Coachbuilder

“ That lightness in their larger carriages is carried to excess most Coachbuilders will agree. We are supported in this view by the fact that for some years these, such as landaus, broughams, and coaches, have been materially modified by European types. The Americans have adopted some of the shapes of Europe, and the mode of constructing the under carriages, retaining their own methods of making the pole and splinters, or whipple trees, as giving greater freedom to the horses. ”

“ We have now reviewed the principal varieties of carriages introduced into England during the present century; to enumerate the whole would be tedious. At our great Exhibitions in London, Paris, Vienna, and other cities, new shapes have continually appeared, and some have found favour, and some have appeared no more. They are evidence that the ingenuity of Coachbuilders is not less than the ingenuity of the workmen in other trades. ”

“ Neither has he the agility of the artist on the Comet, for he is nearly double his size; but he is a strong powerful man, and might be called a pattern card of the heavy coachman of the present day—in other words, of a man who drives a coach which carries sixteen passengers instead of fourteen, and is rated at eight miles an hour instead of ten. “What room in the Regulator?” says our friend to the waiter, as he comes to announce its arrival. “Full inside, sir, and in front; but you'll have the gammon board all to yourself, and your luggage is in the hind boot.” ”

“ Keep your head in the coach, it's all right, depend on 't. We always spring 'em over this stage.” Persuasion is useless; for the horses increase their speed and the worthy old gentleman looks out. But what does he see? Death and destruction before his eyes? No: to his surprise he finds the coachman firm at his post, and in the act of taking a pinch of snuff from the gentleman who sits beside him on the bench, his horses going at the rate of a mile in three minutes at the time. “But suppose anything should break, or a linchpin should give way and let a wheel loose?” ”

“ I inherited the love of driving from my father, who was a very good coachman; and in early days would frequently hang on a single leader to his carriage, making a “pickaxe” team, merely for the sake of initiating me in the manipulation of four reins. The promotion from donkies to ponies rather interrupted my practice; as, though we could always borrow mokes to make up a four-in-hand, it was not so easy to do so with ponies.
A real stage-coach passed our gates twice each day; and for the convenience of the contractor who horsed it, a stable was built upon my father’s premises. ”

“ In the hall of the Coachmakers’ Company, in Noble Street, Cheapside, is a picture of Hyde Park Corner in 1796, painted by Dagaty, in which is an old stage coach; the hinder part has a boot and guard’s seat attached to the body as in modern stage coaches, but the box is detached from the body and on the beds, as described above; the panels of the body are very deep, and on the upper quarters are painted two large stars, from which we may conjecture that it is a mail coach. ”

“ The coach was one of the vehicles of the new fashion—the fashion of public conveyances driven, for the entertainment of themselves and of the public, by gentlemen of leisure. On the Derby day all the coaches that start from the classic headquarters—the "White Horse," in Piccadilly—and stretch away from London toward a dozen different and well-selected goals, had been dedicated to the Epsom road. The body of the vehicle is empty, as no one thinks of occupying any but one of the thirteen places on the top. ”

“ To revert to the subject of Irish coaching which, as I have said before, was of the wildest and most primitive description, before the great mail contractor monopolised nearly every road in the country, conveying both mails and passengers on cars in a manner much better suited to the taste and habits of the people.
What the original coaches lacked in neatness they made up in pace. It was no uncommon thing to see a team brought out to attach to a coach, one blinded with a rubber, two with twitches on their noses, and the fourth having his leg tied up till the moment of departure. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Grand churches whose spires soar away, away far into the sky, astonish our newly-awakened vision as the coachman carefully guides the coach through the narrow and crooked streets, in which the shadows from cornices and roof-tops lie so black and sharp that none but he who has driven here before could surely bring this coach safely through. Once or twice we have quailed as he has driven straight at some solid wall, and have breathed again when it has proved to be only some oblique monstrous silhouetted image cast athwart the81 way. ”

“ On a trip by coach, it was possible to see something of the country and to fill one’s lungs with fresh air, instead of coal-smoke and sulphur—and so forth, ad infinitum!
THE COACHING AGE
The Augustan age of coaching,—by which I mean the period when George IV. was king,—was celebrated for the number of gentlemen-drivers who ran smart coaches upon the principal roads from London. Many of them mounted the box-seat for the sake of sport alone: others, who had run through their property and come to grief after the manner of the time, became drivers of necessity. ”

“ A gentleman not wanting his coach for a time, but wishing it to be kept in perfect repair, and his team fed and exercised, to be kept sleek and strong, leaves it in his coachman's care. The coachman agrees to keep from decay, and to replace should one die, and at the end of the term, return the coach in perfect condition, no mar or wear, and the team sleek and strong from good care, feed and daily exercise. But the coachman discovers that in the daily exercise of the team he can carry a party of business men to and from their offices, and secure for himself a gain. ”

“ This unbounded admiration and approval do not at all deteriorate from the merits of the well-appointed four-horse coaches leaving Piccadilly every morning (Sundays excepted) , as there is as much difference between a stage-coach and a four-in-hand as there is between a mirror and a mopstick.
Horses for a road-coach should have sufficient breeding to insure that courage and endurance which enable them to travel with ease to themselves at the pace required, and if they are all of one class, or, as old Jack Peer used to say, “all of a mind,” the work is reduced to a minimum. ”

“ We come now to the “Era of the Amateur,” who not only flourished pre-eminently on the Brighton Road, but may be said to have originated on it. The coaching amateur and the nineteenth century came into existence almost contemporaneously. Very soon after 1800 it became “the thing” to drive a coach, and shortly after this became such a definite ambition, there arose [Pg 29] that contradiction in terms, that horsey paradox, the Amateur Professional, generally a sporting gentleman brought to utter ruin by Corinthian gambols, and taking to the one trade on earth at which he could earn a wage. ”

