Tourists and booking clerks – information for family historians in the Thomas Cook Archives

This afternoon I’m going to talk to you for an hour or so about the Thomas Cook Archives. Now I’m going to put that into a little bit of context first of all. So I will give you a little bit of overview on the company history but I’ll try and be very brief on that. Normally when I give talks I talk for an hour just on the first 50 years of the company history so I’ll try not to do that today!

So I want to concentrate on the archives: what they are, where they are, how you can access them, what sort of information you can expect to find in them, and how useful or not they might be for those of you who have ancestors who either travelled with Thomas Cook or worked for Thomas Cook, and there are lots of people out there who fall into those categories.

So that’s roughly the layout of what we are going to do this afternoon then I’ll just summarise at the end. [Shows image] That’s a nice Edwardian poster by the way if you are wondering what that image is. And that at the bottom is the uniformed man; they were quite ubiquitous at that time.

So first thing I want to say is really is that Thomas Cook holds a unique position in the travel industry. The modern travel industry really starts with Thomas Cook in 1841. And consequently the records of the company that we have in the Thomas Cook archives are also, to a large extent, the records of the industry. So we have material which relates to all aspects of Thomas Cook’s history but also to all manner of transport developments, and geographical locations because most destinations that you can visit today on a holiday you could actually get to in the late 19th century – so there are very few new destinations in that sense.

So the archives are unique and really there isn’t another travel company or another travel archive, certainly of the same scale as Thomas Cook, anywhere in the world. So we’ll start with a little bit of background, brief introduction to the company and what it is that Thomas Cook did back in the 19th century. I’ve split it up into six little segments each of which has its own characteristics and importance and I will just run through the key events in those periods and also what records we have from each of those segments.

So the first part as you see there, 1841-1873. Now this really is where it all starts. This is Thomas Cook’s period, so Thomas Cook the man himself. We take the starting point of our history as 5 July 1841 and it’s on that day that Thomas Cook conducted his very first excursion which was a rail journey from Leicester to nearby Loughborough just 12 miles away to a Temperance gathering.

Now Thomas Cook was a supporter of the Temperance Movement which essentially was all about teetotalism so Thomas Cook took the pledge and didn’t drink from the 1830s onwards but also it was about social improvement. Temperance supporters believed that alcohol lay at the root of all problems in Victorian England and therefore Thomas hit upon the idea of organising excursions, initially by rail, to get people, the masses if you like, out of the drinking establishments and actually encourage them to do something more useful with their life – so that’s really what drove Thomas.

Thomas was not a businessman, Thomas was never in it for money, he was not driven by profit. Thomas was an idealist so all of his early tours were organised on behalf of the local Temperance Society, local Sunday Schools and it’s only later on that he starts to actually organise trips for profit.

His first of those came in 1845 – a trip to Liverpool; in 1846 he goes to Scotland and introduces a lot of English people to the Scottish Highlands for the first time and it’s really in Scotland that Thomas transforms himself from being an organiser of cheap excursions into a fully-fledged tour manager.

In the mid-1850s he visits the continent for the first time to go to the Paris Exhibition and organises what is really the first package holiday in that he organised the complete tour including accommodation, food, he even arranged foreign exchange for his customers and he led that tour in 1855.

In the 1860s he goes to Switzerland for the first time, he visits Italy, America and Egypt and takes parties of tourists to all these places. But it’s really Switzerland and Egypt which are the two destinations which owe most to Thomas Cook and to his son John because in those places tourism really didn’t exist in an organised way before they went and they really transformed it.

Thomas Cook then goes around the world; he organises a tour round the world in 1872-73 he’s gone from home for a total of 222 days; he takes in America, Japan, China, India and ends up in Egypt as part of this tour. The advertised cost for that trip was £300.

That’s really the climax of Thomas’s career. And although he’s involved with the company for a few more years after that, really from 1873 onwards it’s his son John Mason Cook who is running the business. Now, John is a very different character from his father; John is a businessman and John sees the potential of tourism as a business and as an industry.

John decides that if he is going to make any money out of this business he has to improve the social cache of the Thomas Cook name so he tries to encourage the wealthier classes of society to travel with Thomas Cook well Thomas Cook & Son, as it’s now known.

To that end first of all he opens that little building there; that was our first Head Office that’s at Ludgate Circus in the City of London at the end of Fleet Street at the bottom of St Paul’s Hill. And that building is still there, you could take that photograph and you could go and find that building and could stand right in front of it and it doesn’t look that different. Well, all the Thomas Cook references have long gone but the building still looks very similar to that. And that was the Head Office for Thomas Cook through to the mid-1920s.

