It is sad to see the collapse of the Thomas Cook travel company with its 21,000 employees and the 19 million people who use its travel facilities every year. It is the oldest travel firm in the world, having started in 1841. The Leicester cabinetmaker who founded the business did so as an outcome of his Christian faith.

Thomas Cook was a Baptist preacher who organised Sunday School trips and wanted to provide leisure facilities for hard-pressed workers, who were suffering under the appalling working conditions in Victorian Britain before any of the factory reforms had been enacted.

It was the early days of the railways and he began by offering cheap trips between Leicester and Loughborough and then extended these to the coast for seaside visits. He was a strong campaigner for temperance, seeing the evils of alcohol at all levels in society, especially among the poor. His early railway trips were especially organised for temperance supporters.

Thomas CookHe organised trips to the Great Exhibition in London and then extended to the Continent with trips to Paris and many other European destinations. Thomas died in 1892 and the firm was taken over by his son and remained in the hands of the family for the next 30 years. Since then it has become a global company with an airline subsidiary operating thousands of travel shops in different parts of the world.

Thomas Cook has had many owners, but its most recent management has not been able to cope with the changing demands upon the travel industry, with many people booking online, the strong downturn in many high streets, rising fuel costs and currency fluctuations. These changes have all taken their toll, but there also appears to have been huge management failures whereby senior staff have taken large salaries and bonuses while the business accumulated nearly £2 billion of debt – behaviour which flies in the face of the company’s original biblical values.

Many people will miss the services provided by Thomas Cook, with its famous slogan “Don’t just book it: Thomas Cook it”. They will miss the ready-made package holidays that relieved holidaymakers of the burden of finding hotels and booking airfares. But most of all they will miss the personal care and reliability offered by the company that, despite many changes of ownership, succeeded in retaining its original values of offering service to working people. Christians in the world of commerce today would gain much and give much back to society if they took inspiration from the founding values of this much-loved business.