SYMHC Classics: Thomas Cook

This 2019 episode covers Thomas Cook, a pioneer of the idea of a travel agency to manage tourist holidays. But Cook was initially motivated by his support of the temperance movement and his deeply held religious beliefs. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Thomas Cook was born on November twenty second,
eighteen oh eight, or two hundred and seventeen years ago today,
on the day this episode is publishing. Cook founded his
own travel agency in the nineteenth century, and he's seen
as one of the founders of the package travel industry.
At the end of this episode, we talked about the

(00:22):
company Cook founded and what the business grew involved into,
and when we recorded the episode, Thomas Cook Group was
having some financial difficulties. Then in September of twenty nineteen,
it collapsed and that left roughly one hundred and fifty
thousand travelers stranded overseas with all their bookings canceled. We
talked about that a little bit in an installment of Unearthed.

(00:44):
The following month, Thomas Cook Group's biggest shareholder, Folksin International,
purchased all the branding and all of its assets and
they relaunched the business as an online travel agency in
November of twenty nineteen, and then Polish travel technology company
East Sky Group acquired the business from Folsen in twenty
twenty four. This episode originally came out on July eighth,

(01:08):
twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson and Tracy.

(01:28):
We have been traveling a lot lately. I've been traveling
a whole bunch, and because of that, I just started thinking,
particularly when we were on our trip to Paris, which
was booked as a package, about how package travel started. Yeah,
Because like I often found myself marveling at the people
who managed our trips through defined destinations were just handling

(01:49):
the needs of fifty people who all had differing desires
and internal clocks and whatnot. As we wandered around in
a foreign country, and sometimes people got lost and they
always managed to find them and get I was just
I marvel at the whole concept. So that made me
start to think about how this whole thing began. And
as I dug it did not take very long to

(02:10):
find the person that most people point to and say,
this is the person who started it. But I was
surprised because the man most often referenced as the father
of the modern travel industry was inspired not by some
deep seated yearn to go out and explore the world,
but it was more inspired by his support of the
Temperance movement and has deeply held religious beliefs. So today

(02:33):
we were talking about Thomas Cook, but we were also
talking about his son, John Mason Cook. Modern travelers in
the UK in particular are probably well acquainted with the
Cook name is now the name of one of the
largest travel agencies in the world, if not the largest.
But their family were really pioneers of this idea of
a travel agency to manage tourist holidays and put together

(02:55):
packages that could be sold for all of your needs
to be attended to. He just buyerr one thing and
then it's taken care of. Yeah, it didn't start that way.
That happened incrementally before they got to the buyer one
thing idea. But really you do see the progression of
how this concept started and how it started to add
on different pieces until it became package travel. Thomas Cook

(03:18):
was born on November twenty second, eighteen o eight, in Derbyshire, England.
His parents, John and Elizabeth Cook were very poor, and
John worked as a laborer and died when Thomas was
just four years old. Elizabeth remarried to James Smithard not
long after John's death. Thomas's formal education was rather brief.
He attended school only until the age of ten, and

(03:41):
at that point he started working as a helper to
an estate gardener and he worked in that position for
four years, at which point he became a cabinetry apprentice
under his uncle John Peg. When young Thomas became an apprentice,
he also switched religious denominations. Up until the age of fourteen,
Thomas had attended a Methodist Sunday School and that was
intended to offer a little bit of a supplemental education

(04:03):
since he had to go to work full time to
help the family, and that was a common pattern. Sunday
schools in England during this time were intended to offer
children a small amount of ongoing education after they were
required to join the workforce. Yeah, very different I think
from what we might think of as Sunday school today.
Not as much. I mean, certainly there was religious study involved,

(04:27):
but it was also literally like sort of a standard
education that was getting conveyed. But though he had been
attending Methodist Sunday school for four years, at fourteen Thomas
started attending a Baptist Sunday school. John Peg his new
person that he was apprenticing under was a Baptist, so
that may have had some influence in the switch, but

