Thomas Cook (23 page)

Thomas, who was not a good sailor, stood on the deck of the steamer. Steamships were not yet stabilised and seasickness was common. Since 1838, when the first coal-powered paddle steamship, the
Sirius
, had made the journey, the sailing time between England and America had dropped to about fourteen or even twelve-and-a-half days,
⁷
but luxury had not yet arrived. Cats were a necessity, as mice abounded; hungry rats from the holds often ran down corridors. Cockroaches, too, scuttled into corners. Bedlinen was not changed during the voyage. But standards were improving. Thomas, who hoped to ‘arrange Excursions to and from the United States and Canada’, carried a letter from John Bright, written in Rochdale: ‘from all I have heard of you, I feel the greatest confidence in your power to carry out your undertaking to the satisfaction of those who confide in you.’
⁸

Abraham Lincoln, the leader of the northern states and sixteenth president of the United States, had been assassinated eight months earlier, his death adding to the bitterness of the four years of fighting. In a similar way to Thomas’s tours to France, which had started after France’s participation in the Crimean War, his tours to the United States began after the American Civil War. Over 600,000 people had been killed, but now there were peace and an upsurge in both Temperance and economic activity, including the building of more railways. The American Temperance Society
⁹
had been set up a few years before the first one in England, and by the 1850s thirteen states had forbidden the sale of liquor and there were moves to start a Prohibition Party. Passionate teetotalers, like John D. Rockefeller, a Baptist, sponsored anti-drink lecture tours.

Letters written home to Marianne during the tour show that Thomas’s religious priorities were unwavering. From New York he emphasised a sermon at a Baptist chapel in Brooklyn. The letter also related how ‘pained’ he was by ‘the Exposition of the 4th Commandment’ in a new book,
Dale on the Ten Commandments
,
¹⁰
sent to him by the author, which promoted the advantages of extending public entertainment on Sundays.

Thomas, a Sabbath Observance man, stressed the importance of remembering ‘the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work . . .’ (Exodus 20: 7–10). The growth of Sunday railway excursions was not something promoted by him.

In the depth of winter Thomas took trains across America, ‘travelling over 4,000 miles of Railroads’, enjoying the novelty of their corridors, lavatories, iced water dispensers and sleeping berths – facilities and comforts unheard of then on British or European trains. But they were slow. He visited Toronto and other parts of Canada, the Western States and the Central Districts of Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, Niagara Falls, Chicago, Detroit, New York and Massachusetts. Just as he had diverted to Waterloo on a tour to Belgium, he visited the battlefields of the Civil War. Despite the long journey across America Thomas failed to make any firm plans, but within less than six months John Mason was escorting an exploratory group from New York to Washington, Niagara, Chicago, the Mammoth Caves of Kentucky and the deserted battlefields of Virginia with ‘skulls, arms, and legs all bleaching in the sun’. Ignoring the difficulties, Thomas wrote ‘and thus was inaugurated the first system of Tours to and through America’. He explained: ‘In the following winter my son again crossed the Atlantic, with the view of promoting travel to the Paris Exhibition. He thought he had laid his plans securely, and several great companies promised their aid in giving effect to the arrangements; but our plans were again thwarted, after printing thousands of posters and tens of thousands of explanatory bills.’
¹¹

Back in England times were again troubled. In Hyde Park, in July, Reform Act agitators demonstrated. Railings were torn down and the old eighteenth-century fear of the mob revived. The government realised that reform was urgent. So, thirty-five years after the Great Reform Bill, the franchise was about to be extended.

I
n the eighteenth century, British tourists, whose ears were offended by the sound of lower-class and Cockney accents when abroad, had made condescending remarks about fellow countrymen travelling abroad being vulgar. Even in the twenty-first century, snide remarks are often levelled at either groups or classes, whether Americans, Germans, Japanese and the Dutch, or at ‘ignorant masses’ flocking to Majorca or the Costa del Sol, eating fish and chips, buying English newspapers and complaining about each other. The attacks, though, peaked when Thomas was making it possible for the mill-hand, the hairdresser’s assistant, the labourer and the jobbing builder to save up and have holidays overseas.