Now John decided that he needed to appeal to these wealthier members of society so he had this office, he started to try and offer services that weren’t there before; so not just cheap tickets but John introduces things like railway timetables, like guidebooks, he introduces the uniformed men which we just saw on the poster earlier.

All of these things extra little services to the travelling public and he also introduces the circular note which was an early form of travellers cheque in 1874 as well. He is very successful in what he does and by the 1880s Thomas Cook, or John specifically, but Thomas Cook the company is being approached by people like the British Government to help transport General Wolseley’s Army 550 miles up the Nile from Asyut to Wadi Halfa as part of the Gordon Relief Expedition.

The Indian Government comes to John and asks him to sort out the pilgrimages to Mecca for the people travelling from India to Mecca as part of the hajj in 1886. In 1887 and 1897 Thomas Cook & Son are asked to organise a lot of the travel for the foreign dignitaries coming to London for Queen Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees.

In 1896 Thomas Cook & Son become official passenger agents for the first modern Olympic Games. And in 1898 John is asked to escort the German Kaiser around the Holy Land on a little tour that cost £50,000. Unfortunately that tour killed John; he contracted dysentery while he was travelling and the following year he died at the age of 65.

The company then passed into the hands of his three sons although we tend to talk about two of them, Frank and Ernest, because the youngest, Thomas Albert, who was known as Bert, was actually bought out by the other two fairly early on.

So this period 1899-1928 sees the introduction of things like motorised travel so we have motorised charabancs taking city tours for tourists of London, Paris and Berlin so the equivalent of your open topped bus tours today. They were in existence in about 1910. We have obviously, 1919 onwards, air travel for the first time and Thomas Cook is there as a travel agent selling tickets in Easter 1919; also as an agent selling tickets for trips from London to Paris or London to Brussels which at the time cost something like 30 guineas. That was in 1919.

Also as you see the brochure there is actually advertising the first escorted tour from Cairo to The Cape and that was in 1922 the first one, which again was a huge operation at the time.

So lots of changes in that period, lots of changes in travel but the company by this time is making huge amounts of money. The whole world is travelling with Thomas Cook from, as its put by one journalist, from the Heir to the Throne to the humblest greengrocer they all travel with Thomas Cook.

In 1928 Frank and Ernest retired and the company passed out of family hands for the first time. In the 1930s the company was owned by Wagon Lee, the international sleeping car company who ran the Orient Express and other luxury trains across Europe. Later on during the War the company passes into the hands of the railways and then in 1948 it becomes nationalised and so for the next 24 years Thomas Cook is in fact a nationally owned company and there are consequently some records relating to that here in The National Archives.

But of course it’s in this period in the 50s and 60s that modern tourism, as most people think of it, starts with charter planes, flights to the sun and cheap holidays all this sort of thing.

Now Thomas Cook on the one hand really had very little to do with that. Thomas Cook didn’t sell on price, Thomas Cook sold on service, so there is a lot of new companies coming into being in the 50s and 60s, and although Thomas Cook, through the whole of that period, remains the largest travel company in the world – and indeed in the mid-60s, its profit exceed £1 million pounds for the first time – it begins to lose ground, lose market share because things are changing: the new generation want cheaper holidays not necessarily luxury holidays.

This does change a little bit in the 70s. Obviously there are oil prices increased in the early 70s, there’s a recession and a lot of travel companies, lot of new travel companies, actually go out of business.

Thomas Cook survives that, we are de-nationalised in 1972 and the Midland Bank become the owner. So we are owned by a bank for the next 20 years and there’s lots of changes, lots of rationalisation takes place within the company, so a lot of departments and functions that are developed were sold off. So a shipping and forwarding division that we had alongside our main travel and financial services functions was sold off. A holiday camp that we had built and run at Prestatyn in North Wales was sold off.

Real estate in the heart of Cairo which we had had since the late 19th century and was basically our shipping yard for the Nile fleet that was sold off in the 70s. Also in the 70s a new corporate identity was introduced which was the words Thomas Cook in flame red, or orange as most people remember it, and of course, the most administrative departments moved from London to Peterborough so we actually moved the first departments up to Peterborough in the 70s.

During the 1980s Thomas Cook concentrates on, as a tour operator, long haul operations and as a travel agent expanding its retail network. In the late 80s we also introduced Thomas Cook direct so you actually could book holidays by telephone for the first time. And in 1995 the first website, the first corporate pages on the website on the internet, appear.

So the final 15 years or so have seen a lot of change. I actually joined the company in 1996 in London, which was where we were based at that point. Since then it has been constant change; lots of mergers, acquisitions, sales, change of owners; it’s just been constant. So it all starts in 96 we acquire Sun World. So Thomas Cook for the first time in 1996 becomes a mass market player in the travel industry. Prior to that it’s been concentrating on its role as a travel agent and as a long haul tour operator but in 96 it goes back into the mass market short haul operations as we still are today.