(04:47):
Thomas's mother also wanted her son to change churches. It
appears that Thomas was very diligent in his studies at
this new school, and he eventually started teaching there. He
was eventually named it superintendent. He hadn't been baptized yet,
though that didn't happen until February of eighteen twenty six,
when he was seventeen. Yeah, that kind of ties into
that idea that Sunday school is not the way we

(05:09):
would think of Sunday school in like modern America, for example.
It really was not quite the same deal. And I
only know Catechism, which is different than other religions Sunday schools,
so I'm sure I have a very different concept of
how the whole thing works. Cook's religious devotion eventually supplanted
his work in cabinetry. After five years as his uncle's apprentice,

(05:33):
he left that job behind to become a missionary, and
his new job consisted of traveling from town to town
in rural England. In each town, he would distribute literature,
give sermons, and set up a Sunday school there. He
got paid thirty six pounds annually for the job, and
that amount was throttled back as he started to receive
aid from the people that he ministered to. While traveling

(05:55):
with his work, the twenty year old Cook met a
young woman named mary Anne Mason, another Sunday school teacher
who was a year older than Thomas. Thomas and mary
Anne were sweethearts for four years before they got married
on March second, eighteen thirty three. That's another thing that
made me chuckle. In some of the biographical write ups
of him, people will talk about what a long courtship

(06:16):
that was. Where it's again in the modern era, not
so much. Not only did Thomas's bachelor's status change to
that of husband in eighteen thirty three, he also changed jobs.
He returned to carpentry. His job as a missionary had
ended because the church could no longer fund his salary,
so he moved with Marianne to Market Harborough and opened
up a shop on January thirteenth, eighteen thirty four. They

(06:39):
welcomed a son, John Mason Cook. In eighteen thirty five,
they had another child named Henry, but the second son
died while still a baby. They didn't have any more
children until the mid eighteen forties. When their daughter Annie
was born. In eighteen thirty six, the Cooks took a
strong stand for temperance. They felt that liquor was causing
all manner of social problems. This was a pretty popularly

(07:01):
circulated idea at the time, and they decided that they
wanted to lead by example in their own lives. So
they both signed a pledge of temperance, and they also
vowed that no one who worked for them would have
access to alcohol while on their property. But Thomas was
not content to do just that. He started really throwing
his time and his efforts into promoting temperance. In the

(07:22):
latter half of the eighteen thirties, Cook reached back to
his preaching days. At this time, he started to preach
the importance of temperance and the dangers of alcohol. He
wrote and distributed pamphlets with these same messages. He also
started setting up recreational events that were alcohol free. They
were social gatherings called rational recreation, where the activities were

(07:43):
wholesome and the hardest liquid serve was ginger beer. He
also founded a periodical called the Children's Temperance Magazine in
eighteen forty and it was Cook's temperance efforts and his
desire to put together activities that would offer fun and
socializing without alcohol that led him to start setting up
travel activities. In June of eighteen forty one, while he

(08:05):
was walking to a Temperance meeting in Lester, near his home,
he had a bolt of inspiration. He realized that developments
in transportation that had been part of the Industrial Revolution,
and in particular railroads, could be used to spread the
word about Temperance farther than ever before. He was walking
to a meeting in Leicester when he had this idea,
and when he got there, Cook outlined his planned the attendees.

(08:29):
He pitched the plan that they would hire a train
specifically to get their members to another meeting farther away
the next month. Everybody thought this was a great idea,
so he reached out to the Midland Railway to try
to make the arrangements and they were completely open to it.
So on July fifth of eighteen forty one, just a
month after he had his idea, Thomas led a group

(08:49):
of five hundred members of the Temperance movement on a trip.
It was a train ride from Leicester to Lufborough to
attend a meeting and a lecture there, and each attendee
paid a shilling for the trip that was arranged by Cook.
And this trip went very, very smoothly, and its success
led Cook to plan for more. I just want to say,
five hundred people is a lot of people. That is

(09:10):
a lot of people. I mentioned at the top of
the show how I marveled at managing fifty people on
a trip. Five hundred seems bananas. To bolster the whole enterprise,
Cook wanted to be in a bigger city to have
greater access to travel resources. So to that end, he
and his family moved to Leicester. The Temperance and Baptist
community there was much larger, and he was also able

