Stage-coach and Mail in Days of Yore, Volume 1 (of 2) / A picturesque history of the coaching age

The smart coachmen came into existence with short stages and the fast day-coaches, about 1824. They did not burst suddenly upon an astonished world—were not, like those insect-wonders, chrysalids in the morning and butterflies in the