000 visitors, alternating the east and west routes with four large train parties, each covering in all up to 2,000 miles by sea, rail and road. A pattern had begun in 1848 and, except for the year of the Great Exhibition, would go on until 1863. This was not just because Scotland was a popular tourist destination. Thomas had great affection for the country and made over sixty visits. His lifelong fascination with all aspects of printing and publishing added an extra dimension, and he enjoyed friendships with many Scottish printers and publishers, such as William Collins, who specialised in church history and pioneered school textbooks, and William Chambers, who was so impressed with the way Thomas escorted his troops of tourists that he called him ‘the Field Marshal’. Scotland had always been in advance of England in literacy, education, printing and publishing so was a place of particular appeal to anyone with a passion for printing, like Thomas. A survey in 1795 had shown that out of a total population of 1.5 million, nearly 20,000 Scots had jobs connected with writing and publishing – and 10,500 with teaching.
¹²

Scotland had the best state education in Europe. It shamed England, which, except for charity and religious schools, still had neither free nor compulsory schools. Before the Act of Union, throughout the seventeenth century, Scotland’s parliament had passed various acts
¹³
to ensure that there would be schools and paid teachers in every parish. Education had progressed because of John Knox’s insistence that everyone should be able to read both the Bible and his
Book of Discipline
of 1560, issued the same year that the Presbyterian religion became the official religion of Scotland. Apart from providing primary education, Scotland, in contrast to England’s two universities, had four,
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all open to a wide range of students
¹⁵
and all with lower tuition fees.

The year 1853 also included plans for Thomas to take shiploads of visitors to the Dublin Exhibition, organised to boost the ailing Irish economy after the Famine. He wrote that ‘early in that year the late Sir C.P. Roney sent for me to Ireland, to confer and to cooperate with him in arranging for and working out a double system of excursion and tourist arrangements’:

Cheap excursions were to be worked by special trains, and a fortnight was to be allowed on the tickets; the tourist tickets were to be good for all trains, and valid for a month, at rates really double those of the excursions. I was to undertake the excursion department, whilst the various railway companies of England would take charge of the issue of tourist tickets with the view of encouraging travel in Ireland. I was to be able to give my travellers tickets for Cork, the Lakes of Killarney, Connemara, etc., at greatly reduced prices . . .

Thus was inaugurated the tourist system of Ireland, which, with certain modifications and extensions, has continued to this day.

Rival English agents were bringing tourists to the Dublin Exhibition, but Thomas organised both weekly and fortnightly excursions. At this stage he defined the difference between his excursion tickets and tour tickets: ‘The term excursion is generally used to designate a special trip, or trips, at very reduced prices, and under extraordinary arrangements . . . whilst the word tour takes a wider and more circuitous range, and provides the means of travelling at special rates, and by a more organized system, but taking the regular modes of conveyance.’
¹⁶

There was also a major change in Melbourne. For the third time in five years Melbourne Hall had a new owner. When Lord Melbourne had died childless in 1848, his brother, Frederic, had become the 3rd Lord Melbourne, but he died five years later leaving no heirs. The title became extinct, but the property passed to their sister, Emily, who had married a second time, becoming the wife of Lord Palmerston, the most colourful and best-known foreign secretary in the nineteenth century. When in the government of his brother-in-law, Lord Melbourne, he had been responsible for setting up the first British consulate in Jerusalem and managed to bypass Turkish prohibition on building a Protestant church there by calling it ‘the Consul’s private chapel’. Emily’s son-in-law, who had now inherited the title of Lord Shaftesbury, had been the moving force behind the promotion of British links with Jerusalem and also went to extraordinary lengths to protect and promote the Jews in Palestine.

I
n February 1854, Thomas’s grief had been acute when his mother Elizabeth Tivey, at the age of sixty-four, lay on her deathbed. Apart from his wife and Annie, it had been from her that Thomas had received physical affection. She had been the mainstay of the family. It had been through her strength that Thomas and his brothers had survived in those pre-railway days, cocooned in the little cottage with no money, few prospects and few possessions. Her instinctive reactions to events had kept them afloat and she had saved him from going down the mines. So great had been the bond between mother and son that Thomas had almost taken on the role of husband after her second widowhood. It was in him that she had confided, and they had often sat up at night talking, or she would listen while he read the Bible aloud. In stark contrast, John Mason’s relationship with his own parents was cold and his feelings hesitant and ambivalent, but he became close to Elizabeth and again lived with her in Derby for a few years, when he had a job as a compositor. Her death left the two men and Simeon quite desolate. Simeon’s Temperance Hotel in Corn Market was already being absorbed into her boarding house, which would become Simeon Smithard’s Private Temperance Boarding House.