Thomas
Cook (22nd November 1808 to 18th July 1892)
If you were
playing Trivial Pursuits and was
asked which man established
one of the biggest holiday businesses in the UK I'm sure only a few seconds
would pass by before you thought of Thomas Cook. He’s buried in Welford
Cemetery which overlooks Leicester city and I went to find him. Being wealthy I
thought he'd be in the section where the mill owners are buried under huge
headstones but he's in a top corner plot. He's under an impressive headstone
though - well worthy of most famous person in the cemetery. I wonder what he'd
make of the company's demise and £1.6 million debt pile?
He was born in
Derbyshire into a hard life - aged 5 his dad died and by 10 he was working as a
gardener for 1 pence per day (to help feed his family.) As a teenage he worked
for a printing company in Loughborough, printing religious pamphlets in line
with his strict Baptist upbringing. Aged 18 he became a preacher and toured the
region as a village evangelist. Aged 20 he became a Baptist minister. One day
the-33-year-old was walking from Market Harborough to Leicester to attend a
meeting of the Temperance Society and was throwing a problem around in his
mind: how was he going to get 540 temperance campaigners from Leicester railway
station to a rally in Loughborough eleven miles away. This problem would spawn
his famous travel business. He started to organise the transportation of big
groups of people and set up a company. Within a decade it was transporting
thousands of people to the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London.
Aged 47 he started transporting folk overseas for the first time - across the
channel to The Paris Exhibition of 1855. The company sprouted quickly and
within two years he was arranging holidays all over Europe. Aged 77 his
steamers monopolised of Nile River passenger traffic.
In his final
years his eyesight was failing. He contracted dysentery and died the following
year aged 83. His son John continued the business. What would Thomas think if
he knew the Thomas Cook Group would one day have sales of £7.8 billion/annum
and employ 22,000 people? He'd also wonder how it could implode into a pile of
dust and debt.
He shares the
grave with his wife and their daughter. Life wasn’t all piles of profit and
pleasure: being a wealthy family they had a new gas hot water system installed
in their home in Leicester but one day their 35-year-old daughter Annie was
found drowned in the bath. Rumours abounded of suicide as her dad had forbade her
to marry a man who worked for the company. We’ll never know if this is true
(she’d told a friend she’d fainted in the bath previously) but Thomas noted the
new heater was lit and the bathroom smelt horribly. The coroner concluded the
bathroom was so hot that Annie had probably fainted then drowned.
What would
Thomas think of his company now? Surely something so mammoth could never fail?
I did a salute, thought how the mighty fall, said "Bye Tom" and left.
The last line
is true – he did bring travel to millions…
