Thomas Cook

Thomas Cook was born in 1808 in Melbourne, Derbyshire. His father died when he was three, and he left school at ten to work as a gardener's boy, then as an apprentice cabinet-maker. He became a Baptist and a travelling preacher, walking hundreds of miles a year to speak in villages, and a fierce supporter of the temperance movement, which he saw as the working man's route out of misery.

In 1841, walking to a meeting, it occurred to him that the new railways could be used to carry people to temperance gatherings. He arranged with the Midland Counties Railway for a special train from Leicester to Loughborough on 5 July, and about 500 people paid a shilling each for the return trip, with a brass band and tea. Nobody had done anything quite like it. He organised more outings, at first for no profit, then in 1845 as a business, with a trip to Liverpool for which he wrote the first travel handbook.

The venture nearly broke him several times. A Scottish tour in the 1840s was a financial failure, and in 1846 he went bankrupt; he carried on regardless. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was his breakthrough: he brought some 150,000 people to London, many of them factory workers who had saved through clubs he set up. He took his first party to Europe in 1855, to Switzerland in 1863, to Egypt and the Holy Land in 1869, and around the world in 1872.

His son John Mason Cook, a harder businessman, took over the firm and the two fell out. Thomas, by then nearly blind, retired to Leicester and died in 1892. The company survived until 2019.