Thomas Cook (21 page)

The gala on the first day of his new enterprise on 30 April 1862 had two strands: one was a Temperance meeting, complete with a minister, ritual, speeches and music; the other was enlivened with the Chelsea Drum and Fife Band playing under a giant flag bearing the words ‘Exhibition Visitors’ Home’. So great was the demand that each night the refreshment hall was converted into a temporary dormitory with a hundred beds. By the end of the summer Thomas could boast that more than 20,000 visitors had stayed in this boarding house, many more than one night.
¹⁴
Guests had included parties from Fry & Sons, the chocolate manufacturers, coal miners from West Retford collieries, hands from Allbright & Wilson’s chemical factory near Birmingham, plus forty Italians from Turin who stayed for six weeks, sixty-five Germans from Mecklenburgh for a fortnight and visitors from Paris, Toulouse and other places abroad. Some also came to attend the International Temperance Convention, which was held there – mostly in the open air on 2 September.

Ovington Square, too, was booked out. The initial accommodation was enlarged with five more ‘First Class Houses’, in Pelham Place, Pelham Crescent and Sydney Place. All these, according to the
Excursionist
, were ‘conducted under the immediate direction and control of Mrs. and Miss Cook’. Thomas now opened himself up to more competition. As the circulation of the
Excursionist
was increasing, he decided to accept outside advertisements as an extra source of revenue.

At the same time as Marianne and Annie were looking after the boarding houses, Thomas was exercising all his theatrical skills and salesmanship at his stall, the Scotch Court, outside the exhibition hall, among the cluster of booths and stalls of the Exhibition Bazaar, which bypassed the ban on sales inside the main hall itself. Thomas’s stall still captured the resurgent interest in Scotland’s history, particularly in its Celtic past, with everything from Celtic jewellery to fabrics and mementoes of its history, music, culture, cuisine and printing. Lithographs of Scottish and other celebrities included the greatest historian of the age, Lord Macaulay, and Prince Albert. Visitors could buy ‘The Excursionist’ Tweed Suit at forty-five shillings, eat Edinburgh rock, Scottish shortbread or Edinburgh toffees, purchase books and maps to study, and shawls and kilts. Tartans, of course, were prominently displayed. There was also ‘An Office for the Issue of Scottish Tourist Tickets – all by Commission . . . from his long and familiar acquaintance with most parts of Scotland.’
¹⁵
Thomas showed his determination. He may have been stopped from escorting groups to Scotland, but he could still sell hundreds, indeed thousands, of return tickets.

T
en years after Thomas had moved Marianne and Annie into his imposing hotel in Leicester, he shifted them, along with his headquarters, into 59 Great Russell Street,
¹
part of the Duke of Bedford’s estate in fashionable Bloomsbury in the heart of London. Owning a lease on this charming Georgian townhouse delighted Thomas in many ways. For instance, gas had not been widely used in London until about 1860, but the Bedford estate had designed an innovative method to distinguish the houses at night, as each fanlight above the main front doors was distinctly different from its neighbours.

No. 59 was typical of the tall houses of London’s middle-class families. Here the occupants and rooms were kept clean by servants who slept in attics and ate and lived in the kitchen basements, who had to trudge up and down four flights of stairs with water from a pump in the basement. Thomas’s hotels in Leicester and in London, perpetual struggle though they were, brought in a steady income. They were run as one enterprise, as shown on a surviving printed invoice headed ‘London, Cook’s British Museum Boarding House, 59 Great Russell St., Bloomsbury, Leicester, Cook’s Commercial & Family Temperance Hotel, 63 Granby-Street’, which shows a total of £1 4
s
for three days. Thomas, Marianne and Annie would now centre their lives in London for the next thirteen years.

Not only was Thomas stretched between Leicester and London, but his feet were in two camps. Although always aware of working-class sentiments and traditions, he constantly readapted his principles and inclinations. Compromise as he did, he still refused to go to theatres or to advertise them in his newspaper. He continued, like all strict Baptists, to look askance at the immoderation of modern entertainment, especially playhouses, music halls, dice, cards, gambling, church raffles and theatres. Plays were dismissed for their sexual and bawdy content.
²
In his forty years of setting up package holidays Thomas avoided anything that he considered was hedonistic or
louche
. Even when Sir Arthur Sullivan’s light operas with lyrics by Sir William S. Gilbert were the rage and
Trial by Jury
,
HMS Pinafore
, and
The Pirates of Penzance
took London by storm, Thomas would not attend.

