Thomas Cook (29 page)

The Egyptian finances became so tangled with those of the British and French that the revenue of the company was put under the management of Europeans. From then onwards the European shareholders, or ‘bondholders’, of the canal controlled Egypt. Half of Egypt’s revenue paid the public debt. Captain Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer) was sent to Cairo as British Commissioner of the Debt and the ambivalent British occupation of Egypt increased – as did the wave of Muslim anger towards foreign occupation. Thomas now had to keep on the right side of British officialdom, Turkish officialdom, Egyptian officialdom and Syrian officialdom. Egypt was still part of the Ottoman Empire, but was also, at the same time, a showpiece of British imperialism.

The year 1876 was a time of renewed links with the past for Thomas. When he visited Melbourne on the fiftieth anniversary of his baptism, his old friend John Earp presented him with a Bible on behalf of the church, and the minister gave him a certificate commemorating his Golden Jubilee. At the same time, Thomas knew that the trouble in the Middle East would seriously threaten his Near Eastern tours. He had to balance personal beliefs and religion. Gladstone was vociferously criticising the Turks and there were demonstrations throughout Britain. Russo-phobia swept across Britain with large crowds gathering in Trafalgar Square waving the Ottoman crescent-and-star flag while singing:

We don’t want to fight,

But by jingo if we do . . .

The Russians shall not have Constantinople!

Balancing between being a client of the Ottoman Empire and safeguarding his investments in Egypt, Syria and Palestine meant he again had to compromise when they were caught up in a war that a large number of people, including Gladstone, in Britain did not support. Thomas behaved as if there was no conflict and just wrote when referring to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8 that ‘despite the “Eastern Difficulty” bookings have been higher than ever to Egypt and Palestine’.

Gladstone brought out a popular pamphlet denouncing the massacre by the Turks of thousands of Bulgarians following the outbreak of a widespread revolt in Bulgaria, which was then, like Palestine and Egypt, still part of the Ottoman Empire. Reports of the numbers of deaths ranged from 10,000 to 25,000. Religious passions were inflamed – over 40,000 copies of the pamphlet sold in a week, mounting to 200,000 copies by the end of the month. Russia threatened to invade Turkey (and finally did so) to protect the oppressed Balkan Christians. In England, the ‘atrocitarians’, who believed the worst of the Turks, were backed by the ‘jingoists’, who said that the Russians were using Bulgarian discontent as an excuse to fulfil their designs on Constantinople and ambitions to gain control of the Dardanelles and the Mediterranean. Gladstone whipped up a frenzy of anti-Turkish, pro-Russian sentiment.

William Morris, the artist and designer, disturbed by reports, became treasurer of the Eastern Question Association, a post he held for seven years when he joined the Socialist Party. His fervour was typical of the many thousands of Englishmen who joined together against the efforts of ‘Greedy gamblers on the stock exchange, idle officers . . . and . . . the Tory Rump’ to drag Britain into war with Russia. The war lasted longer than Russia expected – until June 1878 – when Turkey agreed to the San Stefano agreement, which proposed an enlarged Bulgaria. Seeing this as a Russian puppet state, Disraeli immediately sent the British fleet to the Dardanelles, which provoked the conference in Berlin. Disraeli, insisting that British policy must be based on British national interests, had kept Britain out of the war, but at the Congress of Berlin he gained almost as much as if Britain had taken part, and deprived Russia of the crucial gains from its victory over Turkey.
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Thomas’s ambivalence to this war and other situations was defended by Edmund Swinglehurst, archivist and a former public relations official at Thomas Cook & Son, and author of two books on Thomas Cook and his company. ‘It would be easy to accuse Cook of opportunism, and of looking the other way when his principles threatened his profits, but this would be unfair. Idealist and philanthropist though he was, he was a practical man who saw the world in a broader perspective than does a zealot. He wanted to change it but within the terms of what was possible, an attitude that helped him to build up his travel business without those head-on confrontations that sometimes spell disaster in enterprises.’
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In early 1879, six weeks after Thomas’s seventieth birthday, John Mason Cook took over the business completely. It was a year of sadness for Thomas, who, now virtually pushed out of the firm, wrote:

. . . a Deed of Partnership was adopted . . . and in the following month a new deed was agreed upon, under which, by mutual consent, the son agreed to take the management of the business founded by his father, thirty-eight years previously, and the latter was to be at liberty to travel or not at his pleasure, still retaining his proper interest in the business of Thomas Cook & Son, under which title all is now concentrated, our American Partnership of six years having been terminated at the close of the season of 1878, since which time our own Agency has been conducted by our appointed Manager in New York, with subordinate Agencies in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington.

