James Wilson Hyde

“ On these occasions a general run was made to the Tontine Coffee-room to hear the great news, and long before the newspapers were delivered the public were advertised by the guard of the particulars of the great victory, which fled from mouth to mouth like wildfire."
The mail-guards, and also the coachmen, were a race of men by themselves, modelled and fashioned by the circumstances of their employment—in fact, receiving character, like all other sets of people, from their peculiar environment. ”

“ Wherever there is wanting a quick and universal exchange of thought there can be no sound public opinion. Where hindrances are placed upon the free exchange of views, either by heavy duties on newspapers, by dear postage, or by slow communications, public opinion must be a plant of low vitality and slow growth. Consequently, in the age preceding that of steam, so far as applied to locomotion, and to the telegraph, which age extended well into the present century, there was no rapid exchange of thought ”

“ FARMERS that wish to know the best Markets!
MERCHANTS AND TRADESMEN that wish to receive Orders and Money quickly and cheaply!
MECHANICS AND LABOURERS that wish to learn where good work and high wages are to be had! support the Report of the House of Commons with your Petitions for an UNIFORM PENNY POST. Let every City and Town and Village, every Corporation, every Religious Society and Congregation, petition, and let every one in the kingdom sign a Petition with his name or his mark. ”

“ The noise he made brought out the other two sleepy wretches that had been waiting like myself for places, and we at length persuaded the heroic champion to order a postchaise instead of a horse, into which we crammed ourselves all four, with a whole mountain of leather bags that clung about our legs like the entrails of a fat cow all the rest of the journey. ”

“ The night mail from Edinburgh to Glasgow left Edinburgh in the afternoon, but was stopped before reaching Kirkliston. The guard with the mail-bags set forward on horseback, and the driver rode back to Edinburgh with a view, it was understood, to get fresh horses. The passengers, four in number, entreated him to use all diligence, and meanwhile were compelled to wait in the coach, which had stuck at a very solitary part of the road. ”

“ Down to the time of the introduction of mail-coaches, just about a hundred years ago, the roads were in a deplorable state, and travellers have left upon record some rather strong language on the subject. It was only about that time that road-making came to be understood; but the obvious need for smooth roads to increase the speed of the mail gave an impetus to the subject, and by degrees matters were greatly improved. It is not our purpose to pursue the inquiry as to roads, though the subject might be attractive, and we must be content with the general assertion as to their condition. ”

“ The letter-bags are opened for the purpose of sorting out those which are for delivery in port from the rest. A fine day is always chosen, generally towards the end of the voyage, when amusements become scarce and the passengers are growing weary. It is pleasant to sit on the rail and see the passengers gather round the heap of letters, and to hear the shouts of merriment when any exceedingly original superscription comes under notice." Such liberties with the mails in the present day would excite consternation in the headquarters of the Post Office Department. ”

“ There are now very few of them remaining, and these very old men. These officers of the Post Office mixed with all sorts of people, learned a great deal from the passengers, and were full of romance and anecdote. We remember one guard whose conversation and accounts of funny things were so continuous that his hearers were kept in a constant state of ecstasy whenever [Pg 71] he was set agoing. His fund of story seemed inexhaustible, and we can imagine how hilariously would pass away the hours on the outside of a mail-coach with such a companion. ”

“ Whatever is new is sure to be opposed, apparently on no other ground than that of novelty, and in this bearing men are often not unlike some of the lower creatures in the scale of animated nature, that start and fly from things which they have not seen before, though they may have no more substance than that of a shadow. However this may be, the Penny Postage measure has produced stupendous results. In 1839, the year before the reduction of postage, the letters passing through the post in the United Kingdom were 82,500,000. ”

“ During the course of last winter horses were obliged to be occasionally employed; and it is often the case that a strong highlander, with so great a weight upon him, cannot travel more than two miles an hour, which greatly retards the general correspondence of this extensive district of country."
These humble servants of the post office, travelling over considerable tracts of country, would naturally become the means of conveying local gossip from stage to stage, and of spreading hearsay news as they went along. ”

“ Nor is it too much to say that he would see himself surrounded by a world full of enchantment, and that his senses of wonder and admiration would rival the feelings excited in youthful minds under the spell of books like Jules Verne's Journey to the Moon, or the ever-entertaining stories of the Arabian Nights. It is true that he would find the operations of nature going on as before. ”

“ So fruitful has been the nineteenth century in discovery and invention, and so astounding the advancement made, that it is only by stopping in our madding haste and looking back that we can realise how different the present is from the past. ”

“ Night journeys might be very well, in a way, during the balmy days of summer, when light airs and sweet exhalations from flower and leaf gave pleasing features to the scenes, but in the cold nights of winter, in lashing rain, in storms of wind and snow, [Pg 46] the unfortunate passengers and the guard and coachman must have had terrible times of it. ”

“ The only means then available for home communications—that is for letters, etc.—were the Foot Messenger, the Horse Express, and the Mail Coach; and for communication with places beyond the sea, sailing-ships.
The condition of things as then existing, and as reflected upon society, is thus summed up by Mackenzie in his History of the Nineteenth Century: "Men had scarcely the means to go from home beyond such trivial distance as they were able to accomplish on foot. ”