Now really that harks back to Thomas. Thomas was all about mass market and selling on price rather than John who was something different.

More acquisitions follow; Flying Colours, Time Off, a merger with Carlson, the launch of JMC in 1999 which you may remember or may not. That was meant to be John Mason Cook, the initials of Thomas’s son, that was the idea but I don’t think many people understood that at the time so JMC didn’t survive that long.

Of course, we now have an airline in 1996 when we bought Sun World we also acquired Air World so we now have a huge fleet of planes as well.

More changes in 2001, Thomas Cook sold off its financial services division completely to Travelex although five years later we started going back into it again so we now have a financial services division once more and then in 2001 the core travel business that remained was actually sold to a German travel company called Condor and Neckermann and that’s when the new logo that you see there was introduced.

Then rather strangely Condor and Neckermann changed their name to Thomas Cook, which is all very confusing, so they became Thomas Cook AG. And then the latest big merger came in 2007 when Thomas Cook merged with My Travel and obviously inherited the Air Tours brand and at the same time, of course, Thomson First Choice merged so the four big players in the industry became two and that’s the position we are in today.

So, not bad ten minutes; so that’s a brief run through of 169 years of history so let’s now turn to the archives themselves.

The archives actually have their origins in the 1950s that’s when they were first set up as a distinct department. A decision was made, a conscious decision was made to bring all the material that survived in various offices both in the UK and around the world into one place. Now that place in the 1950s was a little room on one of the upper floors of Berkeley Street which was our Headquarters from the 20s through to the 90s.

It moved several times whilst in Berkeley Street and when I joined it was on the ground floor, in a purpose built area that had been set up in 1991 with lots of PR money because that was the company’s 150th anniversary.

Initially it was up on the fourth floor in a little room and over that time, sort of 50s-60s, it had various names. It was known as the Company Museum and was also known as the Records and Relics Department – quite bizarrely and in fact through the whole of that period, prior to my arrival in [19]96, there had only been four archivists but all my predecessors were long serving, semi-retired members of Thomas Cook staff. So I’m a professional archivist, so I was appointed from outside to come in and run the Archives but all of my predecessors were Thomas Cook people first and foremost.

For most of that period as well the Archives actually was run by what was called the Publicity Department which covered both PR and Marketing functions today. So the Archives were, shall we say,’ looted’ from time to time. In the 60s we know a lot of material was thrown away simply because the room was of a finite size and as more material came in, other material went out.

We know there are gaps in our brochure collection and we know who signed them off as well! And in the 70s and 80s a lot of material was actually given away, sort of as a corporate gift, a PR thank you, certain volumes have just disappeared.

And we know they have gone missing because in the 1950s the very first archivist, a man with a wonderful name of Derek Inkpen, who had joined the company back in the Edwardian times – he actually made a list and we have this huge volume. It’s about this fat, a huge volume and it’s just a list of literally everything that was in the archives. Now most of that material is still there but there are one or two things which seem to have gone missing over the years.

So today we are in Peterborough, I say ‘we’ although there is only me. I am a department of one. I did have assistants once upon a time, I vaguely remember, when we were in Berkeley Street in London there were actually three and a half of us but over the years that’s been dwindled down due to various cutbacks and there is now only me.

In Peterborough we have three sites effectively. I have a large store room, I have an area which has desks for myself, for a researcher- just one researcher, but a researcher – and we have a number of showcases and wall space to display original items from the archives. We also have in the main reception on site, because this is the Thomas Cook UK Headquarters we’re talking, in Peterborough. We also have a big display which covers a potted history from 1841 to the present day but that’s mostly for external visitors who sit in Reception as very few staff go through Reception.

So that’s where we are. So the scope of the archive – what do we have? Well the collecting policy is actually quite broad, essentially anything with a Thomas Cook connection, however, vague may end up in the archives.

In the past there are things that have come in that have nothing to do with Thomas Cook but I do at least try to have a Thomas Cook connection today for anything that’s offered to us.

And we are offered things on a regular basis, obviously there is internal material being transferred to the archives but externally I get offers from, usually people whose ancestors either worked for Thomas Cook or travelled with Thomas Cook. So I’ll get offered old training notes, or the last thing I picked up from a little old lady in Chesterfield whose grandmother travelled with Thomas Cook to Switzerland in 1884, and she had the original guidebook. And in it were lots of her grandmother’s notes, so she had actually annotated the guidebook which is wonderful. Also there are a few illustrations and some souvenirs, she’d got two little shells which have got Swiss scenes painted onto them and, something I haven’t seen before although I’ve got it in photographs, an actual Alpenstock so a walking stick which is about this tall, six foot tall, but it’s actually engraved with her name and the date and all the places they visited all around so you never know what’s going to turn up; all sorts of things come into the archives.