The year 1862, though, saw Thomas’s transformation from ‘provincial gentleman’ to ‘London gent’ with a black bowler hat, folded umbrella and frock coat. This was a classic case of putting a good face on things, a way of lessening the uncertainties of his status. His awareness that clothes were also a way of adding style and glamour to travelling resulted in the frock-coats which later became a uniform for his tour guides. But sartorial elegance escaped Thomas – a photograph of him sitting on the ground reveals loose socks that had slipped down to his ankles.

In Great Russell Street, limits on advertising and business announcements meant that Thomas could only have a discreet brass plate near the front door indicating either the boarding house or his travel business. As the Leicester office was also kept going, Thomas managed to squeeze his London office staff into a conservatory at the back of the building where, as he explained later in his memoir,
Travelling Experiences
, his tourist business ‘took root and flourished, though frequently assailed by the pelting missiles of a portion of the Metropolitan press. But there the late Charles Dickens found me out and sent one of his subalterns to collect notes for a commendatory article in “All the Year Round”. The same representative of Mr Dickens afterwards travelled with one of my Italian parties and gave a graphic description of the tour in “Temple Bar”.’

Ties with Leicester were easy to maintain as there were daily trains from King’s Cross
³
to the Midlands. If the pavements were not crowded, and it was not foggy or icy, the distance to King’s Cross from Great Russell Street could be covered in about twenty minutes. The route took Thomas past squares, shops, offices, grand terraces, shabby houses and slums similar to those in Dickens’s
Oliver Twist
where some of London’s prostitutes plied for business.
⁴
Many places were in easy walking distance from Great Russell Street. A five-minute stroll through crowds of people jostling one another’s umbrellas took him to Oxford Street, at that time well on the way to becoming London’s premier shopping destination. The new Cook home was also just around the corner from London University, the first university in England to open its doors to Nonconformists and Jews.
⁵

In the centre of the terrace, each front window of 59 Great Russell Street looked across a courtyard into the British Museum, repository of one of the world’s greatest collections. Its acres of exhibits already included the Elgin Marbles and some of the legendary wonders of ancient Egypt, including the Rosetta Stone, mummies and relics dug up by funerary archaeologists. Shelley’s best-known sonnet, ‘Ozymandias’, with its haunting lines, ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings’, was inspired by his visits.
⁶
Dominating the galleries was the colossus of Ramses, the legendary Egyptian king who spoke with Moses at the time of the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt. Other ancient relics from the shores of the Nile displayed at the museum also acted as the muse for the windows, ‘Adam, Flight into Egypt’, executed by Edward Burne-Jones. The Shelleys had stayed in the street at No. 119 before they sailed for Italy in 1819, as had Keats, further along at No. 20.

Thousands flocked to see the staggering antiquities in Great Russell Street and nobody, let alone a seeker of knowledge like Thomas, could live there and not know the history of Egypt. The great domed reading room, inspired by Paxton,
⁷
had opened in 1857 with the largest library in the world. In the earlier building, Montague House, Dickens, attempting to supplement some of the shortcomings of his schooling, had been a frequent visitor. For an amateur historian like Thomas, Great Russell Street was more than a suitable place to live. The most famous of all the visitors to the street, though, was a 44-year-old German refugee, Karl Marx. When Thomas gazed through the net curtains he might have seen a short, plump, bearded man walking through the iron gates daily to spend his day inside writing, which would result in five years in his
magnum opus
,
Das Kapital
. In 1862, of course, Marx’s name was not well known, nor was that of Thomas’s new neighbour, the painter Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones had moved there after his marriage to Georgiana in 1860 and would live there until he moved to Fulham in 1867. John Ruskin, a vocal critic of mass tourism, was a patron of Burne-Jones, and when Thomas moved in, Ruskin, Burne-Jones and Georgiana were touring near Rome. Illness marred long periods of Burne-Jones’s career, but it was when Georgiana was deliriously ill after contacting scarlet fever and giving birth to a child prematurely that Ruskin paid to have a carpet of deep sawdust laid outside the Burne-Joneses house to soften the noise of the horses’ hooves,
⁸
as the sound of metal-shod horses’ hooves and iron-shod wheels was usually constant.

