THE HOUSE OF COOK.*
FROM time immemorial it has been the custom of the great in the land to entertain an official of some kind whose special
function was to declare to the world the height, width, and breadth of his patron's fortune and virtues. The ancient Princes of Britain had their bards to sing their praises in more or less immortal verse ; the nobility of a later and less poetic age bad their heralds and pursuivants, not the least among whose duties was on great occasions to proclaim at full length the style and titles of their masters. In our day the conditions of greatness may be changed, but the lowly who have been exalted are second to none in their desire to pro- claim their greatness upon the housetops. For fifty years creation has looked on in awe and amazement at the manner in which the house of Cook has gradually asserted its dominion over the reluctant Continent, and even cast out its shoe over more distant regions. As the German rhyme says about a very different Power :—
" Die gauze Welt erstaunte sich nicht wenig
Welch' eM neues Reich entstanden ist."
Their empire is acknowledged far and wide, and the name of Cook enrolled among the great powers of Europe ; and should there be wanting a devoted adherent to proclaim, " De tree haute et tree puissants princes, Messieurs Thomas Cook et file, largesse " ? The occasion of their jubilee has not passed without a fit laureate appearing to chronicle their greatness. Whether he has been chosen by the heads of the House of Cook according to the ancient laudable custom we have mentioned, or whether it is only spontaneous enthusiasm that has urged Mr. W. Fraser Rae to dash into print on their behalf, we are unable to tell; but the result is very much the same. The book before us is entitled in either case to rank as the Saga of the House of Cook.
We are rather disappointed to find that there is in the manner of carrying it out so much that is purely characteristic of the nineteenth century. The panegyric of the past degenerates in the hands of Mr. Fraser Rae into nothing more than an exceedingly long-winded advertisement. We do not even consider it as a first-rate specimen of an advertisement. Though one would expect to find the repre- sentative of Messrs. Cook well versed in all the arts of publicity, we are compelled to admit that he does not hold his own with the men of letters devoted to other prominent firms. There is none of the poetic grace and exuberant fancy that adorn the legends connected with the name of Mr. Eno, nor is there any of the picturesque conception which makes the whole world reverence the name of Messrs. Pears. We miss alike the easy lightness with which the praise of Mr. Beecham's pills is sung, and the epigrammatic brevity which marks the advertisements of Mr. Colman's mustard. Nor can we find any compensating quality in the studied pomposity of Mr. Cook's laureate. It is true that he does seem at times to
• The Business of Travel : a Fifty Years' Record of Progress. By W. Fraser Rae. London : Thomas Cook and Son. 1891. have a certain sense of the fitness of things, which leads him to suit his composition to the subject he is dealing with. His style then approaches closely to that of the popular guide- book, or rather, perhaps, to the viva-voce utterances of the personal conductor. Here, he points out, the traveller through his weary pages will pause to admire the sagacity of Mr. Thomas Cook ; here he will catch an impressive glimpse of the energy and activity of the present head of the firm ; here, again, he will gaze down from the heights of European morality into the abyss of Transatlantic corruption, and shudder at the rapacity of the American Railway Companies. The reader is expected to follow his lead with something of
that sheep-like--but perhaps rather sullen—submission which we have ofttimes marked among the subjects of Mr. Cook ; nor shall we be surprised if he even emulates the secret yawns which seem to be wrung from those estimable persons, even at the very moment when their conductor becomes most instructive.
To any reader less mild of mood, Mr. Fraser Rae takes up a very aggressive attitude, bringing forward his least ques- tionable assertions in a kind of " contradict me and I'll punch your head " style which is deeply impressive. " His manners," if we may quote a remark originally applied to the excellent Mr. Pumblechook, "is given to blusterous," and he spends much time in bitter or scornful refutation of obsolete criticisms on Mr. Cook and his system, of which the world has long ceased to retain any recollection. Among the principal objects of his wrath is a Mr. J. T. Wood, who appears to have told an American audience that the followers of Mr. Cook were in England called " Cookites," a name which is quite new to us. Mr. Fraser Rae explains at length that this is extremely natural, as Mr. Cook had " done service for which others wished to be known by his name, just as the admirers of William Pitt called themselves • Pittites ; ' of Charles James Fox, Foxites ; ' and of Sir Robert Peel, Peelites.' " We need not comment on the modesty of this remark, which may be entirely due to Mr. Rae's personal enthusiasm ; but we trust that the firm of whom he is writing may have grace enough to be a little ashamed of such extravagant com- parisons. Mr. Wood " went on to say that the Cookites ' are generally very ancient maids, and still more antique bachelors." Was this very silly remark—uttered sixteen years ago—worth Mr. Rae's fierce rejoinder? "Even if the tourist-parties were generally composed of old maids and old bachelors, no one could have ground for complaint. There is no law or custom forbidding maids and bachelors of mature years making a tour in any part of the world; yet Mr. Wood's statement was simply untrue, as the unmarried element did not preponderate in the tourist-parties which visited Ephesus under Mr. Thomas Cook's guidance." The gravity of this last rejoinder is sublime.
