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The First Day Trip Operators
Before penny arcades and fishing, seaside piers once
had a function and purpose when people travelled in
their thousands by steamship or paddle steamer which
berthed at the many piers along the Victorian coast. Such
trips were very popular from towns and cities along the
Medway and Thames to the Kent and Essex coast. But it
was the arrival of the railways in the mid 19
th
century that
really led to the blooming of a dedicated day trip industry.
The first package tour entrepreneur Thomas Cook ran
his first one day railway excursion on 5 July 1841. The
32 year old cabinet maker was a religious man, a Baptist
who believed that most of society’s ills were caused by
alcohol. As he walked one day from his home in Market
Harborough to a temperance meeting in Leicester:
“the thought suddenly flashed across my mind as to the
practicability of employing the great powers of railways
and locomotion for the furtherance of this social
reform”.
Cook made his arrangements with the Midland
Railway Company and charged 500 people a shilling each
to travel 12 miles in open carriages from Leicester to a
temperance meeting in Loughborough. Cook later wrote
“thus was struck the keynote of my excursions, and the
social idea grew upon me”. His first trips for temperance
societies and Sunday schools were not for profit but
in 1845 he began on a business footing with a trip to
Liverpool publicising the trip with a 60-page booklet that
would be the forerunner of the holiday brochure. In 1851
Cook brought 150,000 people to London for the Great
Exhibition in Hyde Park.
For day trippers from Liverpool and the North West Henry
R Marcus was the “father of cheap trips” running
excursion train trips to London and other destinations
from the 1840s in conjunction with the London & North
Western Railway. In contrast to Thomas Cook’s middle
class tourists, Marcus promoted his trips as “a grand treat
for the working classes” in handbills entitled Marcus’s
Cheap Excursions. Like Thomas Cook he did very well out
of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and also ran trains for the
Duke of Wellington’s funeral the following year and the
Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857.
He seems to have been a conscientious operator.
The Liverpool Mercury reported that when railway
workers ordered the excursionists off a train some distance
from the station and in the pitch dark, Marcus was on hand
with a torch to lead his customers to safety. The contract
for a railway ticket had to be directly between the railway
company and the passenger so like Thomas Cook, Marcus
was acting as an agent for the railway company. In 1869
having promoted trips to one and half million people over
25 years they gave him the push apparently because his
brand was starting to have more clout than theirs. Just
6 years later the increasingly deaf Marcus was killed by
a train he just didn’t hear coming.
The 1871 Bank Holiday Act introduced a statutory right
for workers to take holidays and this stimulated the
growing day trip market. In addition to the churches and
community organisations, some paternalistic factory
owners and even some grocers and tea dealers started to
organise day trips.
Before the railways came group travel was limited to
the old horse drawn stage coaches or the charabanc - a
French invention of the 1840s used at race meetings and
for shooting parties. The name comes from char a bancs –
carriages with wooden benches. The first charabancs were
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