Streets were often so crowded with pedestrians that it was hard to manoeuvre past those dawdling in pairs. The proliferation of railways, the centralisation of commerce, and the transfer of the financial centre from Amsterdam to London all meant that the capital had grown from less than a million in 1801 to about two and a half million by 1850. Railways were making commuting easier. Daily trains brought office workers from new suburbs everywhere, from Surrey to Essex. When the Metropolitan, the world’s first underground railway, opened in 1863, it did for London what rural railways had done for the country.

In the same year Thomas was suddenly confronted with tremendous change. When the Scottish railway managers broke off all their remaining engagements with him, he could no longer afford to maintain his issuing offices north of the border. Leicester to London routes with return tickets – covering transport, accommodation and meals, the first ‘package’ tours
⁹
– were not enough; he decided to risk another challenge. The pessimism that caused him to write that he would confine ‘operations for a few years’ to the West country’
¹⁰
was brief. His substitute for Scotland as a destination would be the snow-clad mountains of Switzerland. Again Paxton helped out. This time it did not take long to convince the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway to give discounted prices to Newhaven.

On 26 June 1863, with between 130 and 150 tourists, Thomas and his assistant, John Ripley, a former Temperance missionary in Leicester, arrived in Dieppe on the first leg of their journey to the Swiss Alps via Paris. In Paris they split up, with about sixty-two men and women going via Dijon to Geneva and then on to Chamonix to conquer the summits of the Swiss Alps. One member of the party, Miss Jemima Morrell, who kept a diary, wrote of a visit to Leukerbad and the Gemmi pass by way of a narrow zigzag path. Neither she nor another woman was inhibited by crinolines or corsets from climbing over precipices or indulging in a luncheon in Geneva of ten courses: soup, salmon with cream sauces, sliced roast beef with browned potatoes, boiled fowl served on rice, sweet-breads, roast fowl, salad, artichokes, plum pudding steeped in brandy and a choice of sweets.
¹¹

Crossing and recrossing the Alps, penetrating into the very heart of Switzerland, brought so many new clients that by the end of the first season alone more than 500 Cook tourists had climbed over the Swiss mountains. Some overcame Switzerland’s lack of plentiful railways with a sledge and a coach drawn by thirteen mules. Tours covered almost every part of Switzerland so that the holiday-makers could travel independently, all the year round, using Interlaken and Lucerne as the main centres. Deals with innkeepers and hotel proprietors resulted in good rooms and meals at competitive prices. Swiss travellers were from the growing middle classes and expected better accommodation than many earlier customers.

The Swiss seized on this new trade to supplement their income from cheese-making and watch-making. As Thomas said, ‘That which took
tens
of years in Scotland seems to have been acquired at a single bound in Switzerland, where “Cook’s Tours” already rank among the Institutions of the Confederation.’ Foreign languages he certainly lacked, but his friendships with hoteliers grew and enabled Thomas to put his Swiss accommodation arrangements on a solid basis. Ironically, it was easier for him to organise tours in Switzerland than it would be in America where there were no language difficulties.

Switzerland’s imposing peaks, especially the Eiger, the Jungfrau and the Wetterhorn had recently been made even more enticing by the poetry of Byron, Shelley and other writers of the Romantic Movement. Earlier, they had been brought to the fore by English mountaineers, whose exploits thrilled all of Europe and in 1857 led to the establishment of the exclusive Alpine Club.
¹²
Until then climbing mountains was something the Swiss did only if they lost sheep or were hunting ibex, but they were pleased to guide adventurous visitors high into the cloudy heights if they were paid. Mass tourism, welcomed by the Swiss, was derided by the members of the exclusive Alpine Club, who included Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and the Old Etonian Sir Leslie Stephen.
¹³
Having made mountain climbing an exclusive sport, they were now worried about their ‘playground’ being overrun. The idea that the Alps should be trampled on only by the aesthetic elite, and not by the philistine multitude, was taken up by Sir Leslie, whose first wife had been Thackeray’s daughter, Minnie. A former Evangelical clergyman, a muscular Christian and passionate mountaineer and climber who had made several notable ascents of Swiss peaks, he was also the editorial mastermind behind the
Dictionary of National Biography
,
¹⁴
editor of the
Alpine Journal
and in 1882 to be the father of Virginia Woolf.