Part of a vast archive charting the history of pioneering Leicestershire travel firm Thomas Cook can now be looked at online.
Thousands of items in the collection are housed at the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, in Wigston but many of them are now more widely accessible.
Thanks to a grant from the National Archives, under the Archives Revealed scheme, and after months of work by Record Office staff, a portion of the giant archive has been catalogued and is available to search online.
Items which can be searched for using an online catalogue include staff magazines, volumes of contracts and agreements and some of the historic travel brochures.
Project Archivist Jennifer Roach, who is leading the work to catalogue the entire archive, said: “The Thomas Cook archive is internationally significant, as it provides a detailed historical record of the man and company which created international package travel as we know it today. It is a great honour for us to have been chosen as the permanent home of the Thomas Cook archive and we believe it is vital that we can make the material as accessible as possible.
“We’re aiming to keep uploading records to the catalogue throughout the course of the project, with the full catalogue online and the collection available from next April when the project concludes. We will then showcase some of the material in the Thomas Cook Collection, highlighting the gems we have found along the way.”
The wider collection includes minute books and staff records, posters, travel guides and timetables.
It also features 60,000 photographs and souvenirs from the company's 178-year history, including glass and china, uniforms through the ages and even a model of a Nile steamer.
If all the boxes of photographs, diaries, letters, minutes, accounts, reports, contracts, volumes, objects, artefacts and posters were laid out in a line, it would be 250 metres long – around 2.5 times the length of the playing surface at the King Power Stadium.
The Thomas Cook archive collection is a vital piece of Leicestershire history and I am delighted that this work is being carried out to preserve it for future generations, as well as providing a valuable resource to the people of Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland.
Person:Christine Radford, Leicestershire County Council cabinet member for heritage, leisure, and arts The entire Thomas Cook archive was acquired by the county council in 2019, following a nationwide bidding process to find a new permanent home for the collection.
The brochures make up one of the larger sections of the archive, with examples dating back to 1858 and the first continental brochures appearing from 1865. Most of the collection dates from around 1890, with samples from nearly every year being kept, covering all varieties of destinations.
A £40,000 grant from Archives Revealed, funded by The National Archives, The Pilgrim Trust and The Wolfson Foundation, has paid for the work to make part of the Thomas Cook archive available online.
More information on the Record Office’s catalogues can be found at http://www.recordoffice.org.uk/resources/catalogues/