Charles G. Harper

“ Apply these feelings to the case of the coachmen who were born in an age that knew nothing of steam. Every stand-by was rooted up in the coming of railways, and the steam-engine was just as strange a monster to them as the electric dynamo is to many of ourselves. Often they could not transfer their allegiance to the railway, even though they starved. It was not always stubbornness or pride that held them aloof, but a certain and easily-understood lack of adaptability that forbade one who had held the reins to handle the starting-lever of the locomotive. ”

“ Coaches no longer dash through the old “thoroughfare” villages; and when, with the advent of spring, the motorist appears upon the road, the villagers, rather than welcoming his appearance, curse him for the clouds of dust he leaves behind. Motor-cars, they tell us, are to repeople the old coaching-roads, whose prosperity is, through them, to return, and the picturesque old wayside inns, with their memories of the coaching age, are to once again experience the rush of business. ”

“ Harry Foker and others of the “young Oxonians” or “young Cantabs” with more taste for driving four-in-hand than knowledge of that very difficult art, were frequent aspirants for the ribbons, and as they were generally flush of money and free with it, they often tasted the delights of tooling a coach along the highway. Professional coachmen on the Oxford and Cambridge roads reaped a bounteous crop of half-guineas by resigning the reins into these hands, but equally plentiful was the harvest of bruises and shocks gathered by the passengers as a result of their reckless or unskilled driving. ”

“ When a person is enjoying sweet repose in his bed, to be suddenly awakened by the rude, blustering voice of a vociferous ostler was distinctly annoying. More annoying still, however, to lose the coach; and so there was no help for it, provided the stage was to be caught. The morning was very fine when the passengers, thus untimely roused, entered the coach. Nature smiled around them, who only yawned in her face in return. ”

“ The horseless carriages are upon us, and “going strong,” alike in speed and scent. The odour of the imperfectly-combusted petrol desecrates the airs of the country-side. Already the length and breadth of the land have been explored by them,286 on roads good, bad and indifferent, hilly or flat; and the characteristic rattle of their machinery and the hoarse trumpeting of their cyclorns are becoming familiar even to the rustics of Devon and Somerset.
Let it not be supposed, however, that skill in driving is not so necessary now as in the days of the spanking teams of coach-horses. ”

“ Festoons of flowers and sprays of evergreens so draped and covered the coach that the insides, peering out upon the festivities, very closely resembled those antic figures, the “Jacks-in-the-Green,” that used on May Day to prance and make merry from the midst of an embowering canopy of foliage, even so late as thirty years ago, in London streets. The horses, too, bore their part. Their new harness and saddle-cloths, the rosettes and wreaths of laurel on their heads, smartened347 them up so that even the animals themselves were conscious of the occasion, and bore themselves with becoming pride. ”

“ This is Stamford Hill, where the rich City indigo and East and West India merchants live. Warm men, all of them. There, ahead of us, on the right, goes the river Lea: as pretty fishing there as you’d find even in the famous trout streams of Hampshire. What a quaint, quiet rural place this is at Tottenham! And Edmonton, with its tea-gardens; why, London might be fifty miles away! ”

“ Hazlett, who had robbed the mail in 1770, hung on a gibbet at the left hand. “Unfortunate and infatuated Hazlett! Hadst thou robbed the nation of millions, instead of robbing the mail and pilfering a few shillings from a testy old maid, thou hadst not been hanging, a spectacle to passers-by and a prey to crows. Thy case was pitiable—but there was no mercy: thou wast poor, and thy sin unpardonable. Hadst thou robbed to support the Crown, and murdered for the Monarchy, thou might’st have been yet alive.” ”

“ No connoisseur in coaching matters would condescend to travel as a regular thing by a three-horse coach, and so those supporters were alienated, and, against their will, driven to the railway; and the “Swallow,” badly winged, carried only frightened old women who looked upon steam-engines as wild beasts. As they died away, no one took their places, and the old concern became a pair-horse coach. ”

“ Thank goodness! we’re off, and the sooner we’re out of this traffic and off the stones at Kingsland Turnpike the better. These paved streets are so noisy, one can scarcely hear oneself talk, and the rattling sends a jar up one’s spine. How London grows! ”

“ COACH-PROPRIETORS None among the servants of the public earned their living more hardly, or took greater risks in the ordinary way of business, than the coach proprietors. It was a business in which the few—the very few—became rich, and the majority lived a strenuous life, with empty pockets at the end of it. It was very truly said of them, as a class, that they lived hard, worked hard, swore hard, and died hard. To this was sometimes added that they held hard, by which you are to understand that what money they did succeed in getting they grasped tightly. ”

