Thomas Cook (22 page)

Later, in his book on Switzerland,
Playground of Europe
,
¹⁵
Stephen slated Thomas’s ‘Cockney travellers’ and those who were just hill walkers and pressers of flowers, not mountaineers with rope, axe and alpenstock. With sarcasm he wrote of ‘innumerable valleys which have not yet bowed the knee to Baal, in the shape of Mr. Cook and his tourists’. Stephen’s argument was quoted by Ruskin in the
Cornhill Magazine
– that understanding art and natural beauty required much study, something not possible for people who spent all their time working.
¹⁶
Ruskin also complained that all his ‘dear mountain grounds and treasure-cities . . . are long destroyed by the European populace’.
¹⁷

For a few weeks in 1864, the swashbuckling Italian national patriot, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who, after years of uprisings and fighting,
¹⁸
had triumphantly led his ‘red shirts’ to victory in the War of Italian Unification, became London’s hero. He radiated a romantic aura which many in the working class, seeking to achieve political rights themselves, found intoxicating. The new Italian government had glamour unlike any other, even boasting Giuseppe Verdi as a member in the first national parliament.
¹⁹
Wherever he went in London Garibaldi was overwhelmed by rapturous cheers. Crowds larger than those seen for years thronged the streets when he arrived for a state visit. Everyone from Lord Tennyson to trade unionists clambered to meet this champion of nationalism who had struck a blow for the freedom of his country. The Duchess of Sutherland threw a lavish reception for him at Stafford House.

Sixteen years earlier, in 1848–9, Giuseppe Mazzini and Garibaldi had led an assault on Rome which, after a few initial small victories, failed. Napoleon III had sent large numbers of French troops to reinforce the Pope’s army of Zouaves and Swiss Guards. Eventually most of the Italian states united and Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed king. But Garibaldi’s vision of a totally united Italy was stopped by the Pope, who remained sovereign of the state of Rome, and by Venice, which was still controlled by the Austrians. As the Pope had excommunicated Garibaldi and his followers, he had a Protestant pastor for his troops, Alessandro Cavazzi, an Italian ex-priest who had gone from being a Roman Catholic to embracing Methodism.

The Liberals, who were then a bulwark against the Catholic Church in Britain, rejoiced in the victory of Italian nationalism and longed for the decline of the temporal power of the Pope.
²⁰
Crowds surged forward to touch Garibaldi as he rode in a state procession and afterwards thousands of children lined the streets and chanted, ‘We’ll get a rope | And hang the Pope: | So up with Garibaldi!’ One ‘victory fighter’ absent from the parade, though, was Giuseppe Mazzini who lived near the Fulham Road, an easy walk from the home of his friend Thomas Carlyle. He had distanced himself from Garibaldi’s movement, disgusted at his monarchist tendencies and his need for royal ritual and splendour.

In July, only six months after Garibaldi’s visit to London, Thomas crossed the Alps into Italy, anticipating expansion, as he put it, ‘to this land of natural beauty, art and music’. Having managed a good reduction of fares on condition that there were not less than fifty in a party, he inaugurated a series of tourist tickets, which combined most of the railways, steamboats and diligences. ‘These’, Thomas said, ‘were the first circular tickets issued in this country . . .’ His party of more than ninety ended up going from the Coliseum in Rome, the catacombs and places connected with the romance of Keats, Shelley, Browning and Byron on to Naples, Pompeii and Mt Vesuvius. As Thomas wrote, ‘In 1864 . . . I had the pleasure of conducting two Italian parties – one as far as Florence and Leghorn, and the other to Rome, Naples, &c. This arrangement was supplemental to my Swiss Tours, and the combined results of the trips to Switzerland and Italy gave a total of about 1100 tourists. My Swiss Tickets grew in favour with the public, and while the number of tickets issued was double that of the previous year, about half as many [again] as in 1863 availed themselves of my personal company on their travels.’

