Thomas Cook (36 page)

In coming over the Pacific I had a report of a most interesting lecture on the great changes in Japan, delivered in Dr. Landell’s chapel, Regent’s Park. I lent the report to an intelligent attendant on the Prince, and he kept it till the very last hour before landing, and, in thanking me for the loan of it, said how interested the party had been. The Prince and his party sat to hear one of Dr. Ward’s lectures on India and Indian Missions.

We are really all delighted with Japan, and 12,000 miles from London, surrounded with endless foreign objects of interest, has in it so much of home life that it is almost like being at home. Permit me, in conclusion, to acknowledge the great kindness of one well known in military, naval, and diplomatic circles, Mr. W. H. Smith, manager of the Yokohama Club, who has been my ‘guide, philosopher, and friend’ in our pursuits of pleasure in Japan.

To-morrow we embark for Shanghai, going through the inland sea of Japan, which is said to combine all the beauties of all the English and Scotch lakes. Then we go to Hongkong, Canton, and other Chinese cities, after which our programme includes Singapore, Penang, Galle, and parts of Ceylon, Calcutta, and a run over 2,000 miles of Indian railways to Benares, Agra, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Delhi, and thence to Bombay, where we embark for Egypt, the Nile and Palestine, from some of which places I may again trouble you.

1.
Robert Ingle’s excellent
Thomas Cook of Leicester
(Bangor, Headstart History, 1991) is only 67 pages long (hereafter referred to as Ingle). Piers Brendon’s
Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism
(London, Secker & Warburg, 1991) (hereafter referred to as Brendon), published on the 150th anniversary of the firm, gives a detailed account of Cook, his son John, and the progress of the firm. Edmund Swinglehurst’s illustrated
The Romantic Journey: The Story of Thomas Cook and Victorian Travel
(London, Pica Editions, 1974) (hereafter referred to as Swinglehurst) gives detail about the firm right into the twentieth century, with emphasis on the places they visited. John Pudney’s
The Thomas Cook Story
(London, Michael Joseph, 1953) (hereafter referred to as Pudney) again tells the extraordinary story of the man
and
the firm.

2.
Albert Bishop’s notes of memories of Thomas Cook sent to Thomas Budge in 1952.

3.
Brendon quotes J.C. Parkinson’s article in ‘Tripping It Lightly’,
Temple Bar
, 12 August 1864.

4.
Owen Chadwick,
The Victorian Church
(London, Adam & Charles Black, 1971).

5.
Max Weber’s treatise
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(German edn 1904–5, English trans. Talcott Parsons, New York, Allen & Unwin, 1930) describes the relationship between religion and economic forces – that the doctrines of Calvinism resulted in socio-psychological responses that pushed forward ‘the Protestant work ethic’. It would be appropriate if it was known as the ‘the Nonconformist work ethic’.

6.
Peter T. Marsh,
Joseph Chamberlain, Entrepreneur in Politics
(New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994).

1.
G.E. Mingay,
Rural Life in Victorian England
(London, Futura, 1977).

2.
The Oxford Companion to British History
, ed. John Cannon (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997), states that more than 4,000 enclosure acts were passed through parliament in those 80 years, affecting roughly 21 per cent of the land area of Britain. The process continued throughout the nineteenth century.

3.
John Cook was born in 1785.

4.
The Marriage Act of 1753.

5.
Derek Beales,
From Castlereagh to Gladstone
(New York, Nelson, 1969).

6.
Thomas Cook, in
Birthday Reminiscences
, said that his mother ‘lived to the age of 64 and died in 1854’, so she would have been born in 1789 or 1790. Pudney contradicts: she ‘could not have been more than five or six years old’ at the time of her father’s death in 1792, implying that she was born between 1785 and 1787.

