Thomas Cook (3 page)

Nine months after the wedding, on 22 November 1808, Thomas, the only child of the marriage, was born with a sturdy body and short legs that would remain spindly all his life. The birth was noted in the blank leaf between the Old and New Testament in the old family Bible which Elizabeth, as the eldest child, had inherited. Due to her lack of schooling, the words were penned in the neat hand of a stranger: ‘On the 22nd day of November, 1808, at five o’clock in the morning, Thomas Cook was born in Melbourne.’ As if to give symmetry to the pattern in his life, his birth coincided with the exhibition in London of the first steam locomotive and open carriage on rails by Richard Trevithick, the Cornish mining engineer, inventor of the steam engine.
⁷
Thomas’s birth also coincided with another in Paris, that of Louis Napoleon (who would become Napoleon III), the son of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother, Louis, and Josephine’s daughter, Hortense. The activities of Louis Napoleon would impact on Thomas’s life, as would those of William Gladstone, who was born the following year, and of Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was born the year before Thomas.

War formed a backdrop to Thomas’s childhood. With the exception of the period of the Peace of Amiens in 1803, the British had been waging war against the French since 1793.
⁸
Thomas’s birth was at the height of Britain’s long era of war, in the year that Wellington’s soldiers began their fight against Napoleon Bonaparte’s
Grande Armée
in the Peninsular War in Spain, the year that Napoleon – branded in English villages as ‘Boney’ the ogre – had reached his zenith.

The war brought an exotic touch to daily life in remote and inaccessible Melbourne. A proportion of the 122,000 French prisoners of war
⁹
were interned in the neighbouring town of Ashbyde-la-Zouch. With them came the sound of foreign tongues, the exoticism of the Continent and the constant reminder of the threat of invasion, something which had not been felt in England since the Spanish Armada. When Thomas was born, about 460,000 men had enrolled as volunteers in the home militia, including the volunteer infantry first raised in Derbyshire during 1803. As in the rest of Britain, each able-bodied man was trained in his spare time ready to defend hearth, home and country if invaded. In Melbourne, while there had been much improvisation with weapons, the brass band was so well equipped that there could have been rivalry about who was to beat the drum.
¹⁰
At the slightest excuse it struck up a tune, creating such an impression on young Thomas that he later used bands to give gaiety and style to his early tours.

In 1812, when Thomas was just three years old, a calamity with far-reaching repercussions altered the rural calm of the Cook family. John Cook died. There was little sign of God’s Grace and no pennies or pounds for a gravestone. But despite few chapels being permitted to have their own burial grounds he was buried behind the Baptist chapel. The days after Thomas’s father’s death were crammed with people with red eyes, tears and the imagery of hell and the demonic.
¹¹
Death was seen as the transition to a new life in Heaven, but the mourning period was long, gloomy, dark and anxious. There was scarcely money for food or rent.

That summer saw the preparations for the big ‘waltzing ball’ at Melbourne Hall. With its wild woods and deer parks, summer balls and winter shooting parties, it was a house where people came and went but seldom stayed for long – another world, one physically near by, seen every day, but closed to the villagers. Lady Melbourne was a formidable political hostess, so the house was animated by annual events in the Summer Season. Villagers were curious to know if her erratic daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline Lamb, who had been the celebrated mistress of Lord Byron, was at the house party.

Then things changed. Just after the harvest, banns were again displayed and read in Melbourne church. Black clothes were discarded, along with the grim mourning that weighed so heavily in the household. The curtains were opened and light was allowed into the downstairs room; the mood lifted from lamentations to celebrations. A new man, James Smithard, was to take the place of John Cook in the life of Elizabeth. This husband-to-be is listed in the church register as having previously married someone called Ann Hollingsworth in March 1802. Now, in September 1812, the bells of St Michael’s pealed over and over again as Elizabeth’s relations sat in the pews and benches to watch her stand beside the pulpit and again utter the words ‘with my body I thee worship’. Friends who were reluctant to take part in
any
Anglican service yet again waited outside.

