Free Thomas Cook by Jill Hamilton

supporters.’ 1
    The bleak picture of a debtors’ prison painted by Dickens just ten years earlier in
Oliver Twist
(1837–9) remained. Those who failed to pay taxes, rent or debts usually pawned or sold their household belongings – everything from silver-plated hairbrushes to wedding rings – and, if they still failed to meet their creditors, they ended up in special jails. As in the workhouses, inmates often made potato sacks and baskets.
    Declared bankrupts were now exempt from prison, so Thomas quickly made himself his own petitioner. Bankruptcy hearings for ‘T. Cook, printer of Granby Street, Leicester’ took place in Nottingham on 15 January and again on 12 February 1847. The records do not reveal any further proceedings. Thomas was discharged and his print works and travel company continued seemingly unaffected, and he did not move from his old address. He may have been bailed out by John Ellis. Chagrined and bothered though Thomas was by his bankruptcy, he was determined not to lose his base. Like many Victorians, he followed the homespun philosophy of another railway man, Samuel Smiles, 2 who promoted the values of hard work, thrift and progress. This author of
Self Help
was a former administrator on the Leeds and Thirsk Railway and South-Eastern Railway.
    Thomas’s personal setbacks did not prevent him appreciating that it was another year of triumph for Nonconformists. As with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts nineteen years earlier, they had again managed to chip away at the status of the Church of England. The Manchester Act 1847 reduced the number of bishops in the House of Lords from forty-three to twenty-six – a reduction that was seen as a stepping stone for the Dissenters in their long campaign against discrimination.
    Well before Christmas optimistic sentences flew from Thomas’s pen: ‘The year 1847 opened more auspiciously for Scotland, and I had that summer three large excursions, the railways from York to Berwick to Edinburgh being available.’ This sudden jump in trade was despite the discomfort of train journeys – well illustrated by Frederic Chopin’s descriptions of his trips the following year. Henry Broadwood, the maker of fine pianos, booked a ticket for Chopin and three others for the arduous twelve-hour journey from Euston to Edinburgh: one extra seat for his legs, one for his new servant Daniel and one for his pianist/manager. In October, when returning to London, the rail link over the Tyne was still not completed on the east-coast route, so he was forced, as Thomas’s tourists often were, to walk across the bridge at Berwick.
    After one of these journeys north, Thomas, with a large party, followed the Queen and Prince Albert. Travelling across moors, around estuaries, sea cliffs, beaches and rocks, and on perilous routes by sea and land, his group were five days behind the Queen – sailing around Bute, along the Crinan Canal and from the Atlantic coast to Oban. From there, like the Queen, they went to the islands of Staffa and Iona, circumnavigating the island of Mull, and afterwards visited Glencoe and Fort William and went on the Caledonian Canal to Inverness. Being in the wake of a royal party set an example which would be repeated.
    Thomas’s empathy with the mysterious islands of Iona and Staffa matched that of Mendelssohn. The appeal of seeing the graves of warrior kings, ecclesiastical dignitaries and many a shipwrecked mariner was sadly contrasted with the poverty of the inhabitants. Mendelssohn’s gift to the people there was his
Hebrides
Overture or
Fingal’s Cave
, 3 a musical celebration of its wild shores. He wrote after his tour in 1829: ‘. . . many huts without roofs, many unfinished, with crumbling walls, many ruins of burnt houses; and even these inhabited spots are but sparingly scattered over the country. Long before you arrive at a place you hear it talked of; the rest is heath, with red or brown heather, withered fir stumps, and white