Read Thomas Cook for Free Online

classic tourist destinations on his itinerary, such as Mount Sorrel and the old spa town of Matlock, situated amidst romantic scenery on the Derwent.
    As well as being a tour organiser on a non-paid basis for Temperance causes, Thomas occasionally climbed up onto rostrums and took up his old role of preacher. Three total immersion baptisms were performed by him on 28 July 1844 in Smeeton Westerby, a village south of Leicester near Foxton Locks on the Market Harborough to Leicester stretch of the Grand Union Canal. Leicestershire has plenty of inland waterways and is rich in meandering rivers, like the Soar and the Welland, so why a rivulet had been chosen is not known. But when some troublemakers broke down the embankments, an alternative venue was found. The General Baptist Repository 9 recorded that at ‘On Lord’s Day, July 28th, three persons, one male and two females, were added to our little flock by baptism. The sacred ordinance was performed in the canal, about a mile from the chapel . . . in front of a crowd estimated at from 800 to 1000 who listened with marked attention to an address by Mr T. Cook, Leicester, who afterwards immersed the candidates.’ 10 Thomas remained active as a preacher, delivering yet another address to the Sabbath School at Smeeton a week later.
    William Biggs, who served Leicester as mayor in 1842, 1848 and 1859, was also secretary of the local Liberal Association. After he led his party in winning the town’s two parliamentary seats from the Tories in 1838, the two new members were chaired through the town in a procession of about 20,000 people. This was the first time in history that non-Tories had won seats in Leicester.
    Ellis was also typical of the Nonconformists in the new council. Blunt but charitable – his daughters 11 tirelessly ran a local school and helped Leicester’s poor – he was chairman of the Midland Railway Company between 1849 and 1858 and the Liberal MP for the area for four years from 1848. A pioneer in passenger trains, he had recruited George and Robert Stephenson (of
Rocket
fame) to build the Leicester to Swannington railway in 1832, the third railway to be opened in Britain. 12
    There was now a line all the way to London from Leicester – the population had grown to a staggering 48,167, of which about 3,000 men and women were employed in the hosiery factories, and 600 in the more recent shoe and boot industry. The city, according to the
Temperance Messenger
, contained 700 spirit and beer shops and public houses, ‘great numbers of dying drunkards . . . [and] a greater proportion of prostitutes than any town beyond the precincts of the metropolis’. Other urban evils included a high mortality rate, slum dwellings and bad drainage – a problem exacerbated by the flatness of the area.
    Living in the heart of a city did not mean that Thomas forgot his four years in the market garden in Melbourne or the rural pleasures of growing vegetables and flowers. He started the
Cottage Gardener
, a ‘periodical of considerable size, which attracted great interest’. 13 Since the Royal Horticultural Society had been formed in 1804, various magazines had been launched, including the
Gardener’s Chronicle
in 1841 and the
Horticultural Register
. 14 The most influential of the garden writers, John Claudius Loudon, a self-made Scot, carried on the
Gardeners’ Magazine
for seventeen years. 15 Although too expensive for most gardeners, it did inspire local magazines, such as Thomas’s in Leicester.
    Gardening was a consuming pastime in the new suburbs, and most people tried to follow the latest fashions. Contrarily, Thomas promoted the charm of small, simple productive gardens with honeysuckle, wild roses, strawberries and vegetables. The
Gardener
was not mentioned in
Botanico-Periodicum Huntianum
nor acknowledged as a predecessor in the better-known magazine called the
Cottage Gardener
, founded in London by George William Johnson in 1848. Alas, no copy of Thomas’s