Thomas Cook E-Book

Jill Hamilton

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

Biography of Thomas Cook.

Das E-Book Thomas Cook wird angeboten von The History Press und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

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

First published in 2005 by Sutton Publishing

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved © Jill Hamilton, 2005, 2013

The right of Jill Hamilton to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9508 8

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Chronology

Preface

One

Religion, Railways and Respectability

Two

A Nonconformist Childhood

Three

The Protestant Ethic

Four

A Spade! A Rake! A Hoe!

Five

A Long Way from the River Jordan

Six

Lay Preacher

Seven

Another New Career

Eight

A New Life in an Old Town

Nine

Total Abstinence

Ten

‘Excursions Unite Man to Man, and Man to God’

Eleven

Leicester: Printer of Guides and Temperance Hymn Books

Twelve

1845: The Commercial Trips, Liverpool, North Wales and Scotland

Thirteen

Scotland

Fourteen

Corn Laws: ‘Give Us Our Daily Bread’

Fifteen

Bankruptcy and Backwards

Sixteen

1848: Knowing Your Place in Society and Respecting Your Betters

Seventeen

The Great Exhibition

Eighteen

Paxton, Prince Albert and the Great Exhibition

Nineteen

Building Houses

Twenty

Crimea

Twenty-one

The Second and Third Decades

Twenty-two

A Leap in the Dark

Twenty-three

America at Last!

Twenty-four

For ‘All the People!’

Twenty-five

The Holy Land

Twenty-six

Jerusalem, Jerusalem

Twenty-seven

The Opening of the Suez Canal

Twenty-eight

Paris: War, 1870

Twenty-nine

Around the World

Thirty

Grandeur

Thirty-one

Egypt

Thirty-two

‘My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?’

Epilogue

Appendix: Three Cook Letters

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Chronology

1808

Thomas Cook born in Melbourne, Derbyshire.

1834

John Mason Cook born on 13 January.

1841

Organises his first excursion by rail from Leicester to a Temperance meeting in Loughborough.

1845

Conducts his first trip for profit by railway to Liverpool from Leicester, Nottingham and Derby.

1846

Escorts a tour to Scotland.

1851

Promotes trips to the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. The Excursionist published for the first time as Cook’s Exhibition Herald and Excursion Advertiser.

1855

Inaugurates continental tour.

1863

Conducts his first party to Switzerland via Paris.

1864

John Mason Cook, aged 30, joins his father in business.

1865

Office opened in Fleet Street, London.

1866

John Mason escorts the first American tour.

1868

A system of hotel coupons introduced.

1869

Escorts his first party to Egypt and Palestine.

1871

Thomas Cook & Son becomes the official name of the firm.

1872/3

Organises and leads the first round-the-world tour – 222 days and 25,000 miles.

1873

New offices open at Ludgate Circus, London. The first edition of Cook’s Continental Time Tables and Tourist’s Handbook is published.

1874

Cook’s Circular Note, an early form of the traveller’s cheque, is launched in New York.

1878

A Foreign Banking and Money Exchange Department is established.

1879

1 January. John Mason becomes ‘sole managing partner’.

1884

Thos. Cook & Son conveys a relief force sent to rescue General Gordon from Khartoum up the Nile as far as Wadi Halfa.

1892

Thomas Cook dies in Leicester aged 83.

Preface

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

ONE

Religion, Railways and Respectability

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 . . .

Thomas Cook, Handbook to Scotland, 1846

Tourism is now among the world’s largest industries, but little is known about its greatest pioneer, Thomas Cook, the father of tourism. He revolutionised travel, invented package holidays and brought mobility to the masses.1 The sex, alcohol, overspending, indolent leisure and extravagance that are now associated with much of the holiday industry would horrify him. Few know of his preoccupation with God, Rome and the Holy Land, or of his determination to improve the lot of the working classes, let alone his abhorrence of beer houses, pubs and gin palaces. In the nineteenth century no priest, or minister, did more than this diminutive former preacher to shape Protestant attitudes to Palestine. By opening up Palestine to tourism, Cook deliberately offered the British people a way to reconnect with their religious roots. From 1869 onwards he brought the largest number of British to the Holy Land since the Crusader armies and private parties of pilgrims in the Middle Ages.