Sophisticated tourists were noting that the highways of the world were becoming somewhat overtrodden. Growing groups of trippers to Italy, Switzerland and Scotland were seen as trespassers, spoiling the very ambience which made these destinations sought after. Many mourned the days when travel was the prerogative of the cultured and wealthy. As the horizons and numbers of British tourists broadened, so did criticism levied at ‘common’ tourists visiting Scotland and the Lake District. The Poet Laureate, William Wordsworth, in 1844, was most displeased about the groups of people delivered by railways to the Lake District. In his sonnet ‘On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway’, he queried,

Is then no nook of English ground secure

From rash assault?

.  .  .  .  .

Given to the pausing traveller’s rapturous glance:

Plead for thy peace, thou beautiful romance . . .
¹

Unmoved by the argument that large numbers of factory workers would be able to escape the horrors of their urban existence with trips to the Lake District, Wordsworth complained of the same intrusion described in his poem ‘Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways’. While George Cruickshank parodied Cockney tourists with good-natured humour in his cartoons, John Ruskin used venom, saying that the Lake District had become a ‘steam merry-go-round’ and that ‘stupid herds of modern tourists’ were dumped at Keswick and the shores of Windermere ‘like coals from a sack’.
²
Later, Henry James deplored the ‘cockneyfication’ of romantic sites’.
³

Thomas reacted to complaints about the rise of the lower-class tourist as if he was the spokesman for the entire class. One article in his
Excursionist
referred to those critics ‘who affect to treat with disdain those who occupy a lower sphere than themselves, and then . . . think that places of rare interest should be excluded from the gaze of the common people, and be kept only for the interest of the “select” of society’.
⁴

Anthony Trollope’s mother, Fanny, the daughter of a provincial clergyman, who lived for many years in Florence and published thirty-two novels and six travel guides between 1832 and 1856, had also made a point of reproving the new tourists. Quoting Laurence Sterne
⁵
to the effect ‘an English man does not travel to see English men’, she censured the middle-class travellers who ‘every year scramble abroad for a few weeks, instead of spending their money at Margate or Brighton’,
⁶
most of whom, she despaired, seemed content to spend their time with their fellow countrymen.
⁷
Dickens too had criticised the middle- and upper-class travellers who went about Europe endlessly and aimlessly, absorbing nothing and ‘worsening each other’.

Writing under the pseudonym of Cornelius O’Dowd in
Blackwood’s Magazine
in February 1865, in an article titled ‘Continental Excursionists’ which was later reprinted in the
Pall Mall Gazette
,
⁸
Charles Lever
⁹
fulminated against Thomas Cook, his tourists and the rise of recreational travel. Eight years earlier, in 1857, Lever, an eminent Anglo-Irish novelist, had gone to live in Florence and had seized the job as British Vice-Consul for La Spezia, a job he managed to carry out by and large from Florence, before he was promoted to be the British Consul in Trieste.

Lever’s job as consul was to protect British visitors, not to abuse them, but he used his literary skills against the burgeoning mass tourist and Thomas, calling him ‘that fussy little bald man whose name assuredly ought to be Barnum!’ (P.T. Barnum ran a circus in America which toured Europe.) He added that Thomas was swamping Europe with ‘everything that is low-bred, vulgar and ridiculous’ and that Thomas’s tourists were a ‘new and growing evil’ and that he had ‘devised the project of conducting some forty or fifty persons, irrespective of age or sex, from London to Naples and back for a fixed sum . . . the cities of Italy deluged with droves of these creatures, for they never separate, and you see them forty in number pouring along a street with their director – now in front, now at the rear, circling round them like a sheepdog – and really the process is as like herding as may be. I have already met three flocks, and anything so uncouth I never saw before, the men, mostly elderly, drear, sad-looking; the women, somewhat younger, travel-tossed, but intensely lively, wide-awake, and facetious . . .’. In a century when even Balzac ate with his knife and blew his nose on his napkin, there was plenty for people like Lever to sneer at.

