THOMAS COOK

Thomas Cook was born in 1808 in Melbourne, Derbyshire. He left school, around the age of ten, becoming a Baptist missionary in 1828. A strict teetotaller, Thomas, now a cabinet maker, walked from his home in Market Harborough to the nearby town of Leicester to attend a temperance meeting. At the meeting, he suggested that a special train be engaged to carry the Leicester temperance campaigners to a meeting in Loughborough a month later. The first package tour in history was organised for 9 June, when a train was chartered from the Midland Railway Company to take the group of about 500 on the 12-mile journey. He charged the passengers a shilling for the return journey.

Thomas immediately saw the potential and became the world’s first tour operator. From there, he began to arrange leisure excursions, taking a percentage of the railway ticket sales. In 1844, the Midland Counties Railway Company agreed to make a permanent arrangement with him provided he found the passengers. By this time, Cook was working from London. In 1856, he introduced a railway tour of Europe and in the early 1860s he began the travel firm of Thomas Cook and son, which now included tours of the USA. His firm took on military transport and postal services for England and Egypt during the 1880s. Thomas Cook died in Bergen, Norway, in 1892. The business passed to his only son, John Mason, who had been his partner since 1864. The company became state-owned in 1948 – at the time, it was the biggest and best-known travel agency in the world.