“ We all know the truth of the adage that “variety is charming,” and of variety the travellers had their fill. And not only was there variety in design, but an endless change of materials gratified the eyes of those who cared for these things. London, with its dingy brick, was succeeded, as one penetrated westwards, by the weather-boarded cottages of Brentford and Hounslow, by the timber framing and brick nogging of the next districts, by the chalk and flint of Hampshire and Wilts ”

“ From the sordid view-point of the profit-and-loss account, although this was the age in which Chaplin and a few others made their great fortunes, it was a time when the high speed and other refinements of travelling made the path of the coach-proprietor a thorny and uneasy one, often barren of aught but honour. ”

“ Many other coach-proprietors did arrive at such a conclusion, not, of course, by process of reasoning, but by force of being habitually engaged in a business that prejudiced their minds against steam and machinery. Their first instincts of scorn for anything that should presume to replace the horse effectually blinded them to the reality of the coming change. ”

“ Let it be granted that they are ultimately in favour of the community and for the eventual improvement of the race; but if you view him unconventionally, does not the inventor, with his ingenious devices to overturn the practice and habits of generations past, seem sometimes rather a curse than a benefactor to mankind? While with one hand he simplifies and cheapens something (whether it be in travel or in anything else does not particularly matter for argument’s sake) , with the other he sets a more strenuous pace to life. ”

“ Dark nights in wild country were fruitful in strange experiences, aided, doubtless, by the potency of the parting glass as well as by the blackness of the night and the ruggedness of the way. The adventures of Jack Creery and Joe Lord, coachman and guard of the pair-horse Lancaster and Kirkby Stephen Mail, one snowy night, form a case in point. They had the coach to themselves, for it was not good travelling weather. Creery, we are told, “felt sleepy”—a pretty way of saying he was intoxicated—and so the guard took the reins. ”

“ There was not too much physical exertion, endurance, or skill required on the road to Brighton, which was only fifty-two miles in length, and already possessed a better surface than most roads out of London; and, moreover, it was a road peopled from beginning to end with fashionables, before whom the gentleman-coachman could display his prowess. It was then pretty generally recognised that coach-driving was a poor sport if the ease and grace of the performer could not be displayed before a large and fashionable audience. ”

“ When, as in the reign of William IV., the King’s birthday fell in a pleasant time of the year, the procession of the mails was a beautiful and popular sight, attracting not only the general public, but the very numerous sporting folks, who welcomed the opportunity of seeing at their best, and all together, the one hundred and two noble horses that drew the mails from the Metropolis to all parts of the kingdom. ”

“ The vehicle for carrying coach and passengers across the river was the most tiresome and heavy that ever was invented. Four rowers in a small boat dragged the ponderous ferry across the river, very slowly and with great exertions, and almost an hour was consumed in thus breasting the yellow current of the broad and swiftly-running Tyne. ”

“ The only satisfaction these reckless sportsmen obtained, beyond the immediate gratification of their tastes, was the eulogy of the sporting scribes, who discussed their style upon the box-seat with as much gravity as would befit some question of empire. ”

“ Nay, the locomotive steam engine itself is doomed, in turn, to be replaced by self-moving electric motor carriages, and we shall live to drop a salt tear upon an express locomotive retired from active service, or to sigh at sight of a solitary Metropolitan Railway engine placed in a museum of things that were. The days of the prophets were not ended with the Biblical prognosticators, with Nixon, red-faced or otherwise, or with Mother Shipton, or even with Erasmus Darwin, who, although he could foresee steam and the balloon, could not envisage electricity. ”

“ Many among those not born in the age of coaches have marvelled at what they consider the wealth of reminiscences about the old coachmen. The truth is that there exists no such wealth. There were certainly no fewer than three thousand coachmen throughout the country in the days just before railways. What do we know of them? Very little. Even their names have been forgotten, except in some (comparatively few) special cases. No one can give us a complete list of the coachmen of the Edinburgh Mail, of the Exeter “Telegraph,” or Devonport “Quicksilver,” or of any of the crack day coaches. ”

“ At Newark, a hundred and twenty-five miles of our journey performed, it is broad daylight as the coach rolls, making the echoes resound, into the great market-square. Clock-faces—a little83 blanched and debauched-looking to our fancy—proclaim the hour to be 5.30 a.m. The change is waiting for us in front of the “Saracen’s Head,” and so is our new coachman. The old one leaves us, but before doing so “kicks us”—as the expressive phraseology of the road has it—for the usual fees. ”

“ When the London and South-Western Railway was opened to Richmond, in 1843, the first station-master was a former coachman and coach-proprietor, and a very notable one: no less a man, indeed, than Thomas Cooper, who had in his time run a service of coaches between London, Bath and Bristol, and had been landlord of that very fine old inn, the “Castle,” at Marlborough, now and for many years past a part of Marlborough College. ”