“ In such outlying districts as were blessed with postal communication a hundred years ago, the service was kept up by foot messengers, who often travelled long distances in the performance of their duty. Thus in 1799 a post-runner travelled from Inverness to Loch Carron—a distance across country, as the crow flies, of about fifty miles—making the journey once a week, for which he was paid 5s. Another messenger at the same period made the journey from Inverness to Dunvegan in Skye—a much greater distance—also once a week, and for this service he received 7s. ”

“ Unwilling to lose either his meal or his passage, he hastily rolled the fowl in his handkerchief, and mounted the coach. But the landlord, unused to such liberties, was soon after him with the ravished dish. The coach was already on the move, and the only revenge left to the landlord was to call out jeeringly to the passenger, "Won't you have the gravy, sir?" The other passengers [Pg 65] had a laugh at the expense of their companion; but we know that a hungry man is a tenacious man, and a man with a full stomach can afford to laugh. At any rate the proverb says, "Who laughs last laughs best." ”

“ But almost everything to which man had been wont to put his hand would appear to bear the impress of some other hand; and a hundred avenues of thought opening to his bewildered sense would consign his inward man to the education of a second childhood. ”

“ We may look back on the past with very mixed feelings,—dreaming of the easy-going methods of our forefathers, which gave them leisure for study and reflection, or esteeming their age as an age of lethargy, of lumbering and slumbering. ”

“ A guard is fined £5 for suffering a man to ride on the roof of the coach; a driver is fined £5 for losing time; another driver, for intoxication and impertinence to passengers, is fined £10 and costs. The guards are entreated to be attentive to their arms, to see that they are clean, well loaded, and hung handy; they are forbidden to blow their horns when passing through the streets during the hours of divine service on Sundays ”

“ Railway travellers are familiar with an official at the principal through stations whose duty it seems to be to ring a bell and loudly call out "Take your seats!" the moment hungry passengers enter the refreshment-rooms. How far his zeal engenders dyspepsia and heart disease it is impossible to say.
In the mail-coach days similar pressure was put upon passengers; for every effort was made to hurry forward the mails. In a family letter written by Mendelssohn in 1829, he describes a mail-coach journey from Glasgow to Liverpool. ”

“ An official in Scotland thus described the service in 1799: "It is impossible to obtain any other contractors to ride the mails at 3d. out, or 11⁄2 d. per mile each way. On this account we are so much distressed with mail riders that we have often to submit to the mails being conveyed by mules and such species of horses as are a disgrace to any service." This is evidence from within the Post Office itself. While young boys were suited for the work in some respects, they were thoughtless and unpunctual ”

“ He describes how the guards, some fifty years ago, would playfully deal with the youngsters who worked the "apparatus," by not only seizing the bag but also the stick, and causing the young people to run long distances after the coach in order to recover it. The fun was all very well, says the sub-postmaster, in the [Pg 58] genial nights of summer; "but when the cold nights of winter came round, it was our turn to play a trick upon the guard, when both he and the driver were numbed with cold and fast asleep, and the four horses going at full speed. ”

“ Going back a little more than a hundred years, it is of interest to see how irregular were the communications to and from foreign ports by mail packet. Benjamin Franklin, writing of the period 1757, mentions the following circumstances connected with a voyage he made from New York to Europe in that year. The packets were at the disposition of General Lord Loudon, then in charge of the army in America; and Franklin had to travel from Philadelphia to New York to join the packet, Lord Loudon having preceded him to the port of despatch. ”

“ Yet to our imaginary friend's astonished perception, nothing, we venture to think, would come with greater force than the contrast between the means available for keeping up communications in his day and in our own. We are used to see trains coursing on the iron way at a speed of fifty or sixty miles an hour; steamships moving on every sea, defiant of tide and wind, at the rate of fifteen or [Pg 3] twenty miles an hour; and the electric telegraph outstripping all else, and practically annihilating time and space. ”

“ The freedom and independence now enjoyed by the individual, as a result of the vast influence exercised by society through the rapid exchange of thought, is certainly a [Pg 125] thing of which the people of our own country may well be proud. Right can now assert itself in a way which was entirely beyond the reach of our predecessors of a hundred years ago; and wrong receives summary judgment at the hands of a whole people. ”

“ Two mails are due from London, three from Glasgow, and four from Edinburgh. Neither the last guard that [Pg 52] went hence for Glasgow on Thursday, nor he that went on Wednesday, have since been heard of; this country was never so completely blocked up in the memory of the oldest person, or that they ever heard of. I understand the road is ten feet deep with snow from this to Hamilton. I have had it cut through once, but this third fall makes an attempt impossible. Heaven only knows when the road will be open, nothing but a thaw can do it—it is now an intense frost. ”

“ At home, too, curious arrangements come under notice. A family, for example, in London find it to their advantage to have a roast of beef sent to them by parcel post twice a week from a town in Fife. And a gentleman of property, having his permanent residence in Devonshire, finds it convenient, when enjoying the shooting season in the far north-west of Scotland, to have his vegetables forwarded [Pg 123] by parcel post from his home garden in Devonshire to his shooting lodge in Scotland. ”