Afterwards, Elizabeth walked up the hill with her new husband. Smithard came to live in Elizabeth’s crammed labourer’s abode. Sleeping in the room where his wife’s former husband had died only months earlier could not have been a romantic start to marriage. Barely nine months had passed before a half-brother, James, arrived. Another five years were to pass before the cradle was pulled out again, for Simeon in 1818, but Thomas remained his mother’s favourite. Many stepfathers would have looked on a lively three-year-old as an intruder, but Smithard was a kind man. He later used some of his wages to pay school fees for Thomas, who was showing much promise. Perhaps, like his grandfather, after whom he had been named, Thomas might become a Baptist pastor. A few streets away from home, the school room was dominated by the squeak of white chalk on a large blackboard, the creaking hinges of desk lids, the choruses of boys chanting tables parrot-fashion and the stifled yawns of those taking dictation or copying out long lists of difficult-to-spell words. The rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic were inculcated by three men of stern integrity and religious character – T. Pickering, John Smith and Joseph Tagg. Punishments ranged from standing in the corner to the cane. Good penmanship was essential and pages of fine, slanted writing were copied. Anyone could start a school, and many fell by the wayside, but sixteen years after Thomas had put down his slate Tagg’s school was still listed.

At school Thomas showed little aptitude for intellectual pursuits, but his urge to learn and teach went deep, and pamphlets and books to help further his grounding in English were borrowed. The education of those fortunate enough to have any schooling was basic and hardly went beyond the three R’s plus religious instruction. In many schools like Thomas’s, the primer was the Bible. Teachers, avoiding the cost of extra books, could be confident that it would be the one book in the homes of most pupils. School began and ended with the reading of the Bible, often the Old Testament.

This narrow education, lacking any intellectual aspirations, could have been a handicap, but for Thomas the emphasis on the Bible was an advantage. Nobody could match him on either the Old or the New Testament. This would be of much use to him half a century later when taking tourists around the Holy Land. On the other hand, the travel articles he wrote in his own newspapers, most of which have a freshness and the indefinable air of the amateur, have sometimes been criticised as falling into ‘the unctuous style of the sermon’,
¹²
as his style was influenced by his Bible readings.

In the cloth-producing towns of England, such as Melbourne, tallow candles, lanterns lit by whale oil to read by, books, tin soldiers, paintboxes and most toys, apart from rag dolls, marbles and skipping ropes, were luxuries for most children. Bunyan’s works were acceptable but novels were still frowned upon. The one book in most homes was the Bible or a cheap reprint with quaint woodcuts of John Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress
, a book which added a dimension to both travelling and pilgrimages. Bunyan’s prose, especially about the divided self, good and evil, love and hate, Heaven and Hell, had been kept alive in cottages and chapels. He was claimed as a former Baptist. His allegory was written during his six-months’ solitude in a ‘dark, dreary, dungeon’, when he had been imprisoned yet again after English bishops were ordered to penalise anyone failing to come to Communion at their parish church. Thousands had been arrested.

During Thomas’s second year at school, before the long summer holidays and harvest, the fateful battle of Waterloo was fought between Napoleon and Wellington, the ‘Iron Duke’ in Belgium during the weekend of 15–18 June. For a few hours Britain stood still to rejoice in a victory which had taken roughly twenty-five years. Up and down the country, guns thundered and bonfires were lit. Horrific stories of 50,000 human corpses, almost stripped bare on the battlefield, were imprinted on Thomas.

The expected upturn in England’s fortunes following Waterloo did not materialise as foreign markets failed to buy sufficient British goods. There was fear of the Poor House, the Debtors’ Prison or bankruptcy as the country plunged into depression. On top of this, 400,000 demobilised soldiers looking for work swamped the job market. A series of thin harvests led to bread riots and hunger for millions, while unemployment and inflation worsened the poverty among the ragged and hungry poor and food, shelter, blankets, clothes and a few shillings became a priority.

