MR. COOK'S CENTURY
By GRAHAM GREENE
ALREADY they seem to belong to history—those tourists of the 3o's ; they have the dignity and the pathos of a period, as they gather, the older ones in extraordinary hats and veils, the younger a little awkward and coltish, on the Continental platform at Victoria. Their baggage is all labelled for the Swiss pensions, the Italian lakes: in their handbags they carry seasick remedies and some of them tiny bottles of brandy; their passports are probably in the hands of the courier, who now kindly and dexterously, with an old-world manner, shepherds them towards the second-class (first on boat), towards adventure—the first view of Mont Blanc, the fancy-dress dance at Grindelwald, the falls of Schlaffhausen (seen through stained glass for a few francs extra.) How sad it is that war prevents the one-hundredth anniversary of the first Cook's excursion being celebrated in a suitable atmosphere—with lots of eau-de-Cologne and steam and shiny picture-papers, and afterwards the smell of oil and sea-gulls and a sense of suppressed ladylike excite- ment, and the scramble along the corridor with the right coupons towards the first meal on the Basle express—every- thing paid for in advance, even the tips.
Of course there was so much more to Cook's than that : that little daily gathering on the Continental platform was rather like the unimportant flower a big business executive may wear in his button-hole for the sake of some early association. Thomas Cook and Son, who, in 1938, could have arranged you an independent tour to Central Africa as easily as to Ostend, had become a world-power which dealt with Prime Ministers: they transported Gordon up the Nile, and afterwards the relief expedition-18,000 troops, 130,000 tons of stores, and 65,000 tons of coal ; they reformed the pilgrim traffic to Mecca, deported " undesirables " from South Africa during the Boer War, bought the railway up Vesuvius, and knocked a gap in the walls of Jerusalem to let the Kaiser in ; before the end of the nineteenth century, under the son, they had far outstripped the dream of the first Thomas Cook, the young wood-turner and teetotaller and Bible-reader of Market Harborough, who on July 5th, 1841, charted a special train to carry his local temperance association from Leicester to Loughborough, where a meeting was to be held in Mr. Paget's park. (The distance was twelve miles, and the return fare is.: it could hardly be less today.) The words of Mr. John Fox Bell, secretary to the Midland Counties Railway, have the right historic ring : " I know nothing of you or your society, but you shall have the train," and Mr. Thomas Cook was quite aware that he was making history. " The whole thing came to me," he said, " by intuition and my spirit recoiled at the idea of imitation." (This refers to the shameful attempt of the Mechanics Institute of Birmingham, who ran an excursion on June 29th to Cheltenham and Gloucester, to question the originality of his inspiration.) The cheers that greeted the thirsty teetotallers as they scrambled from their open scorching trucks, the music of the Loughborough band, the congratulatory speeches in Mr. Paget's park bore Mr. Cook on a great wave of local pride, inspecting hotels as he went, interviewing railroad secretaries, noting points of interest—the fourteenth-century cathedral, the abbey ruin, the majestic water- fall, on out of England into Wales—" From the heights of Snowdon my thoughts took flight to Ben Lomond, and I determined to try to get to Scotland." And get to Scotland he did with 35o men and women—we don't know whether they were teetotallers, and at Glasgow the guns were fired in their honour.
But Europe was another matter : Europe, to the Bible reader and teetotaller, must have presented a knotty ethical prob- lem, and it was not until i 86o, after a personal look-round, that Mr. Cook brought his excursionists to the Continent. It is easy to mock nowadays at the carefully-conducted tour, but there have been times and places when a guide is of great com- fort. " In 1865, through many difficulties, I got my first party to Rome and Naples, and for several years our way was through brigand-infested districts, where military escorts protected us."
By the end of the century—under the rule of the second Cook—the firm had become the Cook's we know today. I have before me a copy of a paper called Cook's Excursionist, for March 18th,1899; and already there were few places in the world to which an excursion had not been arranged—from the Tea and Coffee Rooms of Bora Bimki to the Deansgate Temperance Hotel in Manchester. The link with Mr. Paget's park is still there, not only in the careful choice of hotel but in the advertise- ments—for Dr. E. D. Moore's Cocoa and Milk, and the Corn- pactum Tea Baskets. I like to feel that this—the spring of I899—marks the great serene height of Mr. Cook's tours, for brigands have ceased to trouble, and there is no suspicion that they may one day come again. Keating's Powder has taken the place of the military escort ; Mrs. Welsley Wigg is keeping " an excellent table " in Euston Square, and a young lady, " who last year found them perfectly efficacious ", is cautiously recom- mending Roach's Sea-Sickness Draught—perhaps this year won't be so lucky? At John Piggott's in Cheapside you can buy all the clothes you need for a conducted tour: the long black Chesterfield coat, the Norfolk suit, suitable for Switzerland, and the cap with a little button on top, the Prince Albert, the Leinster overcoat with velvet lapels, and with them, of course, the Gladstone bag strapped and double-strapped, secure against the dubious chambermaid and the foreign porter. What would they have thought—those serene men with black moustaches, and deer-stalkers for the crossing, if they could have seen in a vision the great familiar station-yard, dead and deserted as it was a few months back without a cab, a porter or a policeman, just a notice, " Unexploded Bomb," casually ex- plaining what would have seemed to them the end of every- thing ; no trains for France, no trains for Switzerland, none for Italy, and even the clock stopped? It is, when you come to think of it, a rather sad centenary year.
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