AMID a week of extraordinary highs and desperate lows, a notable anniversary slipped by.

On Tuesday, there were celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the first package holiday and the 164th anniversary of the first modern travel event. Both firsts belong to Thomas Cook. Both firsts deserve to be commemorated because they radically altered - and broadened - life.

But no-one has yet trumpeted how this area can claim to have beaten Mr Cook on both counts by several years at least.

In 1841, Cook, a teetotaller and Baptist preacher living in Leicester, hired a train and sold 500 one shilling tickets to Temperance activists so they could travel the 12 miles from Leicester to attend a rally in Loughborough.

This is regarded as the first modern travel event.

During the rest of the 1840s, Cook carried passengers to such exotic places as Nottingham, Derby, Birmingham and Liverpool. He formed travel clubs to help his passengers pay for their trips, knowing that if they were saving they couldn't be spending on drink.

After ferrying 150,000 Midlanders to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, Cook's thoughts turned to foreign fields. On July 5, 1855, 40 tourists left London on an 11 day rail and steamboat trip to Brussels, Cologne, Heidelberg and Paris. The £13 cost (about £450 today) included hotel accommodation - the first foreign package holiday.

Now to the North-East. The Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) opened in 1825 and has many claims to fame. One often overlooked is its place in the rise of holiday travel.

The first passenger coaches that ran on the line were horsedrawn. The line was single track with passing loops every quarter of a mile. This produced some interesting confrontations when coaches dashing eastwards from Darlington met those flying westwards from Stockton. The question of who would back up into the passing loop was often settled by fisticuffs - a form of negotiation fuelled by the fact that there were no stations so most passengers waited in railside pubs.

To overcome these punch-ups, posts were erected midway between passing loops. Whoever was "first past the post" had the right to continue - and so a phrase entered the English language.

The world's first passenger timetable was probably for The Union coach which started running on October 16, 1826, from the Black Lion at Stockton to the Black Swan in Darlington via The New Inn in Yarm.

That timetable also says: "On the 19th and 20th of October, the Fair Days at Yarm, The Union will leave Darlington at six in the morning for Yarm and will leave Yarm for Darlington again at six in the evening." So 15 years before Cook sent the first excursion from Leicester to Loughborough, special coaches were running to Yarm fair, an exercise that appears to have been repeated for Stockton races. These must surely be the first modern daytrips.

In 1846, the S&DR extended from Middlesbrough to Redcar and started running special seaside trains. It was primarily railwaymen and their families who toured to the sea, but these little packages proved popular: 1,016 holidaymakers travelled in 1848 and 2,200 in 1850.

By at least five years, Thomas Cook had been beaten to the idea of the family package holiday - even if Redcar isn't quite as exotic as Paris or Brussels.

Published: 09/07/2005