The Man From Cook's

by CHARLES J. ROLO

A FEW years after the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk, a Cook advertisement depicted a man sitting in a basket slung from a fishlike contraption floating through the stars. Thecaption read: “Someday the Atlantic. may be crossed by Flying Machines. When they arrive, we’ll have them.” In 1927, Cook’s Travel Service — the term had replaced Cook’s Tours in 1919 — invited New Yorkers to join the. first conducted excursion by air: a trip to the Dompsey-Tunney championship light in Chicago. Ringside seats and rooms at the Hotel Stevens were provided for the “sport aeronauts.”

Thos. Cook & Son — the founder insisted on Thos. and not Thomas — will rent you a grouse moor in Scotland or buy you a château on the Loire. It will help you to select a school, in the U.S. or abroad, for your children: and if they are too young to travel, it will escort them to and from their home at vacation time. It organizes “educational travel,”for which students can obtain credits. It stores furniture, ships freight, handles insurance. At this very moment, it is carrying tourists to the world’s less accessible “points of interest,”on camels, donkeys, elephants, and spitting llamas; in gondolas, sampans, dahabeahs, rickshaws, bullock carts, horse-drawn charabancs, and mountain railways. Reindeer and polar flogs have not been mentioned for lack of documentary evidence: Cook’s has probably used them.

There seems to be virtually nothing in the realm of travel, transport, and matters related to them — howsoever bizarre—that Thos. Cook & Son will shy away from. On one occasion it transported an entire British army and its supplies into battle in the Sudan; recently it shipped “a fully articulated human skelelon, well packed in excelsior” from Geneva to New York, a delicate assignment since the Customs of all nations take a dim view of skeletons. Back in the eighteen-eighties Cook’s made the Pilgrimage to Mecca safe for devout Moslems — and it did so again in the nineteen-forties. It once supplied Bermuda with a rush order of divining rods, and Richard Halliburton with the elephant on which he retraced Hannibal’s course across the Alps. When the scion of a great American family disappeared in the Sahara some years ago, Cook’s Algiers office sent out couriers to alert the desert tribes, and the lost adventurer was rescued.

Explorers no longer need to bring ’em back alive — Cook’s will do the bringing, and by air freight. The company has flown a baby elephant from Africa to the New York zoo for the Martin Johnsons, and it has started to fly live snakes from its Durban branch to reptile houses and serum laboratories. Cook’s will supply on request a three-page catalogue headed: “Prices of South African Snakes, Subject to Available Supplies, Delivered F.O.B., New York Air Port.” Included is a chart showing the average footage and poundage of each of the thirty-two varieties. There is a large choice of plebeian twoand three-footers at $6 to $10 per foot — Tiger Snakes, Egg-eaters, Horned Adders, and such. A lordly six-foot Mamba, Green or Black, costs $120; a ten-foot Python, tipping the scales at twenty-five pounds, retails at $240.

Copyright 1949, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

Although Thomas Cook held that “travel is a form of missionary enterprise,”the firm’s operations have long been stamped with what might be called the Billy Rose touch. (Mr. Rose, by the way, entrusted to Cook’s the planning of his recent fivemonth air-borne trip round the world.) At the turn of the century, Cook’s organized the Kaiser’s visit to the Holy Land, providing for the All-Highest and his entourage 1430 riding horses, mules, and pack camels; two encampments of 300 tents; 800 muleteers and camp servants. A few weeks ago, a South American millionaire signed up with Cook’s for a $35,000 big-game hunting expedition, complete with professional hunters, physician, native bearers, weapons, and pholographic equipment — and a virtual guarantee there would be fallen lions to photograph.

Cook’s London office maintains a special “Indian Princes Department,” which handles nothing but the complicated requirements of these potentates, who are apt to travel with a retinue of forty persons, including chefs to prepare their food as prescribed by religion or by Brillat-Savarin. Wherever they go, Cook’s provides them with the huge funds they require, insures their jewels, and acts as a shopping service. It also has to intervene when ship stewards make trouble over Indian servants, who insist on sleeping outside their master’s or lady’s cabin door. The services expected of Cook’s by its exalted patrons are sometimes decidedly peculiar. A certain Maharajah, visiting the United States for the first time, instructed Cook’s to find an impenetrable hide-out for his son and heir, who, the ruler was convinced, ran the gravest danger of being kidnaped by gangsters. The problem was dealt with simply — and effectively: the princeling was lodged with one of Cook’s employees in Brooklyn.

