Thomas Cook (31 page)

Thomas’s happiest years had passed. The happiness he had anticipated had dissolved. In five years, one by one the members of his immediate family fell out of his life, like targets in a shooting gallery, leaving Thomas to spend his last eight years alone. It was as if he had not had any children. John Mason had been the first to step out of his life, then Annie. Next would be his wife Marianne.

It might have been better if Thomas and Marianne had moved out of the house, as there could never be true happiness there again. Marianne fell into the role of invalid, her bouts of physical exhaustion and depression becoming more frequent. She had not settled into the life of retirement well, but now it became much worse. Thomas took her to the old spa and seaside holiday resorts, but she declined further. Thermal baths in Bath were of no avail, nor were sea baths in Bournemouth and Worthing. In February 1883, extra staff had to be employed to augment the coachman and the usual live-in servant. For three months Marianne had to be carried from room to room. As Thomas wrote in one of his innumerable short memoirs, which he entitled
In Memoriam, Brief Notes on the Life, Labours, Sufferings and Death of Mrs Marianne Cook
, her last year was a ‘time of extreme trial’. In June she had recovered enough to be able to ‘occupy a through saloon carriage to Worthing’, returning home in July, and going back again to Worthing in September, again returning the next month, only to pass ‘from Time to Eternity at six o’clock in the morning on the 8th of March’. It had taken three-and-a-half years from Annie’s death before she joined her in her grave.
⁷
Again John Mason was away for the funeral, this time in Egypt with Frank, one of his sons.

Thomas and Marianne had been together for over fifty years but Thomas had been absent much of the time. Whether they spent more nights together or apart, or really cared, is not easy to decipher, but their letters reveal a sunny relationship. She had always been there when he came home, had kept up a steady income from the hotels and had pleased him with her unrelenting thrift. Occasionally, she had accompanied him on trips, as she had to Rome, where she had helped with the Baptist mission.

Thomas’s dotage was sad as, not having lived alone before, he found it difficult. He was often in an armchair beside the coal fire. The long dark candleless nights of his youth returned; reluctantly he caught up with all the sleep missed in those years of back-breaking labour.
⁸
‘It almost nightly happens that in the first part of the night, while I sleep somewhat heavily, I am engaged in my dreams in various matters of work connected with tours and travel, and I make many trips through dreamland which leave an impression upon me in the wakeful hours of the morning . . .’ In vain he tried to forget Annie. Gradually he had to accept that he could no longer read properly. For fifty years Thomas had led a restless, unstructured life, dashing here and there, adapting to meals and beds in different places and times. Now he was nearly blind, alone and enfeebled – difficult for someone used to being centre stage.

Interfering in the firm was out of the question. He would just receive another knuckle-rapping from John, who would remind him how much more profitable Thomas Cook & Son was now that
he
was running it
his
way. Nothing could obliterate the pain of rejection and the boredom of being solitary. There was the housekeeper, but she lived her own life with her own family.

Prayer did not fill the vacuum. Unhindered by his physical impairments and lack of sight, Thomas continued to push himself. Lankester often came to see him and accompanied him to Temperance meetings. A welcome addition to the movement at that time was Rosalind, Lady Carlisle, the formidable wife of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, and close friend of William Morris. She added a similar aristocratic glamour to Temperance as Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, had done for Nonconformity a century and a half earlier. Rosalind used her influence to close down pubs or convert them into Temperance hotels or coffee houses. As president of the British Women’s Temperance Association in 1881, she campaigned widely and founded a Band of Hope at Brampton, a mining area near her, a place with a wretched reputation for drunkenness. In Leicester, Lankester fostered similar activities. He was president of the Leicester Band of Hope, a director of the Leicester Coffee and Cocoa Company, president of the Ragged School and in 1889 mayor of Leicester.