In 1976 a BBC documentary on Cook asked the question, ‘But what made him do it? This strait-laced provincial missionary – what drove him on? What fired his abundant energy?’ The following chapters attempt to give fresh insights into Cook – and, so that he, too, can have his voice, extracts from his voluminous writings are included in the appendix. His life gives a vivid picture of the influence of Nonconformity in England in the nineteenth century and the way it helped the slow march to a fairer society and democracy. Success for Cook was integrated with the collective power of the Nonconformists, many of whose ancestors had suffered the rack, the dungeon and the scaffold both during and after the Reformation.

Cook’s near-forty-year career was full of leaps and contradictions, but he himself changed little. He never lost his Derbyshire accent, his fidgetiness or the habit of walking with his hands thrust into his pockets. Sometimes, when listening, he put his hands together and twirled his thumbs over one another.2 One writer described Cook in Paris ‘answering questions and swallowing coffee with a rapid dexterity worthy of a Chinese juggler’.3 Another writer, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sister, described him in 1871 as ‘a home-staying, retired tradesman’. Failings in etiquette and his ‘northerness’ were compensated by his foresight, patience and the ability of a stage entertainer to hold a crowd and impart excitement.

Cook always felt that God was on his side. All his life he retained the traits of many Baptists – that is, a horror of self-indulgence, debts of any sort or extravagance. Faith sustained him when he was attacked in the press by upper-class critics trying to stem the tide of travellers to ‘their’ resorts. Ever resourceful, Cook actually prospered from their condemnation. When his ‘hordes’ began pouring into the tourist destinations of the more affluent, Cook looked to faraway places to find untrammelled havens. So, while more tourists went to places like Morecambe, Blackpool and Ramsgate, the middle classes were exploring the Continent and Middle East – with Cook.

Cook was impelled by religion. Devotion to God, prayer and the Bible fired his imagination and provided him with his daily strength. He also drew inspiration from two other features of the Victorian era – railways and respectability. Scope came from the spreading of the railways. Integrity came from Temperance, which epitomised the ideals of self-control and self-denial and fitted in with nineteenth-century prudery and decorum. To these can be added resolution and reliability. Finally, there was music. Often bands with drums and trumpets beat out rousing tunes on his excursions.

Cook’s life was no fairy-tale rags to riches story of a man rising effortlessly from obscurity. In his case, nights filled with letter-writing, accounts and editing frequently followed days of sustained effort. Even when short of sleep, he often had to reverse mishaps, but somehow he coped with the misadventures of travel – missed connections, broken-down trains, fierce storms at sea, hotels with double bookings and lost luggage. When things went wrong Cook relied on the ethos of self-help so characteristic of the nineteenth century and religious stoicism. But his ability to remain unruffled meant that he could have prearranged trips to see stampeding elephants. Whether facing insurgent warfare or the perils of the Swiss Alps, customers felt safe.

His assets in the travel business were his career as a printer and his marketing skills combined with rigorous self-discipline, attention to detail and an ability to coordinate transport and ground arrangements. Sophisticated marketing, whether persuading people of the evils of alcohol or the advantages of taking a train trip, was at the forefront of all his businesses. With his own printing presses and the help of just a few apprentices, he could quickly turn out stacks of cheap-to-produce leaflets, posters and flyers. Today, marketing is a subject in the curriculum of universities, but Cook acquired his know-how first by selling cabbages, turnips and other vegetables at Derby market, then by learning how to attract converts when earning his living proselytising for the Baptists, and he finally perfected his skills during his near twenty years as a publisher of Temperance literature. He made sure that newspapers and leaflets heightened the anticipation about coming excursions, and that destinations were made more fascinating by guidebooks and itineraries with potted histories.