The bitterness fills too many letters to recite but they all point to the fact that John Mason was right in predicting that he and his father would come to blows. If John Mason had not returned to the firm, though, it is unlikely that it would have survived.

In 1878 Thomas had written about his half-brother Simeon ‘dying suddenly while on a lecturing tour on temperance, at Bridlington in February 1878, while I was staying with my wife, daughter and friends, at Sorrento’. As his other half-brother, James, had also died at the age of sixty, five years earlier, Thomas was now the only survivor of the Cook–Smithard family – and with John Mason out of Thomas’s life, Annie now had almost too much attention focused on her.

The confrontations between the British and the Egyptians intensified after the war between Turkey and Russia. Even though the Khedive refused to abdicate, his eldest son, Tewfik, would eventually replace him. Egypt’s huge debts to foreign investors continued to be unpaid. In 1880, coinciding with the tenth anniversary of Thomas’s tours in Egypt, the Law of Liquidation was passed by five European powers which aimed at ensuring that they were repaid by virtually taking over some of the Egyptian organisations. The growing loathing of the increased British interference – the result of Gladstone being returned for his second term in office, plus a hatred of many of the European officials – turned into a full-scale rebellion. Arabi Pasha, the nationalist hero, demanded a new ministry and overawed the Khedive.

Arabi Pasha’s most vocal British campaigners were Wilfred Blunt and his wife, Lady Anne, Lord Byron’s granddaughter. They had both learnt Arabic before riding through the wildest parts of the Mesopotamian and Arabian deserts, and their Egyptian home at Sheykh Obeyd, the Arabian horse stud near Cairo, was then nearly as famous as the Pyramids.

In 1882, Thomas Cook & Son had temporarily to suspend trips to Egypt as a result of the tensions, and a massacre of between 40 and 300 Europeans in Alexandria. Arabi Pasha strengthened the fortifications, but the city was plundered and partly set on fire. On 1 February John Mason and his son Frank, who was now twenty, arrived in Egypt. They were hardly in Cairo before a request from the consul, Noel Temple Moore, came to make arrangements for Prince Albert Victor and Prince George, the two eldest sons of the Prince of Wales, to travel through Syria and Palestine. The Prince of Wales (who obviously felt no bitterness towards the Cooks from the encounter on the Nile with William Howard Russell thirteen years earlier) was keen for his sons to have a trip to Jerusalem, as he had had in his youth. Frank Cook, who had only recently left Mill Hill – the first member of the family to attend an English public school – conducted the royal brothers.

The princes arrived at Suez on the
Bacchante
on 1 March 1882, and M. de Lesseps, who was waiting to welcome them, had kept the Canal clear for the vessel, just as he had done for the
Osborne
on a former occasion. Two days later the princes landed at Ismailia and from that time until they returned to the
Bacchante
at Alexandria they were the guests of the Khedive. They climbed the Pyramids, where, at the top, they found the initials ‘A.E.’ on the south-west corner, carved there in 1868. The princes put their initials next to those of their father.

Looking at ancient Egypt, so closely associated with the Old Testament, prepared them for their more intensive trip in Palestine which would last till 6 May. Years afterwards, when presiding at a lecture in connection with the Palestine Exploration Fund, Prince George said that he recalled with pleasure the year 1882, when he had travelled ‘through the whole of Palestine . . . across the country east of the Jordan’. Queen Victoria had expressed a wish to the Sultan through the Foreign Office that access to all the historical landmarks which had been granted to their father in 1862 should also be given to his sons, including admission to the mosques and the Cave of Hebron.