[Do you have uniforms at all?] We have some, yes. Shop uniforms don’t actually start until 1977 so they’re fairly recent and there have been quite few since then about six or seven different ones. But prior to that it’s the uniformed men as you saw. We have some of those, yes and that uniform didn’t change that much. I mean they’re around for the best part of a century but they don’t change very much; the hat changes but the actually coat doesn’t change vastly and we have one or two of those.

[Do you have brochures and posters?] Yes, we will come onto those, I’ll show you those.

So the scope of the archives is vast basically; anything and everything to do with Thomas Cook from the earliest days in the 1840s right through to the present and what we’ll do is come onto the main collections in the archives in a moment.

Now, as far as use goes the archives are used obviously quite extensively by internal departments so the Press Office, the Publicity Department, Marketing from time to time, the Legal Department if they need to refer back to some old booking conditions, the publishing department looking for inspiration and anybody else; I mean company anniversaries get flagged up and that’s part of my role is to sort of highlight all the anniversaries, and there are lots of those, and it’s up to PR or Marketing to decide whether they want to use the anniversaries or not.

As far as external uses are concerned the two main groups really are academics, as you might expect, and the media. Now these both of these groups can come from anywhere in the world so we have a lot of academic interest from, usually in visitors they’re usually Postgraduates upwards but in terms of enquiries it can be anything from seven years olds studying the Victorians at school right through to undergraduates and onwards.

But they will come because, the records we have are unique. They can’t find them anywhere else and they will travel. And it’s very odd because sometimes you find it’s more likely that I will get a researcher coming from America or Australia than somebody from Manchester or Bristol; Peterborough’s obviously quite difficult to get to from the West side of the country.

The media, again, can be newspaper, television and there’s a lot of television producers tend to come along because the history of travel is of interest to everybody. Travel has this universal appeal and there’s always something you can find a destination, a period, a mode of transport, we touch on all of that in the archives. So you get travel producers, TV producers who are looking at producing a programme on travelling up the Nile or travelling across Europe, tours across America, you name it.

Not all of them end up being made but there’s lot of producers who come along to have a look. There are two or three in the pipeline at the moment so you never know.

Of course in recent time another group of users have been family historians. Now, we’ll come onto it in a moment exactly what we have that might be of use to family historians, now we’ll come onto in a moment exactly what we have that might be of use to family historians which is a little bit hit and miss I will say that.

The main collections within the archives so broadly speaking the main collections are first of all the brochures; by far the biggest collection we have is the brochure collection. Now, there are examples going right back to I guess 1845 you could argue. The early handbooks that Thomas Cook produced are really more of a guidebook, more of a brochure, than a guidebook in that they are talking about specific tours rather than specific places.

So the earliest handbooks for the trips to Liverpool, trips to Scotland in 1840s are sort of brochures. The earliest brochure proper really starts 1858 we have a guide to Cooks Tours in Scotland and 1865 which you did see earlier on the first screen talking about Thomas Cook in the history section there was a guide to Cooks Tours in France, Switzerland and Italy well that dates from 1865; so that’s really the first continental brochure.

But the main collection starts about 1890 and from that point onwards with one or two exceptions where things were thrown away in later years, we have samples from every year and many examples from many years so that the total collection is certainly over 5,000 items and is probably nearer to 10,000 now because, of course, I also inherited fairly recently the Air Tours, My Travel collection. Now that, even though they only go back as a tour operator to the early 1980s, there were over a 1,000 brochures in that collection so, you know, we must be approaching 10,000 now.

As far as I know it must be the biggest collection of holiday brochures anywhere, I mean nobody else is going to have a collection that big, there is no other company that can have amassed them in-house and a private collector just wouldn’t find them because the brochures very rarely come up for sale. Guidebooks do but the brochures are much more difficult to track down because they weren’t designed to last; they were ephemeral.

Well the brochures are great because you have, obviously, the images, you have the wonderful covers – that’s a nice Edwardian brochure – so you’ve got the…it’s from the Manchester Office [laughter] .

We have samples from, as I say, all destinations to all destinations really. You’ve got the illustrated covers, you have the information inside, you’ve got the prices, the itineraries, there are photographs in them really from, well pretty much from day one, where they have illustrated covers they tend to have photographs inside even in the 1890s and then you’ve got the descriptions of the places and you can see how they change over time and that’s what makes it wonderful is the fact that for somewhere like Egypt or Italy or Switzerland or Paris we have them, not quite for every year perhaps, but certainly every few years we have an example.