“ The appointments of an English coach are no less elegant than its form. A portly looking coachman seated on a very high coach-box, well dressed, wearing white gloves, a nosegay in his button-hole, and his chin enveloped in an enormous cravat, drives four horses perfectly matched and harnessed, and as carefully groomed as when they excited admiration in the carriages of Grosvenor and Berkeley Squares. ”

“ Another writer in 1673 opposes stages. “Is it,” he asks, “for a man’s health to be laid fast in foul ways, and forced to wade up to the knees in mire; and afterwards sit in the cold till fresh teams of horses can be procured to drag the coach out of the foul ways? Is it for his health to travel in rotten coaches, and have their tackle, or perch, or axle-tree broken, and then to wait half the day before making good their stage?”
This gives us some idea of the badness of the roads, and the imperfection of the vehicles. ”

“ In 1868 a coach was started to Brighton called the “Old Times,” [1] the property of a company composed of all the élite of the coaching talent of the day. It proved a great success, and became very popular; especially, it may be added, among its own shareholders, who, being all coachmen, in turn aspired to the box—those who could, as well as those who only fancied they could. The initiated will at once understand how fatal this was to the comfort of every fresh team which came under their lash. ”

“ The waterman darts from the pump, seizes the horses by their respective bridles, and drags them, and the coach too, round to the house, shouting all the time for the coachman at the very top, or rather very bottom of his voice, for it is a deep bass growl. A response is heard from the tap-room; the coachman, in his wooden-soled shoes, makes the street echo again as he runs across it; and then there is such a struggling, and backing, and grating of the kennel, to get the coach-door opposite the house-door, that the children are in perfect ecstasies of delight. ”

“ In the Diary of Sir William Dugdale we find records of his journeys by stage coaches between 1659 and 1680, to the towns of Norwich, Coventry, Chester, St Albans, Bedford, and Birmingham during the reign of Charles II.
Hackney coaches were first used in England in 1605 [Plates 13, 14, and 22] . These were similar to the coaches used by the gentry; at first they did not ply for hire in the streets, but remained at the hiring-yards until they were wanted. As, however, many more persons wished to hire than could afford to keep a coach of their own, the demand increased rapidly. ”

“ They had only lost those agile qualities necessary for that use, and, finding purchasers among farmers and country tradesmen who had no occasion to gallop at eleven miles an hour, lived very comfortably, grew sleek and fat, and must often, from roadside paddocks, have beheld their successors slaving away in the fast coaches; finding much satisfaction in their own altered circumstances. Coachmen at this time usually drove between thirty and forty miles out, and then took the up coach back, perhaps more than half a day later. ”

“ He wonders at your fidgetiness,—"where could we be better than we are, thus silting, thus consulting?"—"prefers, for his part, a state of rest to locomotion,"—with an eye all the while upon the coachman—till at length, waxing out of all patience, at your want of it, he breaks out into a pathetic remonstrance at the fellow for detaining us so long over the time which he had professed, and declares peremptorily, that "the gentleman in the coach is determined to get out, if he does not drive on that instant." ”

“ I've just got off the top of the Liverpool coach, and, I can assure you, it's very cold riding outside a coach all day long—however, I always say that it's better than being inside, though, indeed, it's very little that I trouble coaches at all in the course of the year—generally travel in my own carriage, only my family have it with them in Bristol now, where I'm going to join them; but I'm well used to the elements, hunting, shooting, and fishing, as I do constantly. ”

“ But oh! ah! alas! the very next minute the Family Coach went pounce into a great mud-hole. The coachman jumped off the box, the footman tumbled off the [145] foot-board, and both tried to lift the fore-wheels and hind-wheels, but they found they couldn’t do it. Then they got back to their places; the coachman cracked his whip tremendously; the off-leader and near-leader, off-wheeler and near-wheeler, bounced and jumped, and pranced and danced, till their blinders were twisted into their eyes; the pole rattled; the reins and traces creaked; both the axles groaned ”

“ The coach looks like a bobbed rooster with his tail down, for the dusty boot protrudes immensely at the rear, and all the weight appears to be on the hind seat. Up rolls the coach, the driver making his whip crack like Fanny Ellsler’s castanets in the “cracovienne,” and with a prodigious attempt at creating a sensation—the machine stops at Hamble’s. ”

“ Well, maybe so. But work must go on and coachbuilding must go on, and they will not go on the time there is too much attention given to dreams. A dream is a sort of a shadow, no profit in it to anyone at all. A coach, now, is a real thing and a thing that will last for generations and be made use of to the last, and maybe turn to be a hen-roost at its latter end.
FATHER JOHN.
I think Andrew told me it was a dream of Martin’s that led to the making of that coach. ”

“ And so, instead of the handsome stylish coach, that a gentleman might ride on without shame, with its dashing four-in-hand, we have got this dirty, shabby, yellow thing, with its unicorn team of skin and bone, a driver that old Jack Simons, the coachman, would not have had for a stable-helper, and an urchin for guard, who would be a disgrace to a dung-cart! ”

“ The carriage-builders do not lead, but they have always the means of pressing talent enough into their service whenever a sufficient demand offers them a remunerating return. Coaches were first invented on the Continent, but it was in England that they were improved into public stages, capable of being run 10 miles and upwards per hour for days and weeks together.
This was not done at once, or by any one man: it was the combined result of numberless small improvements, forced on by the necessity of overcoming practical difficulties. Coach-builders have not been remarkable as a scientific body. ”