At Jericho, the news reached the princes of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s death, at the very scene of his poem about Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, who had said to Jesus, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.’ Before leaving Turkish territory, the princes sent a telegram of thanks to the Sultan and in their journal added, ‘We have most thoroughly enjoyed our life in tents and riding, and are as hearty and hard, and strong as possible.’ The
Excursionist
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discreetly, in a slightly self-congratulatory tone, reported the royal visit:

Our arrangements were carried out under the personal superintendence of Dr. F.H. Cook, who has travelled over every route in the Desert, Palestine, and Syria (including Moab as far east as Meshita) likely to be traversed by travellers, and who had the honour, of spending 40 days with the Royal party, and had also the honour, through the special firman granted by the Sultan for the Royal party, to enter the Mosque at Hebron (see Palestine Exploration Society’s Report for October), a favour which has only once before been granted to Christians, viz., on the occasion of the visit of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales in 1862. The testimonials we have received of the satisfactory manner in which the arrangements were carried out are specially gratifying, as they prove that Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul was justified in intrusting such important arrangements to us.

The princes had hardly sailed away before trouble erupted into war. On 11 July the British bombarded Alexandria. Because of disturbances in France, no French troops or ships were sent, but soon British troops arrived from India and England and started crossing the Sinai Desert. They attacked Tel-el-Kebir on 13 September 1882 and quickly defeated the Egyptians, and then moved on to take Cairo. The British were now masters of all Egypt, with the Khedive Tewfik returned to power as their puppet. A semblance of order was restored, with Britain insisting that its administration was ‘only temporary, to secure stability’, and that it would work with the Sultan. The Sultan relied on Britain for protection against the Russian bulwark, so he was unable to object.

Even though Sir Garnet Wolseley described Tel-el-Kebir as ‘the tidiest little war ever fought by the British army’, casualties were relatively high. John Mason took many of these wounded soldiers to Alexandria at cost price,
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and such a large number of the other soldiers on pleasure trips down the Nile that he was given a ‘grand banquet by Sir Garnet Wolseley at the Abdin Palace on the 13th October’.
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Tourism regained its impetus only to confront another setback. In the summer of 1883 a severe outbreak in Egypt of cholera killed at least 150,000 people. Everything seemed to settle down again, but there was yet another threat of war. British tourists, though, were fearless and refused to stay away. During all these troubles Thomas Cook & Son could boast that their tourists had travelled unscathed.

In 1884 Gladstone’s government suddenly asked the firm of Thomas Cook & Son to organise emergency transport for 80,000 British soldiers down the Nile to relieve Major General Gordon in Khartoum, capital of the Sudan.
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Gordon, described as ‘a Bible-taught Evangelical, fearless, tireless, incorruptible; following the call of duty through fields of desperate adventure’,
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had become a celebrity. Public alarm in London for his safety had reached a climax at the beginning of May. Even though he was in imminent danger of death by the Mahdi, Gladstone’s government had so far taken no steps to send a relief force. Vocal protest groups, marching with placards, held a mass meeting in Hyde Park on 9 May, followed by an equally large gathering in Manchester a few days later.

Gordon was no stranger to Cook’s, which had earlier transported him to Khartoum. Their paths had also crossed in the Holy Land earlier when Gordon was looking for the authentic site of the Crucifixion while finishing maps for the Palestine Exploration Fund. He rejected many Roman Catholic religious sites, saying they were erroneous.

Again Gordon was confronting a religious group, as the Mahdi, declaring himself the new messiah, had raised the standard of revolt against what he called the brutal and incompetent Egyptian rule. The headwater of the Nile, the lifeblood of Egypt, and the region around it were now in the hands of fanatical tribes under a religious zealot who might at any moment take it into his head to invade Upper Egypt and raise the banner of the Prophet among the fellahin.
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The rescue plan was unique. Never before had a private company transported the British army on such an expedition. It is often said that the British army engaged Thomas Cook & Son because of their reputation of getting people out of difficult situations. Actually, there was no choice. As John Mason wrote in the
Excursionist
in 1885, Thomas Cook & Son had a monopoly in the passenger traffic on the Nile, so the government had either to give the job to them or to buy them out.