Winter sports actually is probably the most complete set. Our first Winter Sport brochure was issued in 1908 and we have probably 90 Winter Sports brochures over the next 100 years so you can actually trace how winter sports changed.

Originally in the first one it was only Switzerland and there was no skiing; it was skating and tobogganing only so you can see how it changes and how the dress changes, I mean the winter sports clothing is wonderful. So there are all sorts of things you can find from the brochure collection and people do.

Probably the most important collection in terms of informational content is actually this second collection which is The Excursionist. Now The Excursionist began life as a newspaper published, printed, and written by Thomas himself in 1851 and it was originally called Cook’s Exhibition Herald and Excursion Advertiser and its purpose, primarily, was to promote Thomas Cook’s arrangements from the Midlands to the Great Exhibition in London.

It was a 16 page newspaper and rather boldly he advertised ‘published weekly’ on it whereas in fact he only published five issues during the six month period that the Great Exhibition was on but it’s full of information about travelling to the Great Exhibition, what you could expect to see, why you should go, how much it cost, all these sorts of things and then the excursion advertiser part, which was the second part, was all about trips to other places like Matlock, Chatsworth, these sorts of places and some seaside resorts as well.

Now, originally Thomas had intended this publication only to exist for that period 1851 but it becomes a regular publication and it gets the generic title of The Excursionist, it had various subtitles over the years but it’s always The Excursionist and it just contains. It becomes a monthly publication and it contains vast amounts of detail about travel. So if you want to know how much it cost to travel from London to Paris, it’s there, every issue.

So you can track the changes but I mean you’ve got details of travel to Paris, to Switzerland, tours to Italy, to Rome, you’ve got Egypt, around the world, transatlantic steamer prices, cross channel ferry prices, you name it but in fact the most important or the most interesting section is probably the editorial notes at the beginning because there you find references to the latest railway route opening, the latest route over The Alps or tunnelled through the Alps; there are references to a channel tunnel in 1894 so it’s just full of information so you’ve got a whole social history there.

Now The Excursionist continues as a newspaper up until 1902. That’s the cover it has in the 1890s and then in 1902 it’s transformed by Frank and Ernest, Thomas Cook’s grandsons, who are in charge by then into The Travellers Gazette which is a more formal, in some ways, less interesting magazine which doesn’t have the personal approach that The Excursionist had.

It contains, yes, lots of details of prices and fares and itineraries in the same way, it has travel articles which are fantastic; I often plunder those for quotes for our current Cooks Tours brochure; I get asked to find quotes that refer to trips we do today and try and find some historical connections so I always use those. So the travel articles are fantastic which don’t appear in The Excursionist that’s a Travellers Gazette item only.

But it is very much more formal; it is less personal and you don’t get certainly the articles by Thomas which appeared in the very early issues on The Excursionist and even those by John in the 1870s you still have accounts of trips that they have made so in the pages of The Excursionist you’ve got Thomas’s account of his first trip to Egypt, his first trip to Switzerland, Thomas and John’s first trips to America as well as testimonial letters from customers as well. So there’s just a vast amount of detail and in total it lasts from 1851 to 1939. So you have 88 years’ worth of travel history so the history of tourism in that one publication.

Now The Excursionist can be found elsewhere and the British Library does have a set although for some reason it starts in the 1860s, it doesn’t have the first 15 years but what we also have in the archives are various foreign editions of The Excursionist. So one of the things John introduced was overseas versions so we have from 1873 onwards an American version of The Excursionist published in New York so it’s aimed at North Americans; so what you find in those pages are trips to California, trips to Alaska, trips to the Caribbean, trips to South America which don’t appear in the English edition until the 1890s. You’ve got this 20 year difference.

So there’s a whole different perspective so for people studying transatlantic tourism in the late 19th century you’ve got two sources there; now as far as I know there’s nowhere else in England or America that has both sets so you can’t compare them side by side.

Now other editions continue, the French edition starts in 1881, Australasian and Oriental versions start in about 1890 and by the 1920s there are actually 13 different editions of the Travellers Gazette in publication around the world; all of which we have in the archives.

Guidebooks and timetables; we have lots of those. Thomas Cook started his own series of guidebooks in 1874 they were very much in look, very similar to the Murrays and Baedekers that existed already but in content they are very different. They cover basically the routes that Thomas Cooks’ tourists followed so it doesn’t have all the detail, the minute detail, that you would find in a Baedeker or Murray but they’re more geared towards Thomas Cook’s customers which is obviously who they’re aimed at.