(09:32):
to expand his business with an id using these businesses
to promote temperance. He started printing temperance literature in his
own print shop, and he also opened a bookstore to
sell that literature in He also printed and sold guide
books and almanacs through this system, and next he opened
two Temperance hotels. The first in Darby was managed by

(09:53):
his mother Elizabeth, and his wife Mary Anne managed the second,
which was in Leicester. Coming up, we'll talk about how
Thomas t transition from wrangling groups of temperance supporters to
managing travel as a business, but first we'll pause for
a sponsor break. Thomas Cook had since that first rail

(10:19):
trip from Leicester to Lufborough in eighteen forty one, continued
to arrange trips for temperance supporters to attend meetings and
share their ideology throughout England. But in eighteen forty five
he decided to actually make a business out of it,
running tours for profit. He had a really good network
of contacts within the railways at this point, and he

(10:39):
had already made a name for himself as an efficient
and trustworthy organizer of group excursions, so he was starting
this enterprise from a very strong position. Cook's first for
profit itinerary went to Liverpool, with starting points for travelers
at Leicester, Derby and Nottingham. This included excursions to Canarvan
and a hike up Mount Snowden. He was conscious of

(11:01):
the fact that even on his previous temperance oriented trips,
for a lot of the people traveling it was a
really new experience, and to that end he produced a
handbook for the three hundred and fifty people on this
Liverpool tour, offering them both practical advice and encouragement to
abstain from drink while enjoying the journey. This handbook was
the first of many he assembled them for all of

(11:22):
his tours after this point. First class tickets cost fifteen
shillings and second class was ten shillings. Travelers could also
opt into a steamer cruise to North Wales for an
additional fee. The Liverpool Tour was a far more ambitious
project than any of Thomas Cook's Temperance trips had been,
but it went well, so well that Cook started to

(11:43):
set his sights on expanding to new destinations, and he decided,
after he had done some of these Liverpool trips that
the next excursion he wanted to offer would go to Scotland.
The Scotland Tour was scheduled for the summer of eighteen
forty six, and it was Thomas Cook's first real flop
since he started planning group travel. The several hundred people

(12:03):
who had booked had been told that they would be
able to disembark from the train they were on when
it made stops along the way to the coast, and
there they were going to board a steamer to Scotland,
but it turned out that train passengers were not allowed
to get off and on it stops. The train also
didn't have bathrooms and it didn't offer food service, so
by the time the group got to the coast they

(12:23):
were already miserable. The next leg of the trip was
aboard the steamer our Drassen, which was also a problem.
Cook had booked more people than there were cabins. There
appears to have been a miscommunication between him and the steamer,
so some of the group had to hang out on
the deck and they got drenched in a storm that
came along while they made this crossing. But once the

(12:45):
group arrived in Scotland, they were warmly welcomed with marching
bands and other fanfare, and from that point it seems
to have gone okay. Reviews of this tour were unsurprisingly unkind.
Part of the criticism was Thomas Cook's unrelenting devotion to temperance,
which he preached to all his tour groups. This summer
of problems caused a temporary halt to Cook's travel business.

(13:06):
He was also seeing new competitors emerge in the publishing market,
some of whom were printing books and pamphlets on Temperance
as well. Yeah, so he had kind of planned on
this travel thing going well, and it started well and
then wasn't. And then this other area of the market
that he had cornered with suddenly having some competitors and
he just kind of needed to regroup. So he slowly

(13:28):
rebuilt his business over the next couple of years, and
in eighteen forty eight he was once again up and
running with his tours, publishing and his Temperance hotels. For
the next couple of years. After that, he launched successful
tours to Scotland and Ireland, and then a new opportunity
presented itself to Cook in the form of the Great
Exposition of eighteen fifty one, which has made numerous appearances

(13:49):
on the podcast over the years. Cook booked travel arrangements
for more than one hundred and fifty thousand people to
go to the Great Exposition. To bolster his travel business,
he also started publishing the periodical slash Travel catalog Cook's
Exhibition Harold an Excursion Advertiser. This effort to create Exposition
tours was incidentally made at the urging of previous podcast

