Free Thomas Cook by Jill Hamilton Page B

the railways were not long term, so he had no comeback. Thomas’s plans for the Scottish tours had been approved each season by the committees that controlled traffic in Scotland, so it had always been a hand-to-mouth affair. Nor did he have a monopoly of the trade, as there were now other excursion operators, some good, some inefficient, but all ready to take away his customers. Just as Scotland was the mainstay of his operations, in return dozens of Scottish hotels and boarding houses relied on his trade. Many of them, pretty little places covered in roses and honeysuckle tucked away in the hills, changed hands.
    Now, after being a celebrated railway excursionist, Thomas had the indignity of going back to horse-drawn carriages. It would be several years before he got into his stride again. Unwilling to abandon his touring company, Thomas organised ‘numerous Coach Trips to Belvoir Castle, Melbourne Gardens, &c. &c.’, mostly in Leicestershire and nearby counties. Oddly enough, Thomas never took tours to Bosworth Field, where the final battle of the Wars of the Roses had ended with Richard III slain by Henry Tudor’s army. 1
    Thomas’s bumper coach visits to ancestral homes were a century, almost to the year, before their large-scale opening up after the Second World War. In the 1940s and 1950s, when the Marquis of Bath charged tourists a shilling to enter Longleat, or the Duke of Bedford a similar sum to enter Woburn, it was seen as an innovation. Long forgotten were the many stately homes that had earlier allowed visitors. The visitors, though, were usually not members of the working class. The Elizabethan home of the Devonshires, Chatsworth, in the 1760s had welcomed guests on ‘two public days in a week’, and the ‘strangers’ book’ at Wilton, in 1776, listed 2,324 visitors. By the 1790s, Woburn restricted visitors to Mondays, yet other grand houses continued to receive visitors by the hundreds. Housekeepers pocketed so many tips from visitors that Horace Walpole joked that he was tempted to marry the housekeeper of Strawberry Hill, his stuccoed and battlemented pseudo castle at Twickenham. 2 Until the time of Thomas’s day trippers, no entrance fees were fixed, 3 but, seeing the market potential of stately homes and gardens, Thomas blazed a trail. Increased numbers of paying visitors were a symbol of social change, something which many owners, even those who opened their houses and gardens, feared. The Duke of Devonshire, known as the ‘bachelor Duke’, was an exception.
    A lonely man hampered by poor hearing, he became close to two architects, Jeffrey Wyattville and Joseph Paxton. With them he created magnificent settings for his newly acquired paintings and antiques at Chatsworth, in the heart of the Peak District National Park, reputedly the finest stately home in Britain. Like many avid collectors, the Duke enjoyed displaying his collections, so the powdered footmen of Chatsworth opened the stately doors to Thomas’s tourists. With awe the visitors ascended the main staircase to the majestic statue of Mercury and stood enthralled under the richly painted ceilings. Room after room, including the new long wing designed by Wyattville, was crammed with portraits in ornate gilt frames and one of Europe’s finest collections of drawings. One sumptuous suite had, between 1570 and 1581, housed Victoria’s ancestor, Mary Queen of Scots, for eleven of the long years of melancholy captivity imposed on her by her cousin Elizabeth. By visiting Chatsworth, once again, Thomas was following the footsteps of Victoria and Albert, who had stayed there in 1843. Lord Melbourne, who had also been invited, had left an unhappy man. Victoria had few minutes to spare to talk to him and found him duller than ever. 4
    More exciting than the house, for some, were Chatsworth’s 105 acres of gardens. Here they could see tall palm trees and exotic lilies from South America inside Paxton’s massive Great Conservatory – ‘the