This is Thomas Cook. The face of an earnest Victorian high achiever. How sad that today the collapse of the company he founded way back in 1841 should have been announced. Of course, my heart bleeds for all those whose holidays have been cut short or ruined but I also have a little space to grieve the loss to our high streets of the name of a great tourism pioneer.
Thomas Cook wasn't an obvious global entrepreneur. An ardent Baptist and enthusiast for the temperance movement, he started out as a cabinet maker. Both his work promoting his carpentry skills and his need to proselytise for the teetotal cause required him to move around the country from his home in Market Harborough. The arrival of the first commercial railways facilitated these journeys and by 1841 he was collecting tickets for 500 Temperance Society members on their way from Leicester to Loughborough via the new Midland Counties Railway at one shilling a time. By 1851, he was organising outings for 150,000 to the Great Exhibition in London and, in 1855, came his first trip overseas in what we would recognise as the earliest group tour of Europe. Two groups travelled through Belgium, France and Germany ending up at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. These tours were followed by tours to Italy and Greece, echoing the Grand Tour journeys which had been available to only the richest in society, and eventually all over the world. Cook's genius was to issue his tour guests with a single circular ticket for all their rail journeys and vouchers for their hotel stays and meals. Hassle-free mass tourism was born.
Visiting ancient sites was always a draw on a Thomas Cook tour. In 1865, he hired two steamers on the River Nile and lured tourists to Luxor and the Pyramids and four years later, he himself undertook a world tour from Egypt to China via the Suez Canal. Even long haul was not beyond his ambittion.
Not all early Thomas Cook tours were a success. Perhaps weary travellers returning after cancelled holidays this week can console themselves with the tragic tale of Frederick Vyner. Vyner was the son of Lady Mary Vyner of Newby Hall and in 1870, he set off with his intended fiance Constance (well the family believed he would propose), her sister and brother-in-law, Lord and Lady Muncaster on a Thomas Cook excursion to the classical sites of Greece. Disaster struck. The group were captured and held hostage by a notorious group of Greek bandits. The women and Frederick's future brother-in-law, Lord Muncaster, were released - the brigands apparently were under the impression that Lord Muncaster was related to Queen Victoria and would have no problem laying his hands on a ransom of £25,000 -perhaps £2 million in today's money. Frederick was murdered before the ransom could be raised. He was 23.
If you want to reflect upon the relative dangers (or safety) of foreign travel, you could do worse than visit some of the fine church architecture erected in Frederick Vyner's memory by his grieving family. Christ the Consoler, in the grounds of Newby Hall, and St Mary's at Studley Royal, both in Yorkshire, were commissioned from the great Victorian architect William Burges and at Muncaster Castle, a window by Henry Holland graces the ancient church of St Michael and All the Angels.