(14:12):
subject and Crystal Palace architect Sir Joseph Paxton, who hoped
that Cook would make it possible for the workers outside
of London to see the hall. Paxton remained a supporter
of Cook's work long after the Exposition, and Cook's Exhibition
Harold was later published under the name Cook's Excursionist. And
after the Great Expo, Thomas Cook built his offerings up

(14:34):
to meet new levels of demand because he had become
very well known while planning all of those trips, he
started offering an assortment of trips that travelers could choose
from throughout England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. These were not,
we should note, all inclusive tours. Cook's agency booked travel
and outlined itineraries and provided guide books, but tourists were

(14:55):
responsible for booking their own lodging and getting their own food.
His travel business grew, Thomas Cook ceased operation of his
printing efforts so that he could focus more on tourism.
He still printed guidebooks, but he wasn't running his own
print shop. After a decade of growth and expansion within
his established roots, Cook expanded his offerings to a wider
range of destinations on the European continent. This was in

(15:19):
part because his tours in Scotland ran into a problem,
which is that the rail companies in Scotland stopped offering
him discounted group rates for the trains and so to
expand into this new phase of business, Cooked did two things. First,
he opened another office in London. Similar to the reasons
that he moved to Leicester. This shift to London offered

(15:39):
greater resources and more access to a wider clientele. And second,
he started creating more comprehensive bookings, ones that did include
lodging and meals as well as railroad travel and channel crossings.
In eighteen fifty five, Thomas Cook mounted his first European
continental tour to coincide with another exposition, this time the

(15:59):
Exposition on Uniforseel in Paris. This trip hit a lot
of other spots before landing at the expo, though from England,
the group traveled to Antwerp, Brussels, Cologne, Heidelberg and Strasbourg
before finishing in Paris. In addition to booking the trip
as a comprehensive package, he also offered a currency exchange
service to his travelers. Yeah at this point he was

(16:21):
offering literally like full service travel by the fall of
eighteen sixty three, Cook had booked traveled to Switzerland for
an estimated five hundred tourists and to France for about
two thousand. The rapid growth of his expanded offerings led
to Cook being nicknamed the Napoleon of excursions, and before
long a Cook's tour became synonymous with guided tourist experiences.

(16:43):
In eighteen sixty five, the business shifted once again, this
time because Cook's son, John Mason Cook, started working for
the firm full time. Over the next six years, John
helped his father expand the company significantly, so that by
eighteen seventy one there were three offices for the firm
in England, each with full staff. John was made partner
that year and the firm became Thomas Cook and Son.

(17:06):
John had been highly instrumental in getting Cook's company into
booking travel across the Atlantic, and he had streamlined the
way the business rans make everything more efficient, but even
so John had been really reluctant to step into the
role of partner. After the popularity of Thomas Cook and
Son's offering for travel to France and Switzerland, the firm
started offering tours to Italy as well. As we mentioned,

(17:28):
John helped get it across the Atlantic, so a United
States itinerary was soon made available, and then they offered
trips to Egypt and Israel. And as Cook's travel agency
entered the eighteen seventies, he was as always thinking bigger
in terms of where he could go. The advertisements for
the company at this point read a Cook's Ticket brings
the World to you, and Thomas Cook seemed really intent

(17:50):
on delivering on that promise. It was this attitude that
led him to offer the first ever Round the World
tourist itinerary. It was ambitious, but Cook was driven by
his religious faith just as much as any business ambition.
He wanted to continue to share his religious views and
show people the world simultaneously, believing that in doing so
he would help promote global peace. To that end, he

(18:13):
traveled along with his clients on the company's first Round
the World excursion, which ran from eighteen seventy two to
eighteen seventy three. It took two hundred and twenty two days,
and his being there was possible in part because he
had John to manage the offices back home. But despite
trusting John to handle a lot of the business, Thomas
and his son had problems, and we are going to

(18:34):
get into that after we take a break and hear
from one of the sponsors. To keep stuff you missed
in history class going. Thomas and John Cook did not
always agree on how their business should run, even though
John was made a partner, and this ultimately caused serious