Now, guidebooks start in 1874 they published about 65 different titles, various editions of each through to 1939 and then publication stops, so as the Travellers Gazette stop, the guidebooks stop and although we do published guidebooks again today, the current range of guidebooks only really started in 1993 so there is this gap.

With the timetables, however, and that is the very first issue, that’s the cover of the first issue of Cook’s Continental Timetable; now that is still published today as Thomas Cooks’ European Rail Timetable; that started in 1873 so a year before the guidebooks and with the exception of the Second World War years it has been published continuously since 1873.

For the first ten years it was quarterly but from 1883 onwards it has been a monthly publication. Now I won’t say we have every single issue in the archives, we don’t, we have large gaps certainly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries but from 1909 onwards we’re fairly complete and from 1946 onwards the post war issues we’re missing literally a handful of copies.

Now the purpose of the timetable in 1873 and today was essentially the same. It is a cheap, in adverted commas, I mean that’s obviously down to you; it’s a cheap, concise summary of all the main European railways. So it’s very handy for independent travellers, backpackers or anybody travelling across Europe today and it still sells in hard copy, it still sells very well.

But it’s been doing so for over 130 years and they do get used surprisingly, I get a lot of it tends to be either rail enthusiasts or writers, I get a lot of writers of historical fiction who are trying to place their characters in certain places and wanted to know if it was possible to travel from A to B at a particular time; so we have all obviously the timings in there but we don’t have prices but if it falls in the period up to 1939 the prices will be in the Travellers Gazette or The Excursionist.

Also in those, in the timetables, you find exchange rates so we’ve actually got exchange rates in there all the way back and list of Cooks’ offices as well, so a list of our offices which also appeared in the Travellers Gazette and The Excursionist appear in the timetables.

Okay a couple of broad categories now. Ephemera: now obviously we’ll come onto this again in a moment as a specific collection for tourists, tourist records, but we have a lot of miscellaneous items in the archives which have been donated by travellers, or their descendants. So they can be anything from tickets, hotel menus, invoices and bills as well as diaries, personal accounts of trips, photographs, we have some photograph albums as well. And then lots of documentary letters, printed receipts, things like that, hotel coupons which was something Thomas Cook introduced in the 1860s as a pre-paid accommodation to go with your pre-paid tickets.

And finally company business records. Again that is a fairly broad category but there we have records relating to obviously finance records, corporate records, legal records. I will say staff records although, as we will see in a moment, we don’t have staff files or we don’t have files on individual members of staff but there are records relating to staff sort of terms of employment, staff rules of which we have a wonderful list of rules from 1925 one of which was that males under the age of 25 could not marry without their management’s permission and females if they married had to leave the company, that was in 1925.

Okay, records that specifically apply to ancestors, so family historian type records. Basically you’ve got the tourists or the booking clerks, the customers or the staff. As far as specific customer records go first thing I have to say is that we don’t keep booking records, we don’t have lists and lists of booking records of everybody who travelled with Thomas Cook – although some people think that we ought to have.

What we do have obviously we have all the details as I have explained in The Excursionist and guidebooks we have the details of travel. So if you know that your ancestor did a tour of Switzerland in the 1880s then I can probably find you the itinerary they would have gone on. I can tell you how much it cost, I can tell you where they went, I can give you accounts in some other people’s diaries probably of what they saw so we have that level of detail but in terms of, you know, when your ancestors went if you don’t know I can’t tell you that I won’t have a list.

We have a whole collection of diaries in the archives probably 50 or 60 of them. Some handwritten and hand illustrated as in this case which is actually the best example we have; that one dates from 1863 and is an account by a young lady called Miss Jemima who travelled on Thomas Cook’s very first Swiss tour.

Now we have Thomas’s account in The Excursionist of that trip but what we have there is a customer account of that whole tour and it’s not just: ‘on Monday we went to Geneva and on Tuesday we got on a train…’. It’s not that at all. It is very well written, it’s very Austenesque in parts; it’s very witty there are a lot of remarks about fellow travellers, about people they meet, places they visit; it’s a very interesting to read.

Now there is actually a copy of that; in 1963 on the centenary of that first tour a facsimile copy or at least a copy of the text was printed so that does exist in book format and it’s amazing how many English-speaking people in Switzerland have read it because I actually took it out to be displayed at the Geneva State Archives a few years ago and all the English people I met had read that book; they all knew about Miss Jemima so she is famous.

We have lots – handwritten copies, some are just photocopies, some are typescript versions some are actually printed, some people printed their diaries so they went off on holiday, came back, wrote up their notes, had them printed and then circulated to their friends. We have a few of those. The earliest ones we have actually date from 1855 which are the diaries of three sisters who went with Thomas Cook to Paris, the first time he went to the continent; Thomas Cook’s first continental tour. We have, again, an account of people who went there.

