Thomas Cook (7 page)

Far from Blake’s ‘Satanic Mills’ was Barrowden, in Rutland, north of Peterborough in Northamptonshire. This quintessential sleepy brick-and-stone English village with its duck pond, two greens, mill, tannery, church and chapel became Thomas’s new home. A water mill mentioned in 1259 was now the site of a new mill, behind which was a large tannery, where cow hides were made into rugs, parchment for drums and glue. Thomas lodged in a farmhouse belonging to a Baptist, Henry Mason, a widower with five sons and one daughter, and described
¹¹
as a farmer, grazier and maltster. The eldest, Marianne, a Sunday school teacher, kept house. When she met Thomas in 1829 she was already twenty-two, an age which then put her ‘on the shelf’. The courtship dragged on for four years. This was not caused by awaiting permission, as legal consent for marriage was then required only up until the age of twenty-one, and she had been older than that when their romance had begun. Indeed, she was eighteen months older than Thomas.

Photographs show that Marianne was petite, light-haired with blue eyes and thin lips. Her slightly severe appearance was due to sharp features. She was later described as possessing a ‘better business brain than her husband’ and being a ‘smallish very dapper lady who gave one the impression that she was all there’.
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An interest in religion, especially the Bible, remained prominent in her life. She had learnt to read and write at the same time as taking the art of managing a large household in her stride. Capable though she was, she was shy and hesitant. The mannered correspondence between Thomas and her in their few surviving letters does not reveal a loving relationship, but over the years they developed an affectionate dependency on one another.

Years later Thomas described his debut as a preacher: ‘After I had been one year in the service of the village Missionary Society, I made a tour through the principal parts of the Midland Counties, and held meetings in most of the General Baptist Connexion’ in dozens of towns and villages, including Barlestone, Nailstone, Market Bosworth, Hugglescote, Ibstock, Measham.

During these years he found that, like Bunyan’s roads, his were crowded with moving figures and adventures. The twelve-arched thirteenth-century bridge over the Trent at Swarkestone, the longest stone bridge in England, was crossed and recrossed. At some venues he was greeted with open arms, at others hooted and pelted. For some, heckling, jeering and rough handling were a sport.
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The easiest places were those where there were already New Connexion Baptist chapels, like Hinckley, set up in 1770, the home town of his grandfather. Thomas must have been suffering from the toughness of his campaigning and constant travel, as the Baptist minister there, the Revd James Taylor, told him ‘to get back home as soon as possible’. Years later, Thomas wrote that this minister ‘had the impression that I should not be long-lived if I continued in that work’.

Another centre which he enjoyed was Barton-in-the-Beans, the rich bean-growing area of Leicestershire, a place which had influenced the New Connexion of General Baptists. The town of Billesdon with its academy, run by William Creaton the minister and headmaster, was also high on the list of the places he liked to visit.

I
n 1829 a shadow fell over Thomas’s career. From £36 per annum, his salary was reduced to just £26 on ‘account of the great kindness of people among whom he laboured giving him so many presents, and, we judge, inviting him so frequently to their social board’.
¹
Preacher though he was, the only figures that Thomas produced have nothing to do with the converts he brought to the church, but the meticulously measured distances he travelled. In 1829 he noted that he clocked up 2,692 miles. Each day he calculated the distance covered, carefully writing down the figure in a pocket notebook. Over 2,000 of those miles (2,106 to be precise) were walked. A further 500 miles were as a passenger in horse-drawn carriages, stage-coaches or horseback. This careful cataloguing of mileage might also have been to impress his mother, who had earlier undertaken walking tours of England in search of converts.
²
The newly introduced railways are not mentioned in Thomas’s notes, as there were then no railways in the Midlands. The Stockton to Darlington railway, Britain’s first railway, was only four years old.

