Thomas Cook by Jill Hamilton

Author:Jill Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752495088
Publisher: The History Press

TWENTY-TWO

A Leap in the Dark

Ten years after Thomas had moved Marianne and Annie into his imposing hotel in Leicester, he shifted them, along with his headquarters, into 59 Great Russell Street,1 part of the Duke of Bedford’s estate in fashionable Bloomsbury in the heart of London. Owning a lease on this charming Georgian townhouse delighted Thomas in many ways. For instance, gas had not been widely used in London until about 1860, but the Bedford estate had designed an innovative method to distinguish the houses at night, as each fanlight above the main front doors was distinctly different from its neighbours.

No. 59 was typical of the tall houses of London’s middle-class families. Here the occupants and rooms were kept clean by servants who slept in attics and ate and lived in the kitchen basements, who had to trudge up and down four flights of stairs with water from a pump in the basement. Thomas’s hotels in Leicester and in London, perpetual struggle though they were, brought in a steady income. They were run as one enterprise, as shown on a surviving printed invoice headed ‘London, Cook’s British Museum Boarding House, 59 Great Russell St., Bloomsbury, Leicester, Cook’s Commercial & Family Temperance Hotel, 63 Granby-Street’, which shows a total of £1 4s for three days. Thomas, Marianne and Annie would now centre their lives in London for the next thirteen years.

Not only was Thomas stretched between Leicester and London, but his feet were in two camps. Although always aware of working-class sentiments and traditions, he constantly readapted his principles and inclinations. Compromise as he did, he still refused to go to theatres or to advertise them in his newspaper. He continued, like all strict Baptists, to look askance at the immoderation of modern entertainment, especially playhouses, music halls, dice, cards, gambling, church raffles and theatres. Plays were dismissed for their sexual and bawdy content.2 In his forty years of setting up package holidays Thomas avoided anything that he considered was hedonistic or louche. Even when Sir Arthur Sullivan’s light operas with lyrics by Sir William S. Gilbert were the rage and Trial by Jury, HMS Pinafore, and The Pirates of Penzance took London by storm, Thomas would not attend.

The year 1862, though, saw Thomas’s transformation from ‘provincial gentleman’ to ‘London gent’ with a black bowler hat, folded umbrella and frock coat. This was a classic case of putting a good face on things, a way of lessening the uncertainties of his status. His awareness that clothes were also a way of adding style and glamour to travelling resulted in the frock-coats which later became a uniform for his tour guides. But sartorial elegance escaped Thomas – a photograph of him sitting on the ground reveals loose socks that had slipped down to his ankles.

In Great Russell Street, limits on advertising and business announcements meant that Thomas could only have a discreet brass plate near the front door indicating either the boarding house or his travel business. As the Leicester office was

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