Cook’s dazzling progress coincided with the most action-packed period of parliamentary change in England. He started out as an itinerant Baptist lay preacher at the age of nineteen in 1828, the year of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. His time as a self-employed cabinet-maker began in the year of the Great Reform Act, which extended the franchise to all ‘ten-pound householders’. He reached his goal of escorting trips to the Holy Land the year after the much-awaited passage of the second Reform Bill of 1867, which was also the golden moment of Nonconformity and Evangelicalism in English politics. Politics may sound a far cry from Cook sending thousands of holiday-makers off to criss-cross the earth’s surface, but much reform, like Cook’s early trips, was driven by the same ascendancy of religious ferment.

A leading anti-Corn Law campaigner, Cook promoted ‘the poor man’s bread’, the Big Loaf and aid to the starving. He enjoyed the struggle in the 1840s tremendously. Born eight years into the beginning of the century and dying eight years before its end, he spanned the nineteenth century and was typical of those who were entrenched in Nonconformist religion.4 At a time when reform was a key political slogan, Cook was one of the voices in the large groups of Nonconformist Liberals who cried out for education, the disestablishment of the Church of England, an end to church tithes and Free Trade.

While religion gave Cook drive and purpose, the Bible was the wellspring of his life, and, after he had taken the Pledge at the age of twenty-four in 1833, Temperance was the catalyst.5 Cut-price package tourism became a social mission. Because travel freed people and widened their social circles, he wanted to help the poor to ‘go beyond’, get out of their rut, escape the confines of their own homes and fleetingly forget the dreariness of their lives by awakening their minds. Most people in his village seldom travelled further than thirty miles at the most, yet Cook took his name to the ends of the earth, turning it into one of the most easily recognised trademarks in the world. The phrase ‘Cook’s Tour’ entered the English language. He made both scenic beauty and history, combined with trouble-free travelling, a saleable commodity.

The following chapters, while unveiling a little-known side of this ‘pioneer of convenient travel’, give an idea of the extraordinary extent to which religion, then one of the driving forces of the age,6 dominated the lives and politics of so many. The contribution of Nonconformity in the nineteenth century, together with the mutual support given by its members, was enormous. Apart from Joseph Paxton, nearly every helping hand extended to Cook in his first fifty years belonged to a Nonconformist.

Three of the destinations which Cook promoted with such fervour were well known because of the Bible: the Nile, so associated with Moses; the Jordan, which had become synonymous with Jesus; and the Tiber, which witnessed the expansion of the Christian Church. It was almost as if there was an invisible triangle connecting the three rivers which became part of his adult life. Five of Cook’s most profound religious moments were near rivers and waterways. The first was when he was seventeen, when, near the River Trent in Derbyshire, he was plunged in the baptism bath in the Baptist Chapel in Melbourne, near his home. His second was at the age of thirty-five on the edge of the Grand Union Canal. His third was in 1869 while escorting the first package tour of English tourists to the Middle East, when he immersed himself in the Jordan in Palestine in the heart of the Holy Land where John the Baptist baptised Jesus. The fourth was the Nile, where he promoted trips as a tourist destination and explored places immortalised by Moses and Tutankhamen, and the fifth was setting up the first Baptist mission in history in Rome near the banks of the Tiber. Here he followed in the footsteps of Peter and Paul, who had made Rome into the cradle of Christianity.

It took Cook four careers and sixty years – as a carpenter, a printer, a preacher and a travel organiser – before he stood on the edges of the Jordan. By then this man, who had failed to acquire the finer arts of riding or ballroom dancing and who could not speak more than a few phrases in Arabic, could serenely lead a caravan of baggage camels, horses and donkeys, make himself heard and understood above all the noise and commotion, and, with only the help of men who knew no clocks and whose hours and minutes were regulated by the sun, the moon and the stars, get his tours to run with European punctuality.

