©National Archives

Travel poster of 1904 advertising Cook's Conducted Tours on the Continent

Thomas Cook's first cheap excursion by train was organised in 1841 for teetotallers from Leicester to attend a temperance rally in Loughborough. In 1861, the first Cook's tour set out for Paris. Day excursions to the sea-side also became popular - Rowland Hill, inventor of the penny postage stamp, is said to have organised the first one in 1843. Organised trips to the Great Exhibition of 1851 provided a great stimulus to travel in search of self-improvement. Thomas Cook & Son came to organise trips all around the world but the bulk of their business remained in Europe, with passengers such as those shown in this travel poster, setting off via Victoria station in London for the South Eastern and Chatham Railway's boat train service to the Channel ports. This railway company also produced an illustrated booklet in 1900 entitled The Riviera and Italy for a £10 Note, demonstrating how affordable such trips had become. In the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cheap travel, paid holidays and packaged holidays brought affordable holidays abroad to most sections of society. Railway companies had an obvious self-interest in promoting travel.