(18:56):
problems there. I read some historians that suggest said that
the two of them had such different approaches that they
would have been terribly complimentary if it weren't for the
fact that they were continuously butting heads. So while Thomas
was shepherding that First World Tour, for example, John settled
the firm's main offices into a new, fancier and more

(19:16):
expensive location. When Thomas returned, the travel agency started a
business partnership with an American partner, and that turned disastrous.
The idea was that combining their efforts with a business
interest on the other side of the Atlantic was going
to bolster travel bookings from North America to Europe and
vice versa, but that did not work out. Over the
next several years, Thomas and John were increasingly at odds,

(19:39):
and the US partnership fell apart, which added even more
strain into the relationship. Even as they successfully moved on
to new ventures, including offering cruises, they didn't seem to
celebrate as much as they seemed to argue, and the
main issue between them was that they just felt completely
differently as I said, about how their business should run.
Thomas had always dreamed big and terms of trips, but

(20:01):
he wasn't especially concerned with turning huge profits as long
as they were making some profit. He basically seemed to
just want enough to provide for his family and then
donate pretty generously to the various charities that he supported. John,
on the other hand, envisioned much grander things. He really
believed that they could be much more financially lucrative, and

(20:21):
he thought that his father's approach to business was too
soft and inefficient, and that his father was a little
bit of a billy dreamer. Additionally, John wanted Thomas to
keep his religious and temperance views out of their tours
and maintain those interests as personal matters, not business. This
strife between Thomas and John wasn't exactly new. It had

(20:42):
basically been there ever since John was young. There was
a time, as a very young man, just out of school,
when John had worked in Thomas's print shop and had
worked on some of the tours, but the two of
them had butted heads so often that John left to
work for a railway company. Even when John returned to
work for his father in eighteen sixty five, it had
been because he had a wife and a child to support,

(21:03):
not because the two of them actually wanted to work together.
Things eventually came to a head in eighteen seventy eight
and father and son had a massive fight. The end result,
although we don't have details on how exactly this decision
was reached, was that Thomas removed himself from the business entirely.
He moved full time back to Leicester, where he had

(21:24):
built a large house, and he just let John run
things as he wished, But their relationship was damaged beyond repair.
As the firm was transitioning in leadership from father to son,
John established a new department at the firm, foreign Banking
and Money Exchange, and then through this division, the company
started issuing credit notes for travelers, which evolved into travelers checks.

(21:46):
It was proved to be a very lucrative enterprise that
makes travelers checks older than I imagined. Yeah, I think
they were first calling them circular checks, and yeah, they
eventually set this up again. John, I mean was very
smart about business, and his father was very smart about

(22:06):
putting together compelling tours. And if they could just have
lived in harmony, they probably could have done even more
amazing things than they did. John also started selecting new
destinations for the firm, including India, New Zealand and Australia.
The New Zealand and Australian tours made plenty of money,
India not so much. John also negotiated government contracts for

(22:27):
Thomas Cook and Son. So when England sent a force
to relieve Major General Charles George Gordon, who had become
embroiled in a conflict with the Mahdi of Soudan in
the city of Khartoum against the government's wishes, that trip
was managed by Thomas Cook and Son. Incidentally, that relief
effort arrived too late, Gordon's stronghold had fallen and he

(22:48):
had already been killed. That is a whole other potential
podcast episode. Under John Mason Cook, the firm also transported
Indian Royalty to London to celebrate the Queen's to Jubileese
and what seemed to initially like a move his father
would have made. John also assisted in the transport of
Muslim pilgrims to Mecca. Eventually, though, even though this was

(23:08):
part of a mission initialized by the British Government's India Office,
Cook's faars were too high that deal ended. Thomas and
his wife Marianne lived in his retirement, during which he
was getting a pension from his son, with their daughter Annie,
who had never married, and two years after they moved
into the house that was called Thorncroft. That was that
large house that Thomas had built in Leicester. There was

