Thomas Cook, John Cook, and the Rise of the Tourism Industry

Thomas Cook and his son John Mason Cook were pioneers of the idea of a travel agency to manage tourist holidays. But Thomas 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 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy be
Wilson and Tracy. We have been traveling a lot lately.
I've been traveling a whole bunch and because of that,

(00:21):
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. We're just handling the needs of fifty people
who all had differing desires and internal clocks and whatnot.

(00:45):
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 marveled 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 find the per and that most
people point to and say, this is a person who
started it. But I was surprised because the man most
often referenced as the father of the modern travel industry

(01:08):
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 his deeply
held religious beliefs. So today we were talking about Thomas Cook,
but we're also talking about his son, John Mason Cook. Uh.
Modern travelers in the UK in particular are probably well

(01:30):
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 packages that could be sold for all
of your needs to be attended to. You just buy
one thing and then it's taken care of. Yeah, it

(01:52):
didn't start that way. That happened incrementally before they got
to the buy your one thing idea, but it really
you do see the progression of how this concept started
and how it it started to add on different pieces
until it became package travel. Thomas Cooke was born on
November twenty, eighteen o eight, in Derbyshire, England. His parents,
John and Elizabeth Cook were very poor and John worked

(02:15):
as a laborer. Died when Thomas was just four years old.
Elizabeth remarried to James Smith third not long after John's death.
Thomas's formal education was rather brief. He attended school only
until the age of ten, and at that point he
started working as a helper to an estate gardener and
he worked in that position for four years, at which

(02:36):
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 since he had to
go to work full time to help the family, and
that was a common pattern. Sunday schools in England during

(02:58):
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
a Sunday school today. Um, not as much. I mean,
certainly there was religious uh study involved, but it was
also literally like sort of a standard education that was

(03:19):
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 Thomas's mother also
wanted her son to change churches. It appears that Thomas

(03:40):
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 would think of Sunday school
in like modern America, for example. It really was not

(04:02):
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 um different concept of how the
whole thing works. Uh. Cook's religious devotion eventually supplanted his
work in cabinetry. After five years as his uncle's apprentice,
he left that job behind to become a missionary, and

(04:25):
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
with his work, the twenty year old Cook met a

(04:46):
young woman named Marianne Mason, another Sunday school teacher who
was a year older than Thomas. Thomas and Marianne were
sweethearts for four years before they got married on March second,
thirty three. That's another thing that made me chuckle. In
some of the uh biographical writeups of him, people will
talk about what a long courtship that was. Where it's
again in the modern era of not so much uh.

(05:08):
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 thirty four. They welcomed his son,
John Mason Cook. In eighteen thirty five. They had another

(05:31):
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 circulated idea at the time,
and they decided that they wanted to lead by example

(05:53):
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 latter half of the eighteen thirties,
Cook reached back to his preaching days. At this time,

(06:15):
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 wholesome and the hardest liquid serve
was ginger beer. He also founded a periodical called the

(06:38):
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 was walking to a Temperance meeting
in Lester, near his home, he had a bolt of inspiration.

(06:59):
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 Lester when he
had this idea, and when he got there, Cook outlined
as planned the attendees. He pitched the plan that they
would hire a train specifically to get their members to

(07:22):
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 fivet one,
just a month after he had his idea, Thomas led
a group of five hundred members of the Temperance movement
on a trip. It was a train ride from Leicester

(07:43):
to Leughtboro to attend a meeting in 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 people is a lot of people.
That is a lot of people. I'm mentioned at the
top of the show how I marveled at managing fifty
people on a trip. Five hundred seems bananas. To bolster

(08:08):
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 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

(08:30):
a bookstore to sell that literature in He also printed
and sold guide books and almanacs through this system, and
next he opened to Temperance hotels. The first in Derby
was managed by his mother Elizabeth, and his wife Mary
Anne managed the second, which was in Lester. Coming up,
we'll talk about how Thomas transitioned from wrangling groups of
temperance supporters to managing travel as a business, but first

(08:54):
we'll pause for a sponsor break. Thomas Cook had since
that first rail trip from Leicester to Leftboro in eighteen
forty one, continued to arrange trips for temperance supporters to
attend meetings and share their ideology throughout England. But in

