On the 9th of June in 1841, one man set out on a 15 mile walk to Leicester to attend a meeting. While he was doing it, he had a brainwave actually. Brilliant idea, because he had to do this again.
There were a lot of people involved, so he thought, why don't I charter a train? Little did he know that that trip would launch a brand-new type of company that would change the way Britons saw the world. And his name was Thomas Cook.
Today, the travel company that started from these humble beginnings here in Leicestershire is now one of the UK's largest. And to find out how Thomas Cook went from organising one little excursion to planning package holidays all over the globe, I've come to talk to company archivist Paul Smith. And where better than the Great Central Railway in Loughborough, close to where our story starts. Thomas Cook had assistants ready to assist at all stations around the world and I've just spotted mine.
Hello Paul. Hi, how do you do? Pleased to meet you.
I love the uniform. Thank you. Thomas Cook & Sons Limited.
Absolutely. When does this date to? This particular uniform.
dates from about 1930. So tell me a little bit about Thomas Cook and his background. What was his desire to sort of help open the world to the working classes? OK, well, Thomas Cook was very working class himself.
He was the son of a labourer. and the grandson of a Baptist preacher. His father actually died when Thomas was only three.
His mother remarried, and his stepfather died when he was only ten. So Thomas, basically at that point, was taken out of school. He was the main breadwinner for the family. He had a lot on his shoulders at such a young age. He did.
So he originally worked as a gardener's boy. And at the age of 14, he was apprenticed to his uncle as a woodturner and cabinetmaker. Interesting.
Yeah. But really, it was the religious side to his upbringing which was more important. At the age of 20, he went off and became an itinerant Baptist preacher. He covered more than 2,000 miles on foot, travelling around the villages of Leicestershire, Rutland, as far as Stamford, just promoting the Bible, encouraging people to set up Sunday schools, that sort of thing. And it was, in fact, on one of these tours in the village of Baradun in Rutland that he made a statement.
met his wife-to-be. So tell me about that life-changing trip, that walk to Leicester. Yeah, well basically Thomas had the idea to use these newfangled trains to promote temperance to promote social improvement as he saw it he believed that all problems in victorian england were down to alcohol anything he could do to encourage people to you know explore the world do something different would improve society so his idea essentially was to charter a train to take people to a temperance meeting and that was successful in itself yes it was about 500 people went on that first trip they paid a shilling ahead traveled in open carriages and there were two newspaper reports on the trip as well So 500 people became the first to experience a Thomas Cook excursion.
But Cook didn't stop there. He arranged a succession of trips, allowing thousands of people to experience rail travel for the first time around the UK. And on moving to Leicester in 1841, Cook began printing his first small leaflets to accompany his tours. Along with letters and timetables, these survive today.
What was Thomas Cook's first commercial venture? Well, his first commercial venture, believe it or not, was actually a trip to Liverpool, which took place in the summer of 1845. And he actually produced a little handbook. A little guide?
Yep, which is his very first travel-related publication. Now, this was a far more adventurous trip than anything he'd planned before. Not only did it involve an overnight stay, but also it involved negotiations with three different railway companies. Right, linking them together to make the journey. That's right.
In the back of this handbook, He does give a list of hotels within Liverpool where people can stay. Like a little tourist guide. How many people were on the train?
Well, it caused a sensation in Leicester, this trip. He managed to sell 1,200 tickets initially. That's a big train.
That's a big train. But even that didn't satisfy demand, and he had to organise a second trip two weeks later for a further 800 people. So that's 2,000 people from Leicester went to Liverpool. I guess with all this success in mind, he would soon... be ready to cross the Channel?
Well, he was. By the end of the 1840s, Thomas had been to Ireland and his tickets covered the whole of the British Isles, more or less. And he was contemplating trips to places within Europe, to America, to the Holy Land. So where would Cook decide to go on his first venture off the mainland? Well, the Paris exhibition of 1855 beckoned.
But simply organising a trip direct to Paris was far too easy for Thomas Korn. And he then decides to organise a grand circulateur, as he calls it. Well, it would make sense, wouldn't it? Well, absolutely. Which encompassed a trip to Brussels, a river trip down the Rhine, visits to Heidelberg, Baden-Baden, Strasbourg, and finally to Paris.
So we have a circular tour now his original intention was just to sell a travel ticket, but so many people were asking him about Accommodation about foreign exchange and what do they do? How do they cope? So he offered to organise all their accommodation for them for a £5 note.
So this really was the birth of the package holiday right here. It was. You've got accommodation, food and travel, all paid for in advance. That's the package. So in 1872, Thomas Cook was the first to lead a commercial trip around the world.
He was absent for 222 days in total. A long time. And wrote lots of letters as he travelled. He wrote a series of letters to the Times and other newspapers, which he published on his return in a little book.
But he also... He also wrote every Sunday to his wife. We have one of those on display there. So that is Thomas's own handwriting. How charming it is.
They're wonderful. By the time Thomas Cook returned from his globe-trotting, his son sat firmly in the company's driving seat. He built an impressive head office in London and was ready to move the company forward.
Thomas Cook continued to travel the globe by sea. rail and foot, right up until retirement in 1878 at the age of 70. But what it's left us with is a name 130 years later that still conjures up images of sun, sea and sightseeing.