that it had the allegiance of only about half of all practising believers. About one in two of the population had attended a chapel 5 on ‘Census Sunday’, 30 March 1851, with Nonconformists outnumbering Anglicans by two to one in places like Manchester. Figures showed attendances that day as Church of England 5,292,551, Roman Catholics 383,630 and the main Protestant dissenting churches (Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregationalist, Baptist) 4,536,264. As the total population was 17,927,609, the census also revealed that large numbers were staying away from church. Figures for Wales fuelled the fight for disestablishment. Here only one in five attended an Anglican church.
And so the first decade of Thomas Cook, Baptist, Temperance campaigner, printer and travel agent, ended on a high note. He could also see the results of his own efforts, but the risks he was taking were the sort that would hasten heart attacks in many men. Would he in the next ten years overreach himself and end up again in the bankruptcy courts?
TWENTY
Crimea
I n February 1854, Thomas’s grief had been acute when his mother Elizabeth Tivey, at the age of sixty-four, lay on her deathbed. Apart from his wife and Annie, it had been from her that Thomas had received physical affection. She had been the mainstay of the family. It had been through her strength that Thomas and his brothers had survived in those pre-railway days, cocooned in the little cottage with no money, few prospects and few possessions. Her instinctive reactions to events had kept them afloat and she had saved him from going down the mines. So great had been the bond between mother and son that Thomas had almost taken on the role of husband after her second widowhood. It was in him that she had confided, and they had often sat up at night talking, or she would listen while he read the Bible aloud. In stark contrast, John Mason’s relationship with his own parents was cold and his feelings hesitant and ambivalent, but he became close to Elizabeth and again lived with her in Derby for a few years, when he had a job as a compositor. Her death left the two men and Simeon quite desolate. Simeon’s Temperance Hotel in Corn Market was already being absorbed into her boarding house, which would become Simeon Smithard’s Private Temperance Boarding House.
Elizabeth had wanted to be buried beside John Cook in the little graveyard behind the Baptist chapel in Melbourne. But the train did not yet go there from Derby, so a hired hearse-carriage, with Thomas guarding the black-draped coffin, made its way in the dull winter light over the hills to the village of her birth. John Mason and Simeon, who had seen much more of her in the past ten years, sat in front of the draped coffin.
This was the first occasion on which Thomas had returned since Lord and Lady Palmerston had inherited Melbourne Hall, but they were then in London, as Palmerston was attempting to limit Britain’s spiralling involvement in the Crimean War. Within days of Elizabeth’s funeral, in an effort to prop up the Turks and prevent the Russians holding Constantinople and the Straits, the first of many British troops set out for the East.
Fighting began on 14 September 1854 when the Russians crossed the Danube and the British and French laid siege to the port of Sebastopol, the great naval port of the Russian Empire in the Black Sea. The initial cause of the war was a long dispute over the holy places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and resulted in a spiralling quarrel between the French emperor, the Russian tsar and the Turkish sultan over the right to hold the custody of the churches and holy places. Quarrels were heightened by the loss of the star over the grotto in Bethlehem and a tug of war over the keys for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Napoleon III had insisted on confirmation of his role as the patron and defender of Roman Catholics in the Holy Land, and had sent an envoy to Sultan Abdul Medjid in Constantinople. Tsar
And so the first decade of Thomas Cook, Baptist, Temperance campaigner, printer and travel agent, ended on a high note. He could also see the results of his own efforts, but the risks he was taking were the sort that would hasten heart attacks in many men. Would he in the next ten years overreach himself and end up again in the bankruptcy courts?
TWENTY
Crimea
I n February 1854, Thomas’s grief had been acute when his mother Elizabeth Tivey, at the age of sixty-four, lay on her deathbed. Apart from his wife and Annie, it had been from her that Thomas had received physical affection. She had been the mainstay of the family. It had been through her strength that Thomas and his brothers had survived in those pre-railway days, cocooned in the little cottage with no money, few prospects and few possessions. Her instinctive reactions to events had kept them afloat and she had saved him from going down the mines. So great had been the bond between mother and son that Thomas had almost taken on the role of husband after her second widowhood. It was in him that she had confided, and they had often sat up at night talking, or she would listen while he read the Bible aloud. In stark contrast, John Mason’s relationship with his own parents was cold and his feelings hesitant and ambivalent, but he became close to Elizabeth and again lived with her in Derby for a few years, when he had a job as a compositor. Her death left the two men and Simeon quite desolate. Simeon’s Temperance Hotel in Corn Market was already being absorbed into her boarding house, which would become Simeon Smithard’s Private Temperance Boarding House.
Elizabeth had wanted to be buried beside John Cook in the little graveyard behind the Baptist chapel in Melbourne. But the train did not yet go there from Derby, so a hired hearse-carriage, with Thomas guarding the black-draped coffin, made its way in the dull winter light over the hills to the village of her birth. John Mason and Simeon, who had seen much more of her in the past ten years, sat in front of the draped coffin.
This was the first occasion on which Thomas had returned since Lord and Lady Palmerston had inherited Melbourne Hall, but they were then in London, as Palmerston was attempting to limit Britain’s spiralling involvement in the Crimean War. Within days of Elizabeth’s funeral, in an effort to prop up the Turks and prevent the Russians holding Constantinople and the Straits, the first of many British troops set out for the East.
Fighting began on 14 September 1854 when the Russians crossed the Danube and the British and French laid siege to the port of Sebastopol, the great naval port of the Russian Empire in the Black Sea. The initial cause of the war was a long dispute over the holy places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and resulted in a spiralling quarrel between the French emperor, the Russian tsar and the Turkish sultan over the right to hold the custody of the churches and holy places. Quarrels were heightened by the loss of the star over the grotto in Bethlehem and a tug of war over the keys for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Napoleon III had insisted on confirmation of his role as the patron and defender of Roman Catholics in the Holy Land, and had sent an envoy to Sultan Abdul Medjid in Constantinople. Tsar
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