(09:15):
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 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

(09:39):
for travelers at Leicester, Derby and Nottingham. This included excursions
to Canarvon and a hike up Mount Snowdon. He was
conscious of 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 d fifty people on
this Liverpool tour, offering them both practical whole advice and

(10:01):
encouragement to abstain from drink while enjoying the journey. This
handbook was the first of many he assembled them for
all of us 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

(10:22):
more ambitious project than any of Thomas Cook's Temperance trips
had been, but it went well. So well the Cooks
started to 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

(10:43):
Cook's first real flop since he started planning group travel.
The several hundred people 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 that train passengers
were not allowed to get off and on it stops.

(11:03):
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 were already miserable. The next leg of
the trip was aboard the steamer or Drawson, 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 uh so some of the group

(11:24):
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 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

(11:46):
to all his tour groups. This summer of problems caused
a temporary halt to Cook's travel business. He was also
seeing new competitors emerged in the publishing market, some of
whom were printing books and pamphlets on Temperance as well. Yeah,
so he had he had kind of planned on this
this travel thing going well, and it started well and
then wasn't. And then this other area of the market

(12:08):
that he had cornered was suddenly having some competitors and
he just kind of needed to regroup. So he slowly
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

(12:29):
presented itself to Cook in the form of the Great
Exposition of eighteen fifty one, which has made numerous appearances
on the podcast over the years. Cook booked travel arrangements
for more than a 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

(12:49):
Exhibition Herald, an excursion advertiser. This effort to create Exposition
tours was incidentally made it the urging of previous podcast
subject and Crystal List architect Sir Joseph Paxton, who hoped
that Cook would make it possible for the workers outside
of London to see the hall. Paxston remained a supporter
of Cook's work long after the Exposition, and Cook's Exhibition

(13:12):
Harold was later published under the name Cook's Excursionist. And
after the Great Expo, Thomas Cook built his offerings up
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,

(13:33):
we should note, all inclusive tours. Cook's agency booked travel
and outlined itineraries and provided guide books, but tourists were
responsible for booking their own lodging and getting their own food.
And as his travel business grew, Thomas Cook ceased operation
of his printing efforts so that he could focus more
on tourism. He still printed guide books, but he wasn't

(13:53):
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 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.

(14:14):
And so to expand into this new phase of business
cooked in two things. First, he opened another office in London.
Similar to the reasons that he moved to Lester. This
shift to London offered 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

(14:35):
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 Exposition Universale 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. And addition into

(15:00):
booking the trip as a comprehensive package, he also offered
a currency exchange service to his travelers, yea At this point,
he was offering literally like full service travel. By the
fall of eighteen sixty three, Cook had book travel 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,

(15:24):
and before long a Cook's tour became synonymous with guided
tourist experiences. 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

(15:44):
firm in England, each with a full staff. John was
made partner that year and the firm became Thomas Cook
and Son. John had been highly instrumental in getting Cook's
company into booking travel across the Atlantic, and he had
streamlined the way the business rands make everything more efficient.
But even so, John had been really reluctant to step
into the role of partner. After the popularity of Thomas

(16:07):
Cook and Son's offering for travel to France and Switzerland,
the firm started offering tours to Italy as well. As
we mentioned, John helped get 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

(16:27):
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 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.

(16:49):
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
traveled along with his clients on the company's first Round
the World excursion, which ran from eighteen seventy two eighteen
seventy three. It took two hundred twenty two days, and
his being there was possible in part because he had

(17:11):
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 get
into that after we take a break and hear from
one of the sponsors that keeps stuff you missed in
history class going. Thomas and John Cook did not always

(17:35):
agree on how their business should run, even though John
was made a partner, and this ultimately caused serious problems there.
I read some historians that suggested that like 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. Uh So. While Thomas was
shepherding that First World Tour, for example, John settled the

(17:58):
firm's main offices into a new, fancier and more 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,

(18:18):
but that did not work out. Over the next several years,
Thomas and John were increasingly at odds and the US
partnership fell apart, which added even more strain to 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,

(18:40):
about how their business should run. Thomas had always dreamed
big in terms of trips, but 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,

(19:00):
envisioned much grander things. He really believed that they could
be much more financially lucrative, and 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,