TWO

A Nonconformist Childhood

Hedges so thick they seemed prehistoric had grown tall to shelter men and animals from the ferocious winter weather whose winds often blew low through the pretty little Domesday village of Melbourne, seven-and-a-half miles south-east from Derby, south-west of the Pennines. In 1807, winter arrived hastily after the long days of summer. There was snow in November. It melted away, but, as usual, from late November to early March, life was hard and there were few luxuries. Owning a pig was one of them. Happiness for labourers could often be measured by how many they owned.1 When a man could not find enough for his family to eat, the pig would be sold. The money helped pay off debts and bought shoes, clothing and perhaps, in the spring, piglets and hens. Most labourers had a decent potato patch. Leeks, parsnips, turnips, cabbages, beans, peas, spinach, rhubarb, parsley, lavender, rosemary and other herbs were lovingly tended. There were usually a few apple and plum trees. Many men, permanently in debt, relied on pigs, extra harvest earnings and income from their wives’ looms to make ends meet.

Nearly every dwelling had its loom. For centuries wool had been spun in farmhouses and village homes by women and children, but now the wool went directly to the huge newly built woollen mills just a little smaller than the large new sawmills. Beyond them was the land which yielded wheat, barley, fodder, turnips and the seemingly ever-damp grass for the flocks of sheep. Cared for by shepherds with their crooks and guarded by Border collies, they were the real wealth. Everywhere, the hedges, more than any building, gave a feeling of permanence and of man’s unending struggle with the elements. Many had been grown to enclose open fields, commons and waste land and to absorb it into both farms and estates. Between 1750 and 1830 approximately 6.8 million acres in England were brought into private cultivation as a result of Enclosure Acts.2 The soil was rich, renowned for its market gardens, yet scarcity coexisted with earthly abundance. Abject, hopeless poverty contrasted with the lives of the gentry and aristocracy.

Forebears of many labourers and tradesmen had been living near and around the area before the Civil War, before the Norman Conquest, back to the times when the Celts worshipped pagan gods, in circles of stones under the stars.

Horseshoes and little silver balls spelt out the names and date on the wedding cake, which was waiting to be cut. Soon the couple would come up the hill from the church past the tall holly hedges. The wedding of John Cook, a 22-year-old3 labourer, to Elizabeth Perkins was taking place at the parish church of St Michael. John Cook’s family had lived in Melbourne for at least four generations. After the Marriage Act4 of 1753, marriage ceremonies could be performed only by clergymen of the Church of England, or by Quakers and Jews. Apart from the religious humiliation of having to marry in the church they defied, Nonconformists had the hardship of paying fees to the Anglican minister.5 Elizabeth had not been taught to write, so she had to mark the wedding register with a cross. If the family tree in the Cook archives is accurate, she was just over twenty. It gives a date of 1788, but no source.6 As John Cook had hesitated about entering the state of matrimony, her spinsterhood was underscored by her two younger sisters who had married earlier, becoming Ann Pegg and Alice Beresford.

After the wedding in the icy church in February 1808, just as the daffodils and early irises were pushing through the earth, the happy pair did not move in with John Cook’s parents, William and Mary Cook, as was often customary, but rented the narrow picturesque tumbledown cottage at 9 Quick Close, on the highest crest of the hill of the village. If it had fallen down, it would not have been missed. In such cottages, the earth floors at the back ‘heaved’ in winter. From the street there was a panoramic view, but the house caught the winds and gales, which hissed rain down the chimney, rattled shutters and banged doors. It was a stiff climb up from the curving High Street with its pubs, chapels, shops, millers, brewers, maltsters, boot makers, grocers, butchers, bakers, blacksmith and flour dressers and dealers, though not as steep as the climb up from Melbourne Hall on flat ground near the lake.