Meanwhile John Mason was becoming a legendary figure. From his head office beside Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, branches were opened in every main town in Egypt. In an article in the
Excursionist
in 1888 it was announced that Egypt had grown to be the mainstay of their worldwide business. The impact of the Cooks on the Egyptian economy was described by one tourist: ‘Those donkeys are subsidized by Cook’s; that little plot of lettuce is being grown for Cook, and so are the fowls; those boats tied up on the bank were built by the Sheikh of the Cataract for the tourist service with money advanced by Cook.’
⁹

In November 1888, John Mason purchased the funicular railway up Mt Vesuvius, which had been opened eight years earlier
¹⁰
to a wave of international press attention and the celebrated song ‘Funiculì-Funiculà’. It brought enormous numbers of customers, but it also brought problems. When the demands of local guides were not met, John Mason found he had a burnt-out station, a cut track and a carriage cast down the abyss.

Before Thomas returned to the Nile in 1888, he wrote to John Mason saying, ‘I do most earnestly desire to go up the Nile as far as Luxor or Aswan. I hope . . . that I may have the pleasure of one trip more, in the course of which I can tell my friends where they land and what they should see, for . . . I feel as if I know everything by heart and memory.’ Accompanied by another staunch Temperance supporter, Miss Lines, who had been with him on his trip to Egypt eighteen years earlier, plus another old-timer, Miss Frewin, who had also gone with him to Palestine during the early years, as well as her sister and his ‘friend and neighbour Mr. Glasgow’, Thomas, at the age of seventy-seven, now made his last trip to Jerusalem. His friends, he said, ‘considering my impaired sight, thought it almost reckless for me to take a long journey into foreign lands’. It was his farewell to his beloved Palestine and Egypt.

Having travelled by train to Venice, the trio then sailed over the Adriatic and Mediterranean to Alexandria, where Thomas was pleased to have ‘a pleasant interview with the Khedive’. They eventually landed in Jaffa on 1 April ready to be present at the twenty-fifth anniversary of Miss Arnott’s Tabeetha Mission School, for which Thomas had done so much. They then proceeded to Jericho, the Jordan, Bethlehem and Jerusalem for two weeks. Even though Thomas’s face was now wrinkled and craggy and his gait slow, all the locals recognised him, rushing up to him with enthusiastic greetings in Arabic.

Then the sad day came when Thomas knew he had to bid goodbye to Jerusalem forever. Often groping his way in the grey darkness of his diminishing sight, he had to step back, but never was an exit more reluctant. With sadness, he left the familiar and spacious area around King David’s Tower close to the Jaffa Gate, near Jerusalem’s ancient walls. No more would he hear the echoing chants of the muezzin calling Muslims to prayer five times a day to the many mosques, nor the clatter of hooves of the donkeys on the steep cobbled paths. His last souvenir was a wooden crate of simple biblical fruit for the children at the Baptist Sunday school in Archdeacon Lane, Leicester, so they could eat ‘figs from the Holy Land’.

From the Mount of Olives, where tourists go to view the entire city, he looked down over the Old City of Jerusalem, but all beyond were blurs and hazy shapes. In his mind, though, he could still see everything; the glistening dome of the Mosque of Omar, the crenellated walls with their twelve gates and the ancient gnarled trees. He would return via the Jaffa Gate, not the closer Eastern Gate, which had remained shut for over 2,000 years. Then the party rode down the steep winding hills to Jaffa. The weather was unusually stormy for April, as Thomas wrote: ‘we had to remain a week in consequence of stormy weather, which prevented our embarkation.’ He then described a young Arab girl, Labeebeh, whom he befriended: ‘The week was profitably spent in many ways, and . . . I made the acquaintance of an interesting Syrian maid, who had been taught and was now a teacher in Miss Arnott’s School. This young lady expressed a strong desire to see England . . .’ Having booked her onto one of the ‘great Orient Steamers’, he then returned to England via Athens, Corfu, Trieste and Venice to Mayence, where his party took a steamer on the Rhine, and landed at Cologne, and then travelled to England via Calais.

Thomas was hardly home before he was off again, on his ‘annual visit to the Highlands’ with different friends. Labeebeh arrived in Edinburgh in early June and would stay by his side for nearly six months. Some people might think that taking a pretty young Syrian girl home was an old man’s dream, but in reality it was the gesture of a Christian, and his longing to bring a little of the Holy Land back to Leicester. Many a traveller before, including Captain Cook, had brought home a ‘sample native’. Labeebeh appears to have been a brief attempt to find a stand-in daughter.