Then Lever regaled his Italian friends in jest, saying that Thomas was letting loose felons who were really convicts refused by the Australian colonies, ‘and that they were sent to Italy by the English Government under arrangement with Mr. Thomas Cook, who was to drop a few in each Italian city’.
¹⁰
These soon became much-repeated rumours. Thomas lashed out against Lever, saying that a lack of schooling did not necessarily mean that tourists had no insight into either the people or the places they were visiting. Europe was no longer a vast playground for cultured English tourists exploring its architecture and galleries. A counter-attack, reprinted in the
Excursionist
, said, ‘He, a British Consul, to whom in case of difficulty or emergency I may possibly have to appeal for that protection which is my right, deliberately asserts that he has spread among the Italians of his acquaintance a report that I am engaged by the Government of this country to take gangs of convicts abroad, and by leaving three or four at each of the different cities I visit gradually distribute the sweepings of our prison-houses over Europe.’

The slanging match went on. There was a fear among many of tourism overwhelming unspoilt destinations in a similar way to the rising tide of mass production. Lever responded with another article in
Blackwood’s
under the title ‘A Light Business Requiring No Capital’:

the Continental bear-leader, who conducts tribes of unlettered British over the cities of Europe, and amuses the foreigner with more of our national oddities than he would see in a residence of ten years amongst us . . . these Devil’s dust tourists [who] have spread over Europe injuring our credit and damaging our character. Their gross ignorance is the very smallest of their sins. It is their over-bearing insolence, their purse-strong insistence, their absurd pretension to be a place abroad that they have never dreamed of aspiring to at home . . . Foreigners may say, ‘We desire to be able to pray in our churches, to hear in our theatres, to dine in our restaurants, but your people will not permit it.’ They come over, not in twos and threes, but in scores and hundreds, to stare and laugh at us. They deride our church ceremonies, they ridicule our cookery, they criticize our dress, they barbarize our language. How long are we to be patient under these endurances? Take my word for it, if these excursionists go on, nothing short of war, and another Wellington, will ever place us where we once were in the opinion of Europe.

Attacks on the working class to keep them in their place were again being taken up by the English press. Thomas retaliated and stressed that culture should not be confined to the elite; it could be diffused by education and travel. He avoided saying that his travel company, from opening up the narrow world of the poor workers, now also catered for the comfortable middle classes:

Let us ask why Mr. Lever’s susceptibilities should be outraged, and his refinement trampled on, because thirty or forty Englishmen and Englishwomen find it convenient to travel in the same train, to coalesce for mutual benefit, and to sojourn for a like time in the same cities? Reference to a modern compilation shows me that this hypercritical gentleman started upon his career as a student of medicine in Dublin, and that he subsequently took a German degree, and that after practising for a short time he forsook his profession for novel-writing as being at once more profitable and less laborious. Apart, then, from his talent for producing fiction – of which I would speak with all possible respect – Mr. Lever is an Irish gentleman of the precise class to which the English clergymen, physicians, bankers, civil engineers and merchants, who honoured me by accepting my escort to Italy last year, indisputably belong. By what right, then, does he constitute himself their censor? By what right does he assume them incapable of properly enjoying and intelligently appreciating the wonders of nature, and the treasures of art, brought before them by travel? Drawn from the same sphere of society as himself, educated in a like way, and possessing doubtless many tastes and sympathies in common with him, the only social advantage he can claim is the doubtful one of having lived nearly all his life abroad. It is surely a moot point whether the surroundings and moral tone of the curious little colonies of English people scattered up and down the Continent are so vastly superior to those enforced by public opinion at home, as to entitle the self-expatriated Briton to look down upon us with contempt.

Seeing his tours threatened Thomas wrote to the foreign secretary, the Earl of Clarendon, a Whig who had backed the abolition of the Corn Laws. But Clarendon did nothing, saying that his consul was covered by writing under a pseudonym. Next Thomas published a shilling pamphlet which admonished Lever, saying, ‘He would reserve statue and mountain, painting and lake, historical association and natural beauty, for the so-called upper classes, and for such Irish doctors with German degrees as choose to be their toadies and hangers-on. I see no sin in introducing natural and artistic wonders to all . . .’ To ensure maximum coverage Thomas reprinted it in the
Excursionist
in April 1865, but by then he had conflicting emotions. While attracting the middle and upper classes, he remained loyal to the working class. Even though Thomas had a foot in each camp, in the next issue of the
Excursionist
, in May, he wrote about ‘the odious and offensive stench of exclusiveness’.