7.
Dictionary of National Biography
, quoted by Brendon.

8.
France declared war on England on 1 February 1793.

9.
According to the historian and soldier Sir Archibald Alison, the French Government never sent any money to maintain these prisoners, leaving them ‘to starve or be a burden on the British Government, which, on the contrary, regularly remitted the whole cost of the support of the English captives in France to the imperial authorities’. At least 10,000 French out of the whole 122,000 died. Between April 1814 and the end of August 1814, about 67,000 of the French prisoners crossed the Channel back to France.

10.
The south coast was dotted with seventy-four circular Martello towers, each with walls 9 feet deep, armed with swivel guns and howitzers.

11.
Charles Dickens’s description of a death in
Dombey and Son
(London, Bradbury & Evans, 1858).

12.
Brendon.

1.
There is now a Baptist chapel on the site.

2.
The Baptists split in 1633 when a number of members withdrew and formed the Particular or Strict Baptists. The remainder became known as General Baptists.

3.
The Roman Catholic Church did not encourage people to read the Bible themselves until 1944 and then not fully until Vatican II in the 1960s.

4.
One drawback was that if one monitor taught incorrectly, so did their ‘students’ who in turn became teachers. Errors snowballed.

5.
Carl Stephenson and Frederick George Marcham,
Sources of English Constitutional History
(New York & London, Harper & Brothers, 1937).

6.
The Congregationalist Union of England and Wales was established later, in 1831, although they date back to a sect called the Brownists (also known as Independents) who began in 1580.

7.
An earlier group, the Independents, later boasted Cromwell as a member, but they were absorbed by the Congregationalists, and in a similar way many Presbyterians became Unitarians.

8.
Howard Brinton,
Friends of 300 Years: Beliefs and Practice of the Society of Friends since George Fox Started the Quaker Movement
(London, George Allen & Unwin, 1953).

9.
Chadwick,
The Victorian Church
.

10.
William also laid the foundation for the Bank of England and Lloyd’s Insurance.

11.
This reform was necessary because the new king was a Calvinist from Holland.

12.
Lord Macaulay,
The History of England from the Accession of James the Second
, 6 vols (London, Longman, 1849–51
[1913–15]
). Unitarians and Quakers were excluded as they did not accept thirty-four of the Thirty-Nine Articles which had been in force since 1571.

13.
England became a ‘confessional state’; those who wanted any office, civil or military jobs had to take the oaths of allegiance to the established church.

14.
W.J. Reader,
Victorian England
(London, Batsford, 1964).

15.
Benjamin Disraeli,
Sybil, or the Two Nations
(London, Henry Coburn, 1845, repr. 1925).

16.
G.M. Trevelyan,
Illustrated English Social History
(London, Penguin, 1964).

17.
R.H. Tawney,
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
(London, Pelican Books, 1938).

18.
Reports of the Leicester Domestic Mission in Leicester City Reference Library, quoted in Jack Simmons,
Leicester Past and Present
(London, Eyre Methuen, 1974), vol. 1:
Ancient Borough to 1860
.

19.
Ibid
.

20.
Richard William Church, Dean of St Paul’s,
The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years, 1833–45
(London, Macmillan, 1891).

21.
In
Clergymen of the Church of England
, Anthony Trollope argued the need for church reform and the urgency to balance the lopsided pay structure of ridiculously low pay for curates and the disproportionate incomes for higher positions. Bishops, the clergy and his critical ideas on the Church as an institution again became the theme of his six-novel Barsetshire series, which was seen as a piece of satire.

1.
The most famous are in Derby, Stoke-on-Trent and Belper – with such brands as Royal Crown Derby, Spode, Royal Doulton, Denby and Wedgwood.

2.
Cook,
Birthday Reminiscences
(privately printed pamphlet, Thomas Cook Archives, 1890).

3.
In the decade between the 1821 and 1831 censuses, Melbourne’s population, despite the increasing birth rate, only rose from 2,027 inhabitants to 2,301.

4.
For a while these immigrants voluntarily came to Australia, travelling free in sailing ships chartered by the Colonial Office.