Nine months after the wedding, on 22 November 1808, Thomas, the only child of the marriage, was born with a sturdy body and short legs that would remain spindly all his life. The birth was noted in the blank leaf between the Old and New Testament in the old family Bible which Elizabeth, as the eldest child, had inherited. Due to her lack of schooling, the words were penned in the neat hand of a stranger: ‘On the 22nd day of November, 1808, at five o’clock in the morning, Thomas Cook was born in Melbourne.’ As if to give symmetry to the pattern in his life, his birth coincided with the exhibition in London of the first steam locomotive and open carriage on rails by Richard Trevithick, the Cornish mining engineer, inventor of the steam engine.7 Thomas’s birth also coincided with another in Paris, that of Louis Napoleon (who would become Napoleon III), the son of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother, Louis, and Josephine’s daughter, Hortense. The activities of Louis Napoleon would impact on Thomas’s life, as would those of William Gladstone, who was born the following year, and of Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was born the year before Thomas.

War formed a backdrop to Thomas’s childhood. With the exception of the period of the Peace of Amiens in 1803, the British had been waging war against the French since 1793.8 Thomas’s birth was at the height of Britain’s long era of war, in the year that Wellington’s soldiers began their fight against Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée in the Peninsular War in Spain, the year that Napoleon – branded in English villages as ‘Boney’ the ogre – had reached his zenith.

The war brought an exotic touch to daily life in remote and inaccessible Melbourne. A proportion of the 122,000 French prisoners of war9 were interned in the neighbouring town of Ashbyde-la-Zouch. With them came the sound of foreign tongues, the exoticism of the Continent and the constant reminder of the threat of invasion, something which had not been felt in England since the Spanish Armada. When Thomas was born, about 460,000 men had enrolled as volunteers in the home militia, including the volunteer infantry first raised in Derbyshire during 1803. As in the rest of Britain, each able-bodied man was trained in his spare time ready to defend hearth, home and country if invaded. In Melbourne, while there had been much improvisation with weapons, the brass band was so well equipped that there could have been rivalry about who was to beat the drum.10 At the slightest excuse it struck up a tune, creating such an impression on young Thomas that he later used bands to give gaiety and style to his early tours.

In 1812, when Thomas was just three years old, a calamity with far-reaching repercussions altered the rural calm of the Cook family. John Cook died. There was little sign of God’s Grace and no pennies or pounds for a gravestone. But despite few chapels being permitted to have their own burial grounds he was buried behind the Baptist chapel. The days after Thomas’s father’s death were crammed with people with red eyes, tears and the imagery of hell and the demonic.11 Death was seen as the transition to a new life in Heaven, but the mourning period was long, gloomy, dark and anxious. There was scarcely money for food or rent.

That summer saw the preparations for the big ‘waltzing ball’ at Melbourne Hall. With its wild woods and deer parks, summer balls and winter shooting parties, it was a house where people came and went but seldom stayed for long – another world, one physically near by, seen every day, but closed to the villagers. Lady Melbourne was a formidable political hostess, so the house was animated by annual events in the Summer Season. Villagers were curious to know if her erratic daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline Lamb, who had been the celebrated mistress of Lord Byron, was at the house party.

Then things changed. Just after the harvest, banns were again displayed and read in Melbourne church. Black clothes were discarded, along with the grim mourning that weighed so heavily in the household. The curtains were opened and light was allowed into the downstairs room; the mood lifted from lamentations to celebrations. A new man, James Smithard, was to take the place of John Cook in the life of Elizabeth. This husband-to-be is listed in the church register as having previously married someone called Ann Hollingsworth in March 1802. Now, in September 1812, the bells of St Michael’s pealed over and over again as Elizabeth’s relations sat in the pews and benches to watch her stand beside the pulpit and again utter the words ‘with my body I thee worship’. Friends who were reluctant to take part in any Anglican service yet again waited outside.