Cook’s holds the appointment of Official Travel Agents to the Vatican. It has handled the travel arrangements of the World Baptist Alliance, the World Sunday School Association, and a host of learned societies and symphony orchestras; also of many athletic teams attending the Olympic Games. Mark Twain was a grateful customer; so was Rudyard Kipling. British royalty, down to this present generation, has often been accompanied by Cook couriers on its travels.

2

THE sun which never sets on the British Empire never sets, either, on the global travel empire of Thos. Cook & Son and its international affiliate, the Wagons-Lits Company. Cook/Wagons-Lits maintain 324 offices in fifty-three countries on all five continents. Together they service some five million persons annually.

The staff of Cook/Wagons-Lits numbers more than 10,000, ninety-five per cent of whom are citizens of the country in which they work. Most of Cook’s employees, from booking clerk to branch manager, receive a salary plus a commission on sales or a share in the profits of the branch. Economic incentive, or the Cook tradition, or the civilizing effects of the travel business, or all of these things combined, have produced a supra-national solidarity throughout this multi-national group of men and women. Cook’s office in Haifa affords an illustration of this. Here the seemingly impossible has been achieved: Arabs, Jews, and British have worked together in harmony through all the years of violence in Palestine. At a recent party given for a retiring manager in London, it was found that 350 of those present had been with Cook’s more than twenty-five years.

Cook’s most celebrated representative is, of course, the blue-uniformed “Man from Cook’s,” who meets trains, steamers, and now airplanes. His praises were sung as far back as the nineties in a ditty—“Follow the Man from Cook’s” — featured in an operetta called A Runaway Girl. The ideal background for the job approximates that of Matthew Hones, the senior New York “Man from Cook’s,” who can discuss travel problems in seven languages. One of nature’s cosmopolitans, Mr. Rones was born in Istanbul of a Spanish mother and a Turkish father; after knocking around the Continent, he came to the U.S.A. and married an Irish-American.

The scheduled tours currently offered by Cook’s New York office range from a $1.25 elevator ride to the Observation Roof of Radio City, to an 86day Cairo to Capetown safari costing $6200. The latter includes, among other enticements, bids to several tribal dances, a view of the Mountains of the Moon, a stopover at a pygmy village and another among the giant Watusi, numerous glimpses of big game, and — the pièce de résistance — a day spent stalking and photographing, under armed guard, the near-extinct white rhino on the Hluhluwe Game Reserve. An annual South American safari passes through the High Andes and travels down the entire length of the Amazon. Both safaris — to the non-adventurous traveler — sound infernally hazardous. The Cook people, however, swear that crocodile and serpent, jungle, river, and precipice, have claimed no casualties among their tourists.

Periodically, Cook’s tours run into unforeseeable difficulties, but the firm’s motto is “The tour must go on.” On one occasion, it looked as if a trip into the interior of Ceylon would have to be canceled because of floods. The dauntless tour manager, after some heavy brainwork, sent his party inland by car as far as the roads permitted; arranged for rowboats to ferry it across the deeply flooded areas; and hired an elephant to carry the tourists and their baggage over the muddy ground where neither car nor rowboat would function. Cook’s Jerusalem office has kept up its tours of Palestine, using armed escort if necessary, throughout most of the troubles of the past fifteen years.

Along with Cook’s promotional talent and flair for the spectacular, there goes a quaint streak of Victorian solemnity. Last year the New York office received a letter enclosing five unused meal coupons purchased in Paris in 1894, for which a full refund was requested. A check for $12 was immediately sent out on the principle that Cook’s coupons are always good. Recently the same branch discovered that the scheduled ascent of a mountain in Switzerland had been omitted from one of last year’s tours. To repair this heinous lapse, a refund of $2.50 was mailed to the tour members, one of whom promptly sent back a check for $5, and with it the churlish comment that anything omitted from the tour was assuredly his gain.