5.
Temperance Mirror
, 1889, quoted by Pudney.

6.
J.J. Briggs,
The History of Melbourne, in the County of Derby
(Derby, Bemrose & Son; London, Whittaker & Co., 1852).

7.
BBC script of
Great Britons: Thomas Cook and His Son
, produced by Harry Hastings in 1978. The others who were proposed were James Baker, Adele Taylor and Hannah Shore – from the Minute Book of Melbourne Baptist chapel, 1825.

8.
Ingle.

9.
There is no evidence that Cook was indentured as an apprentice, but his printing is not the work of an amateur.

1.
Ingle’s papers.

2.
The first chapel, the chapel in which Cook was baptised, was built in 1750, and some of the original masonry is still visible in a side wall. In 1832 rebuilding and enlargement, with galleries, took place; the extension for the choir and the organ loft was added in 1856.

3.
Winks converted to Baptism when working as a draper’s apprentice at Retford. He returned to Gainsborough as a draper’s assistant and preacher, and his first appointment was at Killingholme and then Melbourne.

4.
General Baptist Magazine
(1876), quoted by Brendon.

1.
Wellington was prime minister for just three years.

2.
In May 1778 a bill repealing some of the harsher laws against Roman Catholics had been introduced, and in 1780 there was protest against legislation giving relief to them (Andrew Barrow,
The Flesh Is Weak
(London, Hamish Hamilton, 1980)).

3.
Chadwick,
The Victorian Church
.

4.
Thomas J. Budge,
Melbourne Baptists
(London, Carey Kingsgate Press, 1951).

5.
Ibid
.

6.
Ibid
.

7.
Swinglehurst.

8.
Thomas Cook Archives.

9.
Harry Blamires,
The Victorian Age of Literature
, York Handbook (Harlow, Longman Press, 1988).

10.
R.W. Harris,
Romanticism and the Social Order, 1780–1830
(London, Blandford Press, 1969).

11.
White’s
Directory of Lancashire
(1846), quoted by Derek Seaton in
The Local Legacy of Thomas Cook
(Botcheston, Leics, self-published, 1996).

12.
Quote by Albert Bishop from a letter to Budge.

13.
Richard Heath,
Thomas Cook of Melbourne, 1808–1892
(privately published in Melbourne, 1980).

1.
Pudney – the
Daily Reporter
‘of the eighteen-seventies’.

2.
Thomas Cook,
Memoir of Samuel Deacon
(privately published pamphlet, Leicester, 1888).

3.
On the first trip the locomotive ran over and killed the MP for Liverpool, William Huskinsson.

4.
In 1819 Stephenson drove at twelve miles an hour on the Stockton to Darlington railway.

5.
Christopher Hibbert,
George IV, Regent and King
(London, Allen Lane, 1975).

6.
Barrow,
The Flesh Is Weak
.

7.
Ibid
.

8.
Hansard, II, 204, 7 February 1831, quoted by Chadwick,
The Victorian Church
.

9.
Seaton,
Thomas Cook
.

10.
Stephen J. Lee,
Aspects of British Political History, 1815–1914
(London, Routledge, 1964): ten counties in southern England with a combined population of 3.3 million had 156 seats; Middlesex, Lancashire and West Yorkshire had 3.7 million people but only 58 seats.

11.
T.A. Jenkins,
The Liberal Ascendancy, 1830–1886
(London, Macmillan, 1994).

12.
Asa Briggs,
A Social History of England
(London, Penguin, 1983).

13.
Salford is so close to Manchester that they are now administered together.

14.
Sheffield – opened by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

15.
Buckingham was the founding editor of the
Athenaeum
magazine; his travels had taken him to America, India and to the Middle East. He published many books, including
Travels in Palestine through the countries of Bashan and Gilead, east of the River Jordan
(London, Longman, 1821),
Travels in Mesopotamia: including a journey from Aleppo, across the Euphrates to Orfah, through the plains of the Turcomans, to Diarbekr, in Asia Minor from thence to Mardin, on the borders of the Great Desert, and by the Tigris to Mosul and Baghdad
(London, Henry Coburn, 1827) and
Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia
(London, Henry Coburn, 1829).