Afterwards, Elizabeth walked up the hill with her new husband. Smithard came to live in Elizabeth’s crammed labourer’s abode. Sleeping in the room where his wife’s former husband had died only months earlier could not have been a romantic start to marriage. Barely nine months had passed before a half-brother, James, arrived. Another five years were to pass before the cradle was pulled out again, for Simeon in 1818, but Thomas remained his mother’s favourite. Many stepfathers would have looked on a lively three-year-old as an intruder, but Smithard was a kind man. He later used some of his wages to pay school fees for Thomas, who was showing much promise. Perhaps, like his grandfather, after whom he had been named, Thomas might become a Baptist pastor. A few streets away from home, the school room was dominated by the squeak of white chalk on a large blackboard, the creaking hinges of desk lids, the choruses of boys chanting tables parrot-fashion and the stifled yawns of those taking dictation or copying out long lists of difficult-to-spell words. The rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic were inculcated by three men of stern integrity and religious character – T. Pickering, John Smith and Joseph Tagg. Punishments ranged from standing in the corner to the cane. Good penmanship was essential and pages of fine, slanted writing were copied. Anyone could start a school, and many fell by the wayside, but sixteen years after Thomas had put down his slate Tagg’s school was still listed.

At school Thomas showed little aptitude for intellectual pursuits, but his urge to learn and teach went deep, and pamphlets and books to help further his grounding in English were borrowed. The education of those fortunate enough to have any schooling was basic and hardly went beyond the three R’s plus religious instruction. In many schools like Thomas’s, the primer was the Bible. Teachers, avoiding the cost of extra books, could be confident that it would be the one book in the homes of most pupils. School began and ended with the reading of the Bible, often the Old Testament.

This narrow education, lacking any intellectual aspirations, could have been a handicap, but for Thomas the emphasis on the Bible was an advantage. Nobody could match him on either the Old or the New Testament. This would be of much use to him half a century later when taking tourists around the Holy Land. On the other hand, the travel articles he wrote in his own newspapers, most of which have a freshness and the indefinable air of the amateur, have sometimes been criticised as falling into ‘the unctuous style of the sermon’,12 as his style was influenced by his Bible readings.

In the cloth-producing towns of England, such as Melbourne, tallow candles, lanterns lit by whale oil to read by, books, tin soldiers, paintboxes and most toys, apart from rag dolls, marbles and skipping ropes, were luxuries for most children. Bunyan’s works were acceptable but novels were still frowned upon. The one book in most homes was the Bible or a cheap reprint with quaint woodcuts of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a book which added a dimension to both travelling and pilgrimages. Bunyan’s prose, especially about the divided self, good and evil, love and hate, Heaven and Hell, had been kept alive in cottages and chapels. He was claimed as a former Baptist. His allegory was written during his six-months’ solitude in a ‘dark, dreary, dungeon’, when he had been imprisoned yet again after English bishops were ordered to penalise anyone failing to come to Communion at their parish church. Thousands had been arrested.

During Thomas’s second year at school, before the long summer holidays and harvest, the fateful battle of Waterloo was fought between Napoleon and Wellington, the ‘Iron Duke’ in Belgium during the weekend of 15–18 June. For a few hours Britain stood still to rejoice in a victory which had taken roughly twenty-five years. Up and down the country, guns thundered and bonfires were lit. Horrific stories of 50,000 human corpses, almost stripped bare on the battlefield, were imprinted on Thomas.

The expected upturn in England’s fortunes following Waterloo did not materialise as foreign markets failed to buy sufficient British goods. There was fear of the Poor House, the Debtors’ Prison or bankruptcy as the country plunged into depression. On top of this, 400,000 demobilised soldiers looking for work swamped the job market. A series of thin harvests led to bread riots and hunger for millions, while unemployment and inflation worsened the poverty among the ragged and hungry poor and food, shelter, blankets, clothes and a few shillings became a priority.