The Cook people loyally insist that the average traveler is a rather superior type. A bulging file in the New York office, politely headed “unusual requests,” suggests that Cook’s operations are also a magnet to eccentrics. A wealthy businessman asked Cook’s to arrange a private cruise that would call at every seaport in the world, a trip that would take several centuries. Another client with original ideas wrote in for a $4200 berth on a world cruise, offering to pay $10 down and $10 a month for thirtyfive years. A collector inquired if Cook’s had for sale “a shrunken human or pygmy head.” (This missive was shunted to the head of public relations with the bland notation: “ Have you one of these?”) A lady in Manhattan wished to know how many horses there are in the Fiji Islands. The answer was corraled, with some difficulty, and transmitted gratis as “tourist information.”

3

COOK’S travel empire was founded by accident — and a singularly unromantie one. Cook’s “Tours” started as an adjunct to the temperance movement.

Thomas Cook was born in the village of Melbourne, Derbyshire, in 1808 — four years before the first stearn locomotive wheezed its way along a railway line. Poverty forced him to leave school at the age of ten, and he started work as a gardener’s assistant at a penny a day. An earnest-minded boy, Cook somehow managed to acquire an education on his own. At twenty he was working for a book publisher connected with the General Baptist Association, and was appointed a “Village Missionary.” His diary for the following year notes that, in the course of his missionary activities, chief of which was the crusade against strong drink, he walked 2106 miles.

In 1841, while on his way to a temperance meeting at Leicester, Cook read a newspaper account of the opening of a railway in the district, and it. occurred to him that the steam engine could be harnessed to the temperance cause. The next meeting was to be held at Loughborough, eleven and one-half miles distant. Cook persuaded the Midland Railway to put a special train “at his disposal” and grant him round-trip tickets for the price of the single fare. He was so successful in promoting this first publicly advertised railway tour that 570 persons traveled to Loughborough to hear the virtues of cold water extolled. On their return, the “tourists” were feted as daring adventurers, and Cook’s fame as a travel impresario spread throughout the Midlands, Other societies were soon begging him to help arrange their excursions. So, on July 5, 1841, setting up headquarters in Leicester, Cook launched a new enterprise which was to become a household phrase in the English language — ”Cook’s Tours.” From then on Cook’s policy was, in effect, to get there fastest with the mostest in transportation and travel arrangements.

In that year railways were still in their infancy. Sir Samuel Cunurd’s new paddle-wheel steamer, the Britannia, had made its first crossing from Liverpool to Boston a year earlier, but the paddle wheels were supplemented with a wide spread of sail. The idea of making a sea journey for pleasure bordered on the fantastic.

Cook’s first pleasure “cruise” — made in 1845 — was not, to be sure, much of a sea journey. After a tour of North Wales — booked to capacity several weeks before the departure dale — Cook took his party by specially chartered steamer to the Isle of Man and then to Dublin. Later he published a guidebook covering the route of the tour, and this became a regular practice. Meanwhile, Cook had signed a contract with the main British railways, which agreed to pay him a fixed commission on all tickets sold, the system under which all reputable travel agencies have since operated.

In 1852, Cook moved his headquarters to London and put his son, John, in charge of the new office, located halfway between St. Paul’s Cathedral and Dr. Johnson’s favorite Fleet. Street tavern, the Old Cheshire Cheese. The previous year, 165,000 tourists had visited the first World’s Fair at the Crystal Palace under Cook’s aegis. The Paris Exhibition of 1855, to which Cook sold 400,000 tickets, launched him into international travel.

At that time, there were no through international railway tickets or long-distance timetables; reliable information about the varying travel conditions in different countries was unobtainable. The independent voyager was at the mercy of unscrupulous hotel proprietors and swindlers of all sorts. Determined to bring order into this situation, Cook set off with his son on an exploratory tour of Europe, during which he arranged for railway companies and hotels to accept his tickets and coupons, the latter providing for accommodation and meals at stipulated prices. He also compiled the first comprehensive handbook of international rail and steamship services. When Cook’s “Circular Tours" of the Continent started in 1856, the London Times commented that Mr. Cook’s system was “making journeys all over the world possible and easy to everyone,” The first tour of America was made in 1866, Cook having previously negotiated a uniform rate of two cents a mile with the U.S. railways.

Still very much the missionary, Cook had long dreamed of opening up the religious shrines of Palestine to tourists. Travel conditions there at this time can be gleaned from a letter in Cook’s archives: —

Back in the fifties my mother and her sister, with a chaperone, went to Petra by camel caravan from Jerusalem. The trip consumed 40 days and in the course of it they were pretty well buried in a sand storm, attacked by Bedouin Arabs and robbed, a sword being held at my mother’s throat. On the return journey the chaperone died in the desert. Somewhere in the wilds they met up with the caravan of a certain European crowned head, who borrowed from my mother a pair of stockings, which up to the present have not been returned.