(19:22):
not business. This strife between Thomas and John wasn't exactly new.
It had 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

(19:43):
John returned to work for his father in eighteen sixty five,
it had been because he had a wife and a
child to support, 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

(20:04):
removed himself from the business entirely. He moved full time
back to Lester, where he had 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

(20:27):
notes for travelers, which evolved into travelers checks. It has
proved to be a very lucrative enterprise that makes traveler's
checks older than I imagined. Yeah, I think they were
first calling them circular checks. Uh. And yeah, they eventually
set this up again. John, I mean, was very smart

(20:48):
about business, and his father was very smart about putting
the other 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 to electing
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. Uh. John also negotiated government contracts

(21:12):
for 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 Sudan
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

(21:32):
he 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 queens to
jubilees and what seemed 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

(21:53):
part of a mission initialized by the British Government's India Office,
Cooks bears were too high that deal and did. Thomas
and his wife Mary Anne 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.

(22:14):
There was 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, Mary Anne 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 in the Temperance movement.
He did eventually lose his sight. In one Thomas, Cook

(22:37):
and son celebrated the company 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 employees, and the next

(22:58):
in line to run things were John 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 that was on July. He

(23:22):
had had a stroke. He was buried in Leicester on July.
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 dred pounds,
but the amount that he bequeathed in his will was
four thousand, two hundred twenty five pounds, which has left

(23:44):
some historians 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 cottage for the poor over the years. Uh there
is still a lot of puzzling over how exactly he

(24:06):
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, John made sure that
the Cook firm was their travel partner. In eighteen ninety eight,

(24:27):
while escorton Kaiserville, Hell in the second on a trip
to the Holy Land, John Cook became ill, most likely
with dysenterry, and though John returned home, he continued to
be unwell for several months leading up to his death
on March six. Johnson's Frank Ernest and Burt took over
the travel agency and it's many offices, and the company

(24:48):
continued to flourish. They kept printing The Excursionist, although the
name was changed to Travelers Gazette, and in nineteen nineteen
they became the first UK travel agent to offer air bookings.
Thomas Cook's grandsons sold the business in to a Belgian
firm for three point five million pounds, and the firm
that Cook started still exists under the name Thomas Cook,

(25:11):
although in recent times it has had some struggles. In
May of this year, which is The Guardian reported that
the company lost one point five billion euros due to
bregit uncertainty. People were canceling trips because they didn't know
what was going to happen next. And then a few
weeks later reports hitting the news that Folson International, that's
the Chinese conglomerate that owns Club Med was interested in

(25:33):
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
while before you will hear it, they announced their move
of their digital marketing office to Manchester from London and

(25:53):
new efforts to market their airline division. So regardless of
what happens next to the company 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 standard
vacation spot for his clients. And this way he planted

(26:13):
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 he
went to in Switzerland would be like, we have a
booming tourist economy, we should court tourism, and like that

(26:36):
cycle would happen over and over and over. Uh. And
in many ways, he really ended up kind of shifting
the way that that various areas managed their their economics
because that, again, tourism is a big business. Um. Do
you want to hear about a fun card? I sure do.
Is very very cute. Uh, it is from our listeners

(26:58):
Shelby and Shelby has the most spectacular penmanship. She rises
dear Holly and Tracy, I've listened to stuff you missed
in history class for years, even before y'all were the hosts.
I have always loved history, and I have learned so
much from the podcast. I've wanted to write in and
send you something for a long time, but only recently
finally found something I thought you might like. It's stickers

(27:19):
of cats and space. I don't have a cat, but
I know y'all are big fans of felines. Hope you
like them. Thanks for all your hard work, UH informing
me and many others throughout the years. She writes, PS,
there are a couple of non feline space stickers, but
they also still reminded me of y'all. And then PPS.
I don't have any pets currently, but I do love

(27:39):
drawing them and I do commissions occasionally. You can check
out her instagram, which is at artful Vice. She doesn't
really really beautiful work, and these cat stickers are adorable,
and it really is sort of the intersection of so
many things that delight me that um, I could not
be more enthused. I love them so she'd have heard
to think of us. Thank you so much, Shelby. I

(28:01):
love the stickers. Thank you for them with Tracy when
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(28:21):
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