In each group there was usually someone who detested the Italian fare. Unable to eat such exotic dishes as octopus stewed in its own ink, let alone spaghetti, they longed for stodgy steak-and-kidney pie. Other irritations were also the inevitable mosquitoes and fleas, some of which responded to ‘Keating’s Persian Insect Destroying Powder’ advertised in the
Excursionist
as ‘unrivalled in destroying fleas, bugs, emmets, flies, cockroaches, beetles, gnats, mosquitoes, moths in furs, and every other species of insect in all stages of metamorphosis. A small quantity of it placed in the crevices of a bedstead will destroy bugs . . . It is indispensable to Travellers by rail or steamboat and visitors to the seaside . . .’

Even though, as Thomas said, for several years ‘our way was through brigand-infested districts, when military escorts protected us’, Italy was a source of warmth, health and sensuous inspiration for many English writers, and those who could afford to spend time there, including such writers as Robert Browning and his ailing wife, Elizabeth. The possessive attitude of the English towards Italy then is illustrated by Browning:

Italy, my Italy!

. . . Open my heart and you will see

Graved inside of it, ‘Italy’.

Such lovers old are I and she

So it always was, so shall ever be!
²¹

There were now so many English people living on both the Mediterranean coast and the hinterland that the area had been given to the Bishop of Gibraltar as a new diocese in 1842, and Anglican churches were built everywhere from Nice, Monte Carlo and Cairns to San Remo. Some churches became such little pockets of England that they assumed the air of consulates.

Meanwhile, Thomas had changed the adversity of a closed door in Scotland into a thriving industry. His trips to Switzerland were altering the country’s economy and the use of its snow-covered foothills and mountains. No longer were they just used as marginal agricultural land. Simple wooden homes expanded into guest chalets and hotels to accommodate not only Thomas’s visitors but also the thousands of others who independently, or with other tour companies, followed his routes.

T
aking large numbers of tourists overseas was full of problems, and germs. However, nothing obstructed Thomas’s plans – not even the lack of amenities, such as public toilet facilities at destinations, let alone flush lavatories, running water, hot water, restaurants or quick communications. Railway carriages usually had no facilities such as restaurants or lavatories. Hygiene was often basic or nonexistent; the need to wash hands was not established until Joseph Lister proved his germ theory in 1867. Many places washed dishes in cold water,
¹
and fleas, another source of disease, often accompanied passengers. Even primitive domestic refrigeration or ice-boxes were not common until the end of the century, so the freshness of food was a concern for travellers. With no telephones, reservations and messages had to be by letter. Weeks could pass waiting for confirmations. The electric telegraph, inaugurated in 1843 between Paddington and West Drayton, was not practical for another two years; the first underwater cable from England to France was not completed until 1851. Another decade passed before cables were laid across the Atlantic in 1866. Cables to Australia followed in 1872. Telegrams and cables were expensive and were used solely for special messages and events. Writing letters by hand was laborious, and typewriters were not in general use until the end of the 1870s. There was no commercial telephone service in London until 1879, nor long-distance calls to Paris until 1891. All this meant that Thomas’s office work was time-consuming, as were his marketing and advertising to attract passengers.

Women were one of the mainstays of Thomas’s overseas trips. Hordes of females lacking an escort – some spinsters, others widows – purchased his excursion tickets. As it was then socially unacceptable for any woman with aspirations to being ‘a young lady’ to travel without a chaperone, and walking in the streets alone was unwise, women outnumbered men on the majority of the earlier trips. His tours offered a safety umbrella to single women asserting their independence and exploring the world. Long journeys were said to be morally, physically and sexually dangerous. Thomas wrote:

the oft-reiterated question: Is it safe and proper for ladies to join in Highland tours? . . . of the thousands of tourists who have travelled with us, the majority have been ladies. In family parties, the preponderance is generally on the feminine side; but there are also great numbers of ladies who start alone, and always meet with agreeable company and get through without any particular inconvenience or discomfort . . . As to their energy, bravery, and endurance of toil, as a rule they are fully equal to those of the opposite sex, whilst many of them frequently put to shame the ‘masculine’ effeminates.

. . . The trappings of prevailing fashion may sometimes perplex them in climbing . . . and amongst rude blocks of granite and basalt; but there is a large class, who, defiant of fashion or customs . . . push their way through all difficulties . . .