On 28 January 1817, before the Prince Regent opened parliament, reformers presented petitions with half a million signatures. Safely inside the House of Commons the Prince condemned ‘those exciting a spirit of sedition and violence’, but outside the crowd waited. Thousands hissed and booed as he drove up the Mall, stones flew and two bullets shattered the windows of his carriage. Committees found evidence of revolutionary movements in London and in the factory slums of Lancashire, Leicestershire, Derby, Nottingham and Glasgow. Unrest was aggravated by growing numbers of jobless men, pitiful wages, long hours, appalling conditions, child labour and near starvation. Repeated riots and demonstrations upset life in both agricultural and industrial districts. A month after this attempt on the Prince Regent’s life, a nervous government suspended habeas corpus so that any person under suspicion could be thrown into prison without trial. Further restrictive acts, including the prohibition of seditious meetings, were passed. Times were dangerous and hard, but churches and chapels thrived and multiplied as they have never done before or since. As religion, in all its many aspects, was embedded in the life of nineteenth-century England and permeated many aspects, including politics, and was the mainstay of Thomas’s life, a separate chapter is devoted to the background of his Baptist religion.

THREE

The Protestant Ethic

An e at the end of Melbourne was still optional, and in Pigot’s Commercial Directory of Derbyshire it was still minus the e. Just as Melbourne was then spelt in two different ways, there were two main communities in the area, the Anglicans and the Nonconformists. No building in Melbourne competed with the church of St Michael, which, with its tall cliff-like walls, was so large that it had the air of being a small cathedral. After its completion in about 1120, St Michael’s was used as a royal chapel by Henry I, then given by him to the Bishopric of Carlisle. It became a refuge for bishops when fleeing border incursions. For 700 years St Michael’s had been the focus of the area. Now, though, it was no longer a symbol of unity in Melbourne. The Evangelical revival, with its new and reinvigorated Anglicanism, had conversely encouraged more villagers to attend the Nonconformist chapels. Each Sunday there were fewer villagers sitting in front of the fearsome old church columns with its capitals of a grinning cat, snarling dog and an ostrich.

Elizabeth’s father, Thomas Perkins from Hinckley, in Leicestershire, had been a ‘hell-fire’ preacher, a man of boiling enthusiasms who electrified his congregation. With fire and brimstone sermons and talk of the Devil, he filled the hastily built chapel. Thomas Budge, a former Melbourne Baptist minister, described Perkins as a man who, ‘in tones of thunder, hurled verses and paragraphs of the sacred writings like huge boulders to crush down all opponents’. Perkins was converted in the Leicestershire village of Barton-in-the-Beans by the ‘Barton Preachers’ – Evangelical revivalists, a splinter group started by a steward to Selina, Countess of Huntingdon. Selina, one of John Wesley’s active supporters, had sold jewels to build sixty-four chapels and a training college for chaplains for her own Connexion, a sect of the Calvinist Methodists, distinct from Wesley’s followers.1 Perkins moved to Melbourne to ‘spread the word’ in 1760, the year that George III came to the throne. Ten years later he walked 180 miles to a meeting in Whitechapel, London, which resulted in the breakaway New Connexion of General Baptists.

This new branch of the Baptists, with their rousing meetings and loud, tuneful hymns, which injected a new vitality and self-reliance into everyday religion, was a result of the Evangelist Revival. Most of the Evangelicals, bar those who were Methodists, remained members of the Church of England, but the vibrancy and colour they brought into services also revitalised English Nonconformity. Perkins returned to Melbourne to become a co-preacher, a post which he kept for twenty-five years. Budge’s history reveals a turn to his career. In about 1785, ‘when somewhat advanced in life, he contracted a marriage which was thought . . . to be an imprudent one, and which led to his retirement from the ministry’. Then in 1792 he fell down a staircase and died. The cause of the accident was never recorded, but, as with many such falls, it could have been an excess of drink. Elizabeth, the eldest of three sisters, was six or seven years old when his coffin was dug into the chapel yard. By then the Baptist church had been established for 180 years. It had started in 1607 when John Smyth, a Cambridge scholar and ordained minister of the Church of England, had defected and fled to Holland where an increasing number of Dissenters were finding refuge from persecution. Known as the first Baptist, he defined the tenets of the new faith while in Holland, which had become a haven to thousands of those Protestants not conforming with the Thirty-Nine Articles introduced in 1571. Among those refusing to go along with the compromised Protestant religion in England was Thomas Helwys, a country landowner from Nottingham. While studying with the pious congregation of exiles in Amsterdam, Smyth and Helwys took up the concept of ‘Believer’s Baptism’ instead of the christening of infants after birth. They took much from the Anabaptists, a spiritual movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries based in Holland, which revolted against church hierarchy and found infant baptism unscriptural.

