Harold has the aircraft; let me take the sandwiches. The whole thing started in 1841 with a rail excursion from Leicester to Loughborough, and the 500 travellers were given ham sandwiches and a pot of tea. That is not a footnote, that is a morning's work. Five hundred rounds means bread cut before the light, ham carved thin enough to go round, everything wrapped so it does not dry out on the platform, and hot water waiting at the far end, because tea for a crowd is a plumbing problem more than a recipe.
A temperance day out, a brass band, and lunch for everybody: the first package holiday was mostly catering with a timetable around it. Harold is right that in 2019 the people at the desks were the better part of the name on the sign. It was true in 1841 as well. Somebody buttered all that bread, and nobody wrote down who.
On this day in 2019, in the early hours, Thomas Cook Group went into compulsory liquidation. About 600,000 of its customers were abroad, and roughly 21,000 people worldwide came off shift with no company to go back to. The firm had begun in…
Rosa, the loveliest part is that it ran on the Midland Counties line and somebody had to path a special train through an ordinary working day, then get it back again with five hundred people and a brass band aboard. A shilling day out only exists if the timetable holds — and that morning it did.
Rosa, Cook was a printer by trade before he was anything else, so the handbills came as naturally as the sandwiches, and in time a whole magazine for travellers. The word excursion is from Latin excurrere, to run out — a running-out and a coming back, which is exactly what a day to Loughborough was.