Cook's Confined

After 15 years of Belgian control, Thos. Cook & Son, that uniquely British institution, became all-British again. The British Custodian of Enemy Property sold its impounded shares to the big four British railways,* turned over its banking business (travelers' checks, etc.) to Grindlay's private bank. Cook's most valuable asset-its name-stayed put.

Thomas Cook, a teetotaler printer and lecturer, began his famed endeavor 101 years ago. He chartered a Midland Railway excursion train to carry a temperance convention from Leicester to Loughborough (24 miles) for a shilling a head. A Cook's tour from Leicester to the then-remote wilds of Scotland in 1846 was so popular that many of the 350 one-guinea tickets were resold at scalpers' prices before the trip began. By 1851 Mr. Cook's novel business had mushroomed to such impressive proportions that it brought 165,000 visitors to London's famed Crystal Palace Exhibition --the first of what was to become a golden series of Cook-aided world's fairs.

Cook not only showed Britons their way around the world, but helped them build (and defend) their Empire. In 1868, for his first tour to the Holy Land, he made special safe-conduct treaties with Bedouin chiefs in Syria and Palestine. In 1884-85, when Chinese Gordon went to his death at the hands of the "Fuzzy-Wuzzies" at Khartoum, Cook's, by then master of all tourist transportation on the Nile, took charge of his transport. Later (and too late) Cook's carried the 17,000 troops, 130,000 tons of war materials, 70,000 tons of coal, 50,000 tons of other supplies sent to relieve him.

Bermuda, and many a Caribbean island, owes its early tourist popularity to Thomas Cook. The world's first conducted tour by air was a 1927 New York-to-Chicago flight, in a plane chartered by Thos. Cook & Son for the Dempsey-Tunney fight.

Shortly thereafter, the firm was absorbed by the expanding Belgian firm, Wagons-Lits (the Pullman Co. of Europe). But to the thousands of Cook's tourists-from maharajas to U.S. clubwomen-Cook's was still Cook's.

Even before the Custodian of Enemy Property took it over, Thos. Cook & Son (as so often before) had gone to war for Britain. Most of its work now is "handling intricate arrangements of international travel for business and Government officials." Its huge vacation camp at Prestatyn, Wales, has become a military training base; its Egyptian machine shops (set up to service its luxury fleet of Nile steamers and "dahabeahs") service the B.E.F.'s war machines. Only in North America does Cook's still book pleasure trips, and travel is confined to the Hemisphere-which any self-respecting Cook's employe finds confining indeed (see cut, p. 65).

But at war's, end, Thos. Cook & Son dreamers see all kinds of brave new travel: weekend air trips from New York to London and Paris; tractor-treaded excursions into areas where no car or train or plane can go. They have never forgotten old Thomas Cook's cherished belief: if enough people travel to enough places, international understanding must follow.

*London Midland & Scottish, Great Western, London & North Eastern, Southern.

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