Labeebeh and he went everywhere from Oban, to Iona, to Inverness, to Perth. Before crossing the border they visited Sir Walter Scott’s house, Abbotsford, before returning to Thorncroft. In a circular sent to ‘numerous friends, especially those who were with us in Scotland’, he announced celebrations for his eightieth birthday:

On 12th of November, it is my intention again to take Labeebeh to London, and offer to friends there the opportunity and privilege of meeting her on that day at Parson’s Temperance Hotel, 59, Great Russell Street. Invited friends and guests will take tea together there at six o’clock on the evening of that day. The chief part of the following day will be spent in London, and we then return to Leicester. The remainder of the week will be devoted to a Conversazione at the Memorial Hall, which was built in memory of my departed daughter . . . During the time allotted to refreshments some beautiful specimens of Needlework executed by Labeebeh during her visit to Thorncroft . . . will be shown in the Memorial Room; and there will also be shown specimens of Agricultural Implements used in the East, which have been manufactured by a youth in connection with Miss Arnott’s School. At seven o’clock addresses will be delivered by H. Lankester . . . Suitable hymns will be sung. Wednesday, November 21st will be spent at my home at Thorncroft, and the eve of my 80th birthday will be spent in suitable exercises. On Thursday, November 22nd, I propose, with a few friends who may choose to accompany me, to go with Labeebeh to Liverpool, and see her embark there for Jaffa on board the S.S.
Britannia
, which is advertised to sail on the 23rd inst.

Activities filling Thomas’s months and days for the next two years are not recorded – his diaries have disappeared. But much time was spent doing what he could to help the Baptist Union and spreading ‘the word’. He also had the satisfaction of seeing the youngest of his three grandsons educated at Mill Hill school in London, but sadly he did not spend time with them or his two granddaughters.

The year 1891 was marked by three remarkable achievements. First, in July the Golden Jubilee
¹¹
was celebrated to mark the fiftieth year of Thomas Cook & Son; secondly, over sixty years after he had left Melbourne, Thomas unveiled the memorial cottages there, bringing his life full circle; and, thirdly, his
Cook’s Tourist Handbook for Palestine and Syria
was published, with its references to biblical sites and their scriptural references, designed to be read on horseback or by a flickering lamp in a tent.
¹²

Thomas was not one of the 300 guests in London at the lavish celebrations at the Hotel Metropole for the Jubilee banquet. Excuses were given. Presiding over the long table and its silver table centre, with the loftiness of an aristocrat, John Mason gave a speech in which he told of Thomas’s frailty. This, though, was dramatised and inaccurate. His remark that Thomas had not recognised John Mason’s voice implied that Thomas may have also been suffering from failing mental powers, but this was not the case. Thomas travelled frequently to Melbourne and wrote or dictated an admirable series of circulars and reminiscences.

Then, as always, the problem was that John Mason, a man who always liked being in full control, never liked sharing the limelight with anyone, let alone his father. In one of the speeches he boasted how his personal management had been the turning point in the firm’s fortunes: ‘In 1865 the whole personnel of the business consisted of Thomas Cook, myself, two assistants and one messenger . . . In 1880 we had a staff of 1,714 permanent salaried members. In addition it required 978 persons, chiefly Arabs, to work our business in Egypt and Palestine . . . we have 45 distinct banking accounts; and either as our own property or under rental or lease we have 84 offices worked by salaried staff of the firm, and in addition 85 agencies.’

An extract from a letter from Gladstone was also read out aloud. Having given excuses for being unable to attend he wrote: ‘I do not regard your festival as a mere celebration of commercial success . . . I conceive that the idea which your house was, I believe, the first to conceive and patiently to work out, has distinctly placed you in the rank of public benefactors; and the competitors who have sprung or may yet spring up around you are so many additional witnesses to the real greatness of the service you have rendered . . .’

Regardless of his diminishing sight and physical infirmities, Thomas’s last autumn was happy. Although the rift with his son was still there, the bitterness lessened. The return of the old injury from childhood to his leg caused possible gangrene and much pain, so that he was seldom able to take long walks, but he managed to get around. Gladstone was setting a remarkable example of being sprightly at a year younger than Thomas. He looked as if he would be celebrating his eightieth birthday at 10 Downing Street, as once again the whole country was split over Ireland.