Cook negotiated a series of regional treaties with the Bedouin Chiefs, who, for a consideration, undertook to allow infidels to use the caravan trails unmolested. From 1868 on, a 26-day visit to Syria and Palestine was included in Cook’s scheduled tours. The company now moved into Egypt, and was appointed by the Khedive the Official Passenger Agents for traffic up and down the Nile. It was Cook’s which pioneered the winter tourist trade in Egypt. Under the company’s stimulus, a palace hotel was built in what was then a sleepy Arab village, Luxor; and the temple ruins of Luxor and Knrnak were cleared of the rubble which hid their treasures.

The Cooks’ venture into Egypt was to have momentous consequences. To operate their fleet of Nile steamers they set up their own shipyard and engineering works at Boulac near Cairo. In the Second World War, the Boulac Works, with its sizable foundry and large floating dock, played an important role in the touch-and-go campaign for Egypt. It manufactured mountings for Bren guns and special tackle for rescuing damaged tanks from the desert. It repaired military vehicles and motor torpedo boats; built bodies for portable kitchens, mobile photographic darkrooms, radio cars, and ambulances.

The British Government had once before turned to Cook’s for military assistance. In 1884, Sudanese tribesmen led by a religious fanatic, the so-called “Mad Mahdi,” laid siege to the small British garrison at Khartoum, commanded by General (“Chinese”) Gordon. The War Office, appalled by the difficulties of moving an expeditionary force up the Nile and past its rapids, eventually engaged Thos. Cook & Son to handle the job — the only occasion in history in which a private company has served as Transportation Corps in a military campaign. Cook’s chartered 28 ocean liners for service between Britain and Upper Egypt; mobilized 27 steamers and 650 sailing boats on the Nile; and provided 800 whaleboats for navigating the rapids. The relief force did not arrive in time to save Gordon — the British Government, as on other occasions, had acted too late. But Cook’s received a citation from the Secretary of War.

4

FIFTEEN years earlier, the Golden Spike which linked America’s eastern seaboard with the Pacific had been driven in, and a world pleasure tour had become a practical possibility. In 1872— the year in which Jules Verne published Around the Worid in Eighty Days — Thomas Cook escorted a party of nine on the first round-the-world pleasure lour. The journey, which lasted 222 days, held such news interest that the London Times published eighteen of Cook’s letters home. An engaging report on the tour by a Mr. Edgar Allen Forbes later appeared in World Travel: —

The S.S. Oceanic rushed them across the Atlantic in little more than three weeks, and the Grand Hotel of New York had the distinction of being the first to paste labels on their baggage. They landed on the day when “The Red Stockings" of Boston beat “The Mutuals” of New York; the game is duly described in the New York Herald of October 17, but I find no mention of the arrival of the tourists. The little old town of Manhattan seems to have made as little impression on Mr. Cook as his party on the town; even Brooklyn is not mentioned, though there was a Mexican Wild West Show shooting up the suburb that week.

What impressed the abstemious Cook most about the U.S.A., Forbes tells us, was the jugs of ice water on hotel dining tables. Cook was disappointed to learn that the crack “Pacific Express" averaged no more than 19 m.p.h., and was shocked at the arrangements in American sleeping cars — “The admixture of strangers and sexes is very repulsive to English travelers.” However, the strange sights glimpsed crossing the prairies more than compensated for outraged decorum, and the party was utterly enthralled when a parade of 500 Sioux Indians passed near the train.

Cook had set his heart on driving the Demon Rum out of the British Empire. To this end he had taken in his baggage a huge stock of edifying pamphlets with such titles as “Malt Liquor Lectures,”“History of Teetolalism,” “Reminiscences of Teetotalism.” At Singapore, Mr. Forbes relates, Cook set out on a sightseeing tour of his own and change brought him to a little shop on which he saw the magic sign: Temperance Star. He hurried inside and found it to be a place where soft drinks were sold. I o w horn, he does not say; if you know Singapore, you will wonder. And there was also a lile Band of Hope Review. This arid spot in the great, moist oasis of the Orient gave Thomas a brilliant idea. He hastened back to the steamer and brought to the shop his entire cargo of ’Malt Liquor Lectures,’etc., and contributed them to the uplift Singapore.”