Rails started criss-crossing the landscape after the inauguration of both George Stephenson’s
Rocket
in 1829 and the Liverpool to Manchester train service
³
the following year – the most expensive train built since Stephenson had invented the locomotive in 1814.
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Immediately, it became the fastest line in the world and was also the first ‘inter-city’ railway line linking two large industrial centres. While some companies such as this one made huge returns for shareholders, the promises of many other companies proved hollow. Railway shares were so risky that they were parodied by Lewis Carroll in ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ with the line, ‘You may threaten its life with a railway-share’.

For three years from 1829 discontent from France crossed the Channel. The English monarchy was at its lowest ebb. When George IV died in July, after his funeral
The Times
wrote, ‘There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased King . . . What eye wept for him?’
⁵
His brother, William IV, sixty-four, was more popular, having kept the habits of a brusque, hard-swearing, hard-drinking sailor.

As a general election had to take place following the succession of a new sovereign, there was a new government, with Earl Grey as prime minister – remembered for the aromatic tea named after him. When disturbances spread in which even moderate orators attacked the absurdity of the electoral system, Grey began the moves which would result in passing one of the most significant pieces of legislation in British history, the Reform Bill. The hurdles, though, were many. On 8 October 1831, after the Archbishop of Canterbury and twenty other bishops in the House of Lords had voted against it, anti-clerical riots broke out across the country.
⁶
In Bristol crowds burned not only the bishop’s palace but another hundred buildings to the ground. The army savagely attacked the crowds, leaving a death toll of over a hundred.

Political stirrings were voiced by churchmen, but new preachers like Thomas had to be careful. He did not, though, have to exercise caution for long. Before his thirty-second birthday, he faced the fourth change in the way he earned his living. Job shortages and general distress were heightened by an epidemic of cholera – which had replaced both smallpox and the plague as the major killing disease – of unprecedented severity.
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This was seen as a judgement of God upon the nation, and there were cries to shut down theatres and ballrooms, to smash card tables and to sack parsons who hunted. When one MP called for a general fast as an act of penitence for the state of the nation, Henry Hunt, the rabble-rousing MP who had been imprisoned after the Peterloo riots, asked the promoters if they were aware that one-third of the people of Britain fasted almost every day in the week.
⁸

Like those of thousands of men in England then, Thomas’s nerves were quickened by the economic downturn. The Baptists announced that there were no longer any funds to pay an itinerant preacher. This may have been a convenient excuse. Should he further his schooling and become a minister like Winks, who had already moved from Loughborough to Leicester to give more scope to his dual career as a clergyman and publisher of children’s literature? But at twenty-three Thomas let his heart rule his head. He set up shop as a carpenter in Barrowden so he would be near Marianne Mason.

Mastery of his trade put Thomas in a better position than the thousands of unskilled unemployed, but customers were slow in coming. In the middle of November 1832 he relocated to nearby Market Harborough, the twelfth-century market town dominated by the Anglican church of St Dionysius. From then onwards the county of Leicestershire was to be his home. No doubt, the appeal of Leicestershire was partly because of its reputation for religious tolerance. Nearby was Lutterworth, the home of John Wyclif, the ‘morning star of the Reformation’; George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends or Quakers, was also born nearby in Fenny Drayton.

Market Harborough, which then had a population of only about 2,500 but at least six places of worship, was on a road to Leicester, and the Royal Mail coach from Manchester to London stopped there each day at 9.30p.m. at the Three Swans in the high street.
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Day and night countless drivers of coaches and carts halted to refresh themselves and their horses while collecting boxes of hats and carpets. All trade was welcome, as the carpets and worsteds factory belonging to John Clarke and six straw hat makers, the main employers in the town, were then feeling the effects of the slump depressing trade everywhere.

Thomas’s rented house in Adam and Eve Street, backing onto Quakers’ Yard, was, like his workshop, surrounded by one-up, one-down labourers’ cottages. To establish himself in a new town would have been a brave or a foolish thing to do without either cousins, uncles or membership of a chapel. For a worker migrating from town to town, belonging to a chapel could be the ticket of entry and offer instant relationships with people with common aims. Religious affiliation often turned members into a particular community that fought together so each could ‘better oneself’. Politics once again was becoming a subtle component of chapel life, something which was soon to gain momentum and, from the late 1850s, carry the Liberal Party into the next century.