A still greater sinner, however, against the majesty of Cook was a pestilent person named Lever—of whose " talent for producing fiction," the head of the House handsomely remarked, " he would speak with all possible respect "—who was her Britannic Majesty's Consul at sundry Italian and Austrian towns, and who, basely disguising himself under the unrecognisable pseudonym of " Cornelius O'Dowd," wrote articles in a pernicious publication called Blackwood's Magct- sine, in which he spoke of Mr. Cook and his merry men as if they were not absolutely a boon and a blessing to all the countries they visited. Foreigners, he observed, said of the excursionists that " they deride our church ceremonies, they ridicule our cookery, they criticise our dress, they barbarise our language." We can only say our- selves, from personal experience on the Continent, that, what- ever they may have done in Charles Lever's time, the class of tourists whom Mr. Cook's philanthropic efforts brings over in battalions to crowd the places they do not care to see, are at present amiably pre-eminent in their profound contempt for all foreign manners and customs, and the absolute frankness with which they express it to the poor natives of those un- civilised parts, when by any chance they are able to com- municate with them. Mr. Rae, however, boldly remarks that " when Lever penned the foregoing lines, he was either writing nonsense, and doing so consciously, or else he was temporarily irresponsible for what he wrote." Mr. Cook went even further than this, actually having written to the Foreign Office to call for some official censure upon the presumptuous wretch who had dared to criticise him. "Lord Clarendon," Mr. Rae
vaguely tells us, "could do little more than express his sym- pathy," which is not surprising; but our author—a thorough- going advocate, for whom Ego el Coguus meus would be a fitting device—does not seem to have any appreciation of the astounding impudence of Mr. Cook's demand. All his astonishment is reserved for the " ungentlemanly con- duct" of Charles Lever in expressing his opinion on a matter of public interest. To refute the latter's asser- tions, Mr. Rae informs us that Lever "beggared himself with gaming at Baden-Baden." that he and his children, and "sometimes even Mrs. Lever," wore " very conspicuous habili- ments," and that he infringed Court etiquette at Carlsruhe,— all of which circumstances, though highly interesting and in excellent taste, have about as much bearing on the question as the anecdote with which we are also favoured of the indecent conduct of a young English traveller at Rome in the eighteenth century.
We would not say that, because Mr. Fraser Rae has not told it well, the story of the rise and progress of the house of Cook was entirely without interest. It is an ordinary tale of commercial energy and push, backed, we have no doubt, with every virtue that is required for a career of lucrative philan- thropy. It would be idle to weigh the high moral purpose of facilitating the intercourse of nations, and thus promoting the general peace and prosperity of the world, against the practical views that may have been entertained of material profit to the promoter. There is no shame in the latter, and we are ready to allow any reasonable amount of disinterested motive. The history of the first step of Mr. Cook's career is of some interest, and will probably be new to most readers. Fifty years ago, Thomas Cook, the founder of the firm, was a wood- turner at Market Harborough, and an ardent Temperance advocate. A Temperance Society to which he belonged pro- posed to hold a demonstration at Loughborough, and it occurred to Mr. Cook that it would give an additional attraction to the meeting if he could get a special train run from Leicester to Loughborough. The new extension of the Midland Railway from Derby to Rugby, including the piece of line to be traversed, had only recently been opened, and was still a source of great interest to the locality, where rail- ways were still regarded with a veneration unknown to our day. The idea, therefore, was eagerly taken up, and, the Railway Company consenting to provide a train, the first regular railway excursion was accomplished under Mr. Cook's superintendence.
Such was the success of this little expedition, that other Societies wishing to make excursions applied to Mr. Cook for advice as to arrangements, and his position became so firmly established as a conductor of cheap trips, that he found it worth while to turn this occupation into a regular profession. The record of the subsequent progress of Mr. Cook and his family is of no particular interest. They can take excursion- ists all over the world now; they have even contracted to deliver troops at a certain point by a fixed time ; and it is one of their yearly duties to conduct an Indian Mahommedan pilgrimage to Mecca. The only thing they have not done was to bring the foreign Sovereigns over to the Jubilee, and it does appear that some of the Indian Princes were confided to their charge. It seems natural enough that their power should be most emphatically asserted in the easily dominated East, where there is rarely any appeal against their jurisdiction. The present writer witnessed an amusing instance of the supremacy of Cook at the railway-station at Alexandria. A legion of loafers hanging about the gates had observed a carriage approach containing their natural prey, an English family—probably endued with the haziest notions regarding the Egyptian currency and the proper amount of remunera- tion for porters—and with a combined rash precipitated themselves upon the luggage. A sad stern smile of mingled pity and contempt came over the face of the driver as he saw their eagerness ; from his lips there dropped the simple mono- syllable, " Cook !" and the birds of prey sank back abashed to wait for some more defenceless victim.
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