Thomas Cook

To Penny Hart, who has helped me so
much over the years
.

First published in 2005 by Sutton Publishing

The History Press
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This ebook edition first published in 2013

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© Jill Hamilton, 2005, 2013

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Original typesetting by The History Press

Cook is a forgotten hero of his age. This book commemorates the 150th anniversary of his first overseas conducted tour in 1855. Driven by his religious faith, Cook founded a major industry, one that is now one of the world’s biggest sectors. In the UK alone, it is the third largest industry, worth over £75 billion a year.

When Cook was born in 1808, the term ‘tourism’ had not been invented. Leisure in distant places was mostly an unknown experience – as was staying in hotels or eating in restaurants. Poor men made journeys only when necessary; poor women usually stayed at home. Yet, by the time Cook died in 1892, travelling abroad had become part of modern life. The number of travellers from England who steamed across the Channel to the continent via ports with railway connections grew from 165,000 in 1850 to 951,000 by 1899.

It was not until Cook started his cheap overseas tours in 1855 that workers, let alone women, had the opportunity to go abroad easily. His group packages gave them an umbrella under which it was safer to explore foreign places. Just how revolutionary this was can be seen by looking at the small numbers of women who had braved sailing boats in the previous four centuries.

Cook’s career in travel began with the burgeoning of rail and steam transport in 1841; he died just as the combustion-engine era was about to take off. Since Cook’s death in 1892 modes of travel have changed enormously, but not the basic methods, organisation and marketing that he championed. A printer by trade, he knew the potential of advertising, promotions and travel writing – even starting the first regular monthly travel newspaper in 1851. Nearly every trip was promoted in advance with posters and leaflets, and each tourist was given historical and practical information to animate places
en route
and destinations. The one thing, though, that would startle this man who left school at ten years old would be the university degrees in tourism and the many Professors of Tourism and Leisure Management. As degrees in different aspects of the travel industry have expanded, the Thomas Cook Archives in Peterborough have been mined by research students. Like them, I have relied heavily on this invaluable resource. This book, though, was neither commissioned nor subsidised by the famous travel agency that Cook started. It springs entirely from my interest in how he opened up the Middle East, especially the Holy Land and Egypt, to tourism.

Three times a week, when walking to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, I walk past the site of Cook’s former house in Great Russell Street, opposite the British Museum, and I never fail to recall Cook’s tenacity and ability to keep going despite terrible reverses. The man who boasted that he had escorted over a million tourists without mishap witnessed the death of his only daughter at home because he personally misjudged the safety of a gas boiler. That was on top of having become estranged from his only son – but if he had lived longer he would have had the satisfaction of seeing that his name continued as a household word, synonymous with popular tourism; and that the Baptist chapel that he worked so hard to open in Rome in the 1870s is still well attended.

Jill Hamilton
Chelsea, November 2004

To travel is to feed the mind, humanize the soul, and rub off the rust of circumstance – to travel is to read the last new book, enjoy to its full the blessings of invention – to travel is to have Nature’s plan and her high works simplified, and her broad features of hill and dale, mountain and flood, spread like a map at one’s feet – to travel is to dispel the mists of fable and clear the mind of prejudice taught from babyhood, and facilitate perfectness of seeing eye to eye. Who would not travel at a penny per mile?

Thomas Cook,
Excursionist
, July 1854

The prejudices which ignorance has engendered are broken by the roar of a train and the whistle of the engine awakens thousands from the slumber of ages . . .