In the year of the world tour, Thos. Cook Son opened its first American office at 261 Broadway; the firm’s name appeared in the first New York City telephone directory. Shortly afterward Cook’s inaugurated travelers’ checks — called “circular notes" — a notable contribution to travel, since they made it possible, for the first time, to carry large sums with virtually no danger of loss.

Cook’s Tourist Hand Book for 1875 affords some diverting sidelights on European travel at this time. It is something of a shock to discover that the rail and sea trip from London to Antwerp took three and one-half hours less than it does today, because of time saved on Customs and passport formalities. The column on British passport regulations pointed out that “servants, governesses, and couriers” could be included on the family passport, and that “Female Servants, English or Foreign,” need not be identified by name but merely numbered.

Like so many self-made men, Cook heartily subscribed to the Victorian notion that it was sinful to pamper the lower orders. On the subject of tipping, the handbook sternly observed: “Messrs. Thos. Cook & Son would be very glad to see the custom of giving fees to servants entirely abolished, and would by no means recommend a liberal system of feeing.”Among the advertisements was one by Messrs. Bell and Pritchard announcing: “Tourist Suit for two guineas, made lo order in six hours.”

5

GLOBE-TROTTING — or was it temperance? — kept Thomas Cook alert and vigorous right up to his death in 1892, at the age of eighty-four. The pioneer of pleasure travel was that rare combination: dreamer, a resourceful man of action, and a painstaking organizer. The success of his tours was founded on what seemed visionary ideas, made practicable through rigorous, often dangerous, exploratory travel. “He was too religious to be personally attractive,”says a contemporary. But clearly he had singular powers of persuasion, evidenced in the agreements he secured from European hotelkeepers, American railroad magnates, and Arab chieftains. He must have had, too, an indestructible constitution.

John Cook, who survived his father by only seven years, was also cast in the mold of the Victorian empire-builder, but in his ease the missionary streak was overlaid with a more aggressive temper than his father’s. When the Franco-Prussian War ended, he browbeat the victorious Hermans into letting Cook s relief trains enter starving Paris. It was John who built up the network of offices abroad and the engineering works in Egypt, whose military contracts saved Cook’s from a deficit during the last war, when tourism was at a standstill.

After John’s death his sons, Frank and Ernest, took command. In the next three decades, Cook’s pioneered a series of tourist booms. It originated Bermuda’s honeymoon and vacation trade, and pleasure cruises to the Caribbean. It launched the craze which sent well-heeled tourists, starry-eyed or world-weary, flocking to Bali in the twenties. Always on the lookout for new touristic thrills, it carried sight-seers to the Seychelles and the Cook Islands, to Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic and to Zamboanga, a former head-hunters’ hangout in the Philippines.

In 1927 Thos. Cook & Son passed out of the hands of the Cook family. Ernest had already retired, and neither of the brothers had any sons. Frank, finding the burden of managing the business on his own loo heavy, sold the company to a syndicate formed by the principal shareholders of the Corn pagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. Cook’s retained a separate corporate identity, but shared a joint directorate with the Wagons-Lits until 1940.

During the Second World War, which placed the Wagons-Lits organization in enemy territory, the capital stock of Thos. Cook & Son was purchased by the four main British railways. When the railways were nationalized in 1948, Cooks, as a subsidiary of theirs, became in effect the property of the British people. At this time a new holding company was formed, Thos. Cook & Son Continental and Overseas Ltd., comprising all of Cook’s organization outside Great Britain and Ireland, including the American corporation. Seventy-five per cent of the stock in this new company is held by the parent British company, the rest by the Wagons-Lits. Cook’s offices everywhere represent Wagons-Lits, and vice versa.

Cook’s is still pioneering new ideas in travel. In response to the British Government’s exchange restrictions, it is developing tourism within the sterling area — “sterling holidays.” Harold White, head of Cook’s operations in America, is also bent on developing a new type of travel: economy overseas trips, by air, for the U.S. wage-earner of modest means. The airplane has made vacations abroad possible even for those who can afford only two weeks away from work. What remains is to organize cheaper overseas flights, safe and comfortable but stripped of “frills.” As soon as such flights are practicable, Cook’s will have them on its list of tours.