No newcomer who settled in such a town was ever truly part of it. Outsider though Thomas had been in Barrowden, he had been on the fringe of acceptance by being engaged to the daughter of a well-respected family. Here in Market Harborough, as in most small towns, groups of suspicious neighbours instinctively excluded, and even rejected, outsiders. The experience of these snubs would harden Thomas for the many which lay ahead.

At last in 1832 – over a year since the bishops had opposed it – the political struggle which had begun after Waterloo came to a head. The Reform Bill, which Grey called ‘that most aristocratic measure’, was passed. Bonfires were lit up and down the country. The anomalies were still huge,
¹⁰
but the Rotten Boroughs were no more. Less than 15 per cent of adult males had the vote out of a population of 24 million, but there would be forty-two MPs for the industrial towns and each county was to have two MPs. With the number of voters still limited to about one in eight adult males, the increase was only from 400,000 to somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000. While it broadened the class and backgrounds of those who could take part in the ballot, there was still a wide gulf between MPs and the people who elected them.
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The aristocracy continued to dominate politics, with landowners filling most seats on both sides of the House, but now at least some MPs now lived in the areas they represented.

Because of the repeal of the Test Act, some of the newly elected MPs were Nonconformists and there were a few dour self-made MPs, marking the end of the old order. But there was a wait of thirty-five years before there was one in the Cabinet – when John Bright, the Radical Quaker, celebrated political orator and Anti-Corn Law League founder, became president of the Board of Trade in 1868. One reason for the small number of Nonconformists participating was because the majority were ineligible to vote as they lacked the necessary property qualifications. Only in such places as Birmingham, Leicester, Manchester, Salford and Sheffield, where there were enough members of the chapels with incomes large enough to bring them into the ‘£10 householder categories’, were there noticeable differences in the type of MPs.

Much campaigning to better the lives of the working classes came from Manchester, then the mecca for change and also the home of many intellectual agitators. One was Friedrich Engels, author of the ground-breaking
Condition of the Working Class in England
¹²
and devotee of Karl Marx, whom he helped financially. Another was John Shuttleworth, the Nonconformist textile manufacturer and a founder of the
Manchester Guardian
, who campaigned to transfer the seats of Rotten Boroughs to the new manufacturing towns, demanding that Manchester and Sheffield had two MPs and Salford
¹³
and Wigan one MP each, instead of none.

Among the new style MPs was Richard Potter (grandfather of Beatrice Webb), a Unitarian cotton manufacturer in Wigan and typical of the new politicians from industrial areas. Another was the member for Sheffield, the social reformer, Temperance and anti-slavery campaigner, James Silk Buckingham, who was the force behind the first free public library in England.
¹⁴
He was also the author of
Travels in Palestine through the Countries of Bashan and Gilead, East of the River Jordan
. Conceited, charismatic and clever, he had an exotic reputation that had been enhanced by an engraving of him, turbaned and bearded with a jewelled dagger in his colourful waistband, in the frontispiece of his book,
Travels among the Arab Tribes
.
¹⁵

The danger of travelling across the Holy Land was reinforced by Robert Curzon’s
Visits to the Monasteries of the Levant
, published in 1849.
¹⁶
He was twice captured by bandits. Curzon said that the West wanted to possess the Holy Land and predicted that in so doing it would destroy the very thing it desired. His book was not as graphic as those by Silk Buckingham who epitomised two things close to Thomas’s heart: the Holy Land and Temperance. In 1834 Silk Buckingham had persuaded his fellow MPs to appoint a select committee, mostly Evangelicals, to ‘inquire into the extent, causes and consequences of the prevailing vice of intoxication among the labouring classes . . . in order to ascertain whether any legislative measures can be devised to prevent the further spread of so great a national evil’.
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