Photographs: we have a huge collection of photographs but many of them are anonymous, you know this is a group photo, in this case, in the ruins of Pompeii in 1868. However, for some of them, such as this one, this was a formal group photograph taken by a professional photographer and then made available for sale to all the people who went on that tour. Thomas Cook is actually on that tour; he’s there sitting right at the front in the dark suit just to the right of the gentleman in the very light suit. So Thomas is just about coming up to 60 on that photo. But we have a copy of that photograph with all the names annotated, we have a list, it’s framed around the outside of the picture we have all the names of the people in that photograph so we can tell you who went on that particular tour in 1868.

It’s unusual, we don’t have lots of those; we have lots of photographs but not lots with names on but we have, you know, if you want to see if you know your ancestor was travelling to Italy in 1868 that’s what they would have worn. What’s interesting about what they wear is also that you can compare photographs of Cooks’ tourists in Italy, Egypt, Scotland, Paris, America, even the Holy Land, they’re all dressed the same.

There is no concession to the climate whatsoever, they’re all dressed in their Sunday Best with hats and everything and it’s just bizarre. So if you actually wanted to try and identify where they were, from what they were wearing you would have no chance but they’re brilliant, they’re fascinating. You can look at those for hours; they are wonderful.

We have even more for Egypt actually. We have a lot of material relating to Egypt; it’s probably the largest collection of both business records and customer photographs and actually also passenger lists. We do have some but the only passenger, well I say only, 99% of the passenger lists we have relate to Thomas Cook’s Nile steamers and also only cover a three or four year period so if you know your ancestor travelled on the Nile with Thomas Cook in the early 1890s then I can probably find you a list of passengers and I can tell you exactly who they were travelling with; I can tell you how much it cost, I can tell you the dates they went, where they went because all of those itineraries exist but we don’t have that level of detail for anything else. But those again are wonderful, we often find Professor this, Lord and Lady that, there’s all sorts of people appear on those passenger lists.

So in terms of sort of customer records, records that refer to specific travellers, specific customers those are the main sources. The equivalent for staff we have firstly, probably, the staff magazines. Now the staff magazines actually start in 1911, there are none before that. They start in 1911 and the original staff magazine, which was called The Ludgate Circus Club magazine, was actually a mouthpiece of the sports and social club. So if your ancestor worked for Thomas Cook and was as a sporting person then they are undoubtedly going to appear in there at some point.

If they played football, rugby, cricket, swimming, they will be in there and it’s also amazing how many different societies they had, you know, in the late Edwardian period. They had a dramatic society in the 1920s we actually had our own orchestra and operatic society. In the early 1920s Thomas Cook could put on an opera and we have some of the programmes and it’s just phenomenal.

We had our own sports ground as well, actually, out at Ravensbourne in Kent so there’s a lot of records about that. If they were involved in, you know, a sporting activity if they were a sporting person then we can probably find a reference to them.

1911 to 1914 is this Ludgate Circus Club magazine; there’s then a gap and staff magazine starts up again in 1923 and runs through to 1930 at this point it’s known as The Globetrotter. Now that period 1923-30 is probably the most useful; those are probably the most useful staff magazines we have because they still contain a lot of sports and social references but they also start to refer more to staff at large and by this time, you know, we have got offices all over the world; or in literally all over the world.

And so there are references to staff from those offices in there as well but what you find in the 20s are retirement notices and obituaries with complete career synopsis of people who joined 40 and 50 years before so these are the people who set up the company in the 1870s with John and the 1880s and you find them all retiring after 40, 50 years’ service. I mean the one I’ve put up there is only there because I actually had an enquiry about this particular person just a couple of weeks ago.

A descendant of Mr Durrant-Thorpe contacted me and wanted to know if I had anything in the archives. Now he worked for the company for over 50 years, we don’t have that many references to him but first point of call is the staff magazines which we have indexed, at least up to 1989; 1911-1989 there are indexed because for that period there is only a single staff magazine. After 1989 they start to proliferate and there are different magazines for different parts of the business. It just gets very complicated and I don’t have time to index those at the moment.

But we found this and he was overwhelmed, the fact that we had a photograph was fantastic and it gives, you know, you got a complete career synopsis there but he’s referring to the fact that he was employed by John in the 1870s; he knew John Mason Cook and therefore he would have known Thomas because Thomas was around then as well; so this is a guy who was not retiring until the 1920s actually knew both Thomas and John and all the people who actually built up in the company in the earliest days.

So that’s sort of thing is great but, you know, it’s again for a limited period; if your ancestor retired in the 20s and had done, you know, a decent amount of service then yes they will probably get a reference.