Thomas was no ‘ladies’ man’. His mother, wife and daughter were the only women close to him, but his ability to listen and his extraordinary patience meant that, according to a journalist later writing in the
Daily News
:
²

Unprotected females confide in him . . . hypochondriacs tell him of their complaints; foolish travellers look to him to redeem their errors; stingy ones ask him how eighteen pence can be procured for a shilling; would-be dandies ask his opinion about dress; would-be connoisseurs show him the art treasures they have picked up; the cantankerous refer their quarrels to him, and the vacuous inflict on him their imbecility; but the great conductor never flinches.

This was just one portion of Thomas’s growing business which was becoming too much for one man to run. The volume of people was burgeoning, so that in 1864, two years after Thomas had moved to London, he pleaded with John Mason, then working as a printer, to come into partnership. A realist, John Mason wrote that they had been unable to agree on matters in the past,
³
so why would their relationship improve? Thomas promised him more autonomy and, with his usual ebullience, talked him into being manager of a new London headquarters. The frustrations of the past would be forgotten; John Mason would control the new office.
⁴
Every penny that Thomas owned was put into purchasing 98 Fleet Street, on the corner of Bride Lane.

Thomas was now in Fleet Street, the mecca of the newspaper, publishing and literary world. As always, he liked mixing with other printers and publishers, but not in their usual meeting places, El Vino or the bar of the Olde Cheshire Cheese, famed for visitors in the past, such as Dickens, Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope. Later, John Mason, a teetotaller from birth, appalled by habits in Fleet Street, started a teetotal club for pressmen in the upper part of the building. Despite the enthusiasm of its manager, a Yorkshire Quaker, it was sparsely attended and lost so much money that it was closed after a few years.
⁵
Thomas described John Mason’s return to the fold with warm words:

An important event in 1864 was the adhesion of my son to the work which had been the study, the hobby, and the labour of a solo for twenty-three previous years. When very young, my son had worked with me in various ways; but he left me to go into the Midland Railway Office, and to take charge of the company’s excursion business. He afterwards spent a number of years in mercantile operations of considerable magnitude. His return to my aid liberated me from details of office work, and enabled me to carry out foreign schemes of long projection, in both the Eastern and Western hemispheres.

The old fear of insolvency made Thomas turn part of the new offices into a travel shop. Customers could purchase baggage and items such as rugs, hats, telescopes, footwear, guide books, water purifiers, the old staple Keating’s Persian Insect Destroying Powder and an adapted Gladstone bag with a rope and pulley inside which could be a fire escape in an emergency.
⁶
John Mason and his wife moved into rooms upstairs, part of which, as in the previous four Cook homes, became a Temperance boarding house/hotel. One sadness that year was the death of Paxton at his solid Victorian villa on Sydenham Hill, close to where his masterpiece, the Crystal Palace, had been re-erected. Six years previously Paxton’s mentor, the Duke of Devonshire, had died, after having virtually moved in with the Paxtons.

During 1865, after he had widened his reputation by taking over 1,600 passengers to Switzerland, Thomas weighed up the advantages of going to either the Holy Land or America. Despite being fifty-seven, his energy was boundless. When the summer season was over, he took some tourists across the Alps and also escorted two trips to Rome and Naples. Then he suddenly decided to go to America, where the Civil War had just finished. So, sixteen years after his visit to Liverpool to arrange tours to the United States, on 29 November he boarded the small cramped
City of Boston
.

As Thomas was sailing across the Atlantic, the Palestine Exploration Fund was being set up in London. It was less than four years since Albert’s death and although Victoria, a heartbroken widow, had gone into seclusion, she agreed to be its patron. On 12 May, in the ‘Jerusalem Chamber’ at Westminster Abbey, where Henry IV had died in 1413, the new committee made it known that the prestigious society would investigate the archaeology, geography, geology and natural history of Palestine and map the whole country, while verifying the sites in the Bible. This overlapped with the Royal Engineers’ mapping expedition, for which the Turkish authorities offered protection, as the men investigated a stretch from Mount Lebanon, Nazareth and the Jezreel Valley to the hills of Samaria and Jerusalem.