On 28 January 1817, before the Prince Regent opened parliament, reformers presented petitions with half a million signatures. Safely inside the House of Commons the Prince condemned ‘those exciting a spirit of sedition and violence’, but outside the crowd waited. Thousands hissed and booed as he drove up the Mall, stones flew and two bullets shattered the windows of his carriage. Committees found evidence of revolutionary movements in London and in the factory slums of Lancashire, Leicestershire, Derby, Nottingham and Glasgow. Unrest was aggravated by growing numbers of jobless men, pitiful wages, long hours, appalling conditions, child labour and near starvation. Repeated riots and demonstrations upset life in both agricultural and industrial districts. A month after this attempt on the Prince Regent’s life, a nervous government suspended
habeas corpus
so that any person under suspicion could be thrown into prison without trial. Further restrictive acts, including the prohibition of seditious meetings, were passed. Times were dangerous and hard, but churches and chapels thrived and multiplied as they have never done before or since. As religion, in all its many aspects, was embedded in the life of nineteenth-century England and permeated many aspects, including politics, and was the mainstay of Thomas’s life, a separate chapter is devoted to the background of his Baptist religion.

A
n
e
at the end of Melbourne was still optional, and in
Pigot’s Commercial Directory of Derbyshire
it was still minus the
e
. Just as Melbourne was then spelt in two different ways, there were two main communities in the area, the Anglicans and the Nonconformists. No building in Melbourne competed with the church of St Michael, which, with its tall cliff-like walls, was so large that it had the air of being a small cathedral. After its completion in about 1120, St Michael’s was used as a royal chapel by Henry I, then given by him to the Bishopric of Carlisle. It became a refuge for bishops when fleeing border incursions. For 700 years St Michael’s had been the focus of the area. Now, though, it was no longer a symbol of unity in Melbourne. The Evangelical revival, with its new and reinvigorated Anglicanism, had conversely encouraged more villagers to attend the Nonconformist chapels. Each Sunday there were fewer villagers sitting in front of the fearsome old church columns with its capitals of a grinning cat, snarling dog and an ostrich.

Elizabeth’s father, Thomas Perkins from Hinckley, in Leicestershire, had been a ‘hell-fire’ preacher, a man of boiling enthusiasms who electrified his congregation. With fire and brimstone sermons and talk of the Devil, he filled the hastily built chapel. Thomas Budge, a former Melbourne Baptist minister, described Perkins as a man who, ‘in tones of thunder, hurled verses and paragraphs of the sacred writings like huge boulders to crush down all opponents’. Perkins was converted in the Leicestershire village of Barton-in-the-Beans by the ‘Barton Preachers’ – Evangelical revivalists, a splinter group started by a steward to Selina, Countess of Huntingdon. Selina, one of John Wesley’s active supporters, had sold jewels to build sixty-four chapels and a training college for chaplains for her own Connexion, a sect of the Calvinist Methodists, distinct from Wesley’s followers.
¹
Perkins moved to Melbourne to ‘spread the word’ in 1760, the year that George III came to the throne. Ten years later he
walked
180 miles to a meeting in Whitechapel, London, which resulted in the breakaway New Connexion of General Baptists.

This new branch of the Baptists, with their rousing meetings and loud, tuneful hymns, which injected a new vitality and self-reliance into everyday religion, was a result of the Evangelist Revival. Most of the Evangelicals, bar those who were Methodists, remained members of the Church of England, but the vibrancy and colour they brought into services also revitalised English Nonconformity. Perkins returned to Melbourne to become a co-preacher, a post which he kept for twenty-five years. Budge’s history reveals a turn to his career. In about 1785, ‘when somewhat advanced in life, he contracted a marriage which was thought . . . to be an imprudent one, and which led to his retirement from the ministry’. Then in 1792 he fell down a staircase and died. The cause of the accident was never recorded, but, as with many such falls, it could have been an excess of drink. Elizabeth, the eldest of three sisters, was six or seven years old when his coffin was dug into the chapel yard. By then the Baptist church had been established for 180 years. It had started in 1607 when John Smyth, a Cambridge scholar and ordained minister of the Church of England, had defected and fled to Holland where an increasing number of Dissenters were finding refuge from persecution. Known as the first Baptist, he defined the tenets of the new faith while in Holland, which had become a haven to thousands of those Protestants not conforming with the Thirty-Nine Articles introduced in 1571. Among those refusing to go along with the compromised Protestant religion in England was Thomas Helwys, a country landowner from Nottingham. While studying with the pious congregation of exiles in Amsterdam, Smyth and Helwys took up the concept of ‘Believer’s Baptism’ instead of the christening of infants after birth. They took much from the Anabaptists, a spiritual movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries based in Holland, which revolted against church hierarchy and found infant baptism unscriptural.