(23:30):
a tragic loss when Annie died in her bathtub. The
gas fumes from a new heater were determined to have
been the cause, and Thomas's wife Marianne died four years
later in eighteen eighty four. Thomas Cook continued his life
quietly outside of the company. He continued to travel and
to work with the church and in the Temperance movement.
He did eventually lose his sight. In eighteen ninety one,

(23:52):
Thomas Cook and sons celebrated the company's silver jubilee. Thomas
did not attend, although it is unknown whether that was
his choice, perhaps because his health was not great or
because his son did not want him there. The firm
celebrated their immense success without their founder. At that point,
the company had eighty four offices and more than twenty
five hundred employees, and the next in line to run

(24:14):
things were John's three sons. Although John continued to head
things up for a while, and he even expanded the
company once again to include a fleet of steamers that
offered Nile River cruises. John did make a move that
seemed a little bit more like something his father would
have done when he paid for a hospital to be
built in Egypt. The year after the company's celebration, Thomas died.

(24:34):
That was on July eighteenth, eighteen ninety two. He had
had a stroke. He was buried in Leicester on July
twenty second. As obituary in The Times referred to him
and John as the Julius and Augustus Caesar of travel.
Thomas's will was at odds with his existing worth. At
the time of his death, his estate was worth roughly
twenty five hundred pounds, but the amount that he bequeathed

(24:55):
in his will was four two hundred twenty five pounds,
which has left some history. Ourian's puzzling over what exactly
happened to the great fortune that he had made. And
while he was very generous throughout his life, believing that
it was his duty as a religious man to help
others in need. For example, he had arranged everything from
soup kitchens to the building of cottages for the poor

(25:15):
over the years, there is still a lot of puzzling
over how exactly he ended up with so little. John
didn't even break stride in terms of business. After his
father died. He had become very much a social climber,
and whenever any royalty books travel with the firm, he
personally escorted them during their journey. When the first modern
Olympic Games took place in Athens in eighteen ninety six,

(25:38):
John made sure that the Cook firm was their travel partner.
In eighteen ninety eight, while escorting Kaiservillehelm the Second on
a trip to the Holy Land, John Cook became ill,
most likely with dysentery, and though John returned home, he
continued to be unwell for several months leading up to
his death on March sixth, eighteen ninety nine. John's son's Frank,

(25:59):
Earnest and Burt took over the travel agency in its
many offices, and the company continued to flourish. They kept
printing The Excursionist, although the name was changed to Traveler's Gazette,
and in nineteen nineteen they became the first UK travel
agent to offer air bookings. Thomas Cook's grandsons sold the
business in nineteen twenty eight to a Belgian firm for

(26:19):
three point five million pounds, and the firm that Cook
started still exists under the name Thomas Cook, although in
recent times it has had some struggles. In May of
this year, which is twenty nineteen, the Guardian reported that
the company lost one point five billion euros due to
Brexit uncertainty. People were canceling trips because they didn't know
what was going to happen next. And then a few

(26:41):
weeks later reports hitting the news that Fossen International, that's
the Chinese conglomerate that owns Club Med was interested in
purchasing the company, and the company was talking with them still.
A June eighteenth article in Travel Weekly announced plans for
the Thomas Cook Company to open two new hotels in Egypt,
and the day before we recorded this, but a little

(27:03):
while before you will hear it, they announced their move
of their digital marketing office to Manchester from London, and
new efforts to market their airline division. So regardless of
what happens next to the company that bears his name,
it was really Thomas Cook that set the stage for
the industry of tourism as we know it today. Whenever
he selected a destination as an offering, it became a

(27:25):
standard vacation spot for his clients. And this way he
planted the seeds of this industry which now drives the
economies of many countries and many individual places within countries. Yeah,
it's really fascinating to think about. Like he would basically say,
like I think we should start going to Switzerland, and
people would start going to Switzerland, and then towns that

(27:45):
he went to in Switzerland would be like, we have
a booming tourist economy, we should court tourism, and like
that cycle would happen over and over and over and
in many ways, he really ended up kind of shifting
the way that various areas managed their economics because that, again,
tourism is a big business. Thanks so much for joining

(28:11):
us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us
a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot
com and you can subscribe to the show on the
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