Now there are lists in the back of the staff magazines in the 20s and later for staff who have joined the company, transferred, left the company but there are literally, it is a list not even with a date in the early years, it is literally this last month or this last quarter these people have moved or transferred offices.

Those are not indexed but if you had somebody who was worked in a branch and moved from one to another we could probably find roughly when that happened so we could piece together possibly a career path for somebody who worked for Thomas Cook over those years; from the 1920s and later so. Before the 1920s you have to hope that they had a long career and then retired in the 20s.

Photographs: Now photographs crop up for staff as they crop up for tourists. We also have a whole series of photographs of offices as well so lots of photographs in the archives.

That is actually an exception; that photograph is taken in 1955 and that is Mr Donald White who was our uniformed man at Victoria Station for many, many years and in fact his claim to fame is that he actually had a little tea card with his image on it so you know in tea you used to, if you’re old enough, remember in tea you used to get little cards well he [comment from audience] so the tea cards similar but he was on one of those and we have it in the archives actually; it’s his claim to fame.

As well as actually knowing all the politicians and sort of members of the Royal Family of the day because most of them passed through Victoria Station and he was on first name terms with pretty much everybody who travelled on a Cook’s ticket.

Most of our staff photographs actually date from the 1890s so they’re earlier, much earlier. We actually have two photograph albums from the 1890s which we believe were commissioned for the company’s Golden Jubilee in 1891 because most of them date from then but we don’t know why there are two because some people appear in both and other people only appear in one and they’re not the same format, they’re two different sizes, two different types but there are about the same period so they are early 1890s.

But they are indexed so we have a list of all the people; I won’t say it’s a list of everybody who worked for the company at that time but there’s a fair few of them and certainly all of the Branch Managers, all of the Head Office staff will be in there somewhere. So again, if you are looking for a photograph of an ancestor and you know they worked for Thomas Cook it in the early 1890s it is likely that they’re in those albums somewhere.

And the third main collection of records we have which relate and name staff specifically are contracts. Now, we don’t have contracts for everybody; what we have is, we have a series of large volumes which we call the agreement books. These run from about 1873 probably because that’s when most of the business records begin, through to the late 1920s. So essentially the period where John was in charge and then his sons were in charge.

Now for that period we have these series of volumes into which were copied all of the major contracts and agreements that the company made. Now these can be with individuals, they can be with hotels, they can be with shipping companies, railway companies, airlines, automobile companies – there’s are a lot of those – and they are indexed so we have an index to all of them.

Now unfortunately the only members of staff that tend to appear in these agreement books are overseas agents or overseas branch managers because every one of their contracts was unique because every market was different so their commission basis was different in every market.

The UK branch managers and UK Head Office staff tended to have standard contracts so we might have an example of the standard contract and sometimes we will have a list of names to whom that applied but not always.

So again if you have an ancestor who worked for Thomas Cook overseas, which a lot of branch managers did, because they often moved from Head Office in London, perhaps to start with, then they might go to a UK office then they might go to Paris or a continental office and they may, as Mr Durrant-Thorpe did, end up in America; I mean he went from London, Paris to Boston and ended up being our agent in Boston for many years.

So in that case, yes we probably will have a contract; the one that’s on display there is actually an original that we have although a copy of that also appears in the agreement books and that is the agreement that was made between Thomas and John and Mr John Bredell who was the compiler of the original rail timetable and that is his contract for that timetable in 1873 for which he was paid a penny a copy.

So in summary the archives contain a vast amount of material and information about travel for the period the mid-19th century to the present day.

However, in terms of specific individuals it’s very much a case of when, where, who, who they were; the chances of finding information about a specific individual are quite slim unless they were a very senior member of staff.

We don’t have booking records en masse we don’t have a file for every member of staff but we do have, as I have shown you, various records which do mention specific individuals but if you want to know about what your ancestor might have done as a booking clerk or a member of Head Office staff, or a uniformed representative or one of a whole host of other things they could have done in working for Thomas Cook, or if you know your ancestors travelled on the continent, whether it was with Thomas Cook or not, I mean chances are late 19th century early 20th more likely than not it was with Thomas Cook but even if they travelled independently most Thomas Cook customers actually travelled independently – they bought their tickets from Thomas Cook but they didn’t necessarily travel as part of a conducted party. So if you want information about the route they might have followed, how much it might have cost them, the sorts of people who were going then yes we have all that information in the archives.

So that’s really where I want to leave it just to say the Thomas Cook Archives really are an unrivalled resource for anybody with an interest in the history of travel and tourism from an academic point of view, from a media point of view or from a family historian point of view or any other point of view so that is where I think I will stop.

Transcribed by Anita Hewitson as part of a volunteer project, May 2015