They believed that infants should be instructed in the Christian church but not made members of it. Faith, it was argued, required intelligence and should not be undertaken by a parent, but by each boy or girl. After being instructed in the basic doctrine of Christianity, each should decide personally to follow Christ. Young children were not of an age to make such a decision; for salvation to be effective, men or women must, by their own choice, believe. This was shocking to the Catholic, Anglican and other churches. A baby was often carried to church through rain, snow, sleet or wind because, if a christening was deferred and a babe died unbaptised, his soul went to limbo, lost with nowhere to go. A child must have the words ‘Dearly beloved, for as much as all men are conceived and born in sin . . .’ said over him and be sprinkled with holy water.

Smyth and Helwys set up the earliest Baptist church at Spitalfields, London, near Guy’s Hospital in 1612.2 Helwys died in prison; Smyth was a Pilgrim Father, sailing from Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620. Eighteen years later the first actual Baptist church in America was set up on Rhode Island by Roger Williams.

The Baptists, like other Nonconformist religions, believed people needed to examine every line of the Bible themselves and not rely on interpretation by the clergy. Followers were encouraged to have a personal and direct relationship with God, with no priest acting as an intermediary.3 The literates took pride in plodding through the hundreds of pages of the Old and New Testaments, and beginning again when they finished. For them, ignorance of the scriptures meant ignorance of Christ.

Church attendance increased in all denominations after Sunday schools had been started by Robert Raikes, the printer, prison reform campaigner and the proprietor of the Gloucester Journal. Seeing prisons crowded with people whose lives had been shaped by deprived childhoods, Raikes opened the first Sunday school in St Catherine’s Street, Gloucester, in July 1780. Any child aged between five and fourteen was admitted, no matter what the state of their clothes. Raikes, the hero of the striving poor, helped to destroy illiteracy. Not until the Education Act of 1870 were elementary schools provided at public expense in England and Wales, and not until 1889 was schooling in England compulsory. The private and ‘dame’s schools’, and the schools set up by charities, mainly the Church of England, were sorely inadequate. The Church, anxious not to lose control and fearful of schools not teaching the Anglican catechism, opposed all government grants. The first grant occurred in 1833 when £20,000 was shared by two religious societies, the National Society (for Anglicans) and the British and Foreign Society (basically non-sectarian but predominantly for Nonconformists).

On Sundays, children who slaved for six days in factories, farms and mines put on their ‘Sunday best’ and attended Sunday school. They were taught the Scriptures, the Catechism, the Psalms and basic reading. The monitoring method of advanced pupils teaching beginners, who, in turn, became teachers themselves, later grew into the pupil–teacher training system. Churches of all denominations brought the rudiment of literacy to the poor,4 but it was the Nonconformists who were at the forefront of the Sunday school movement.

From the time when Henry VIII had dismantled papal authority over the Church of England and parliament had declared him ‘the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England’,5 various splinter groups of Dissenters, Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists,6 Presbyterians and Unitarians7 had become independent of the main church. Unitarians were the most extreme, denying the existence of Hell and rejecting the Trinity – the belief that God reveals himself in three persons, God the Father, God the Son (Jesus) and God the Holy Spirit (or Holy Ghost). While acknowledging Jesus as a teacher, they denied that he was a deity.

After the Reformation anyone not attending services in the Church of England could be prosecuted. This changed during the eighteen years of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, but was revived after the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1858 and the abdication of his son Richard the following year. The restoration of King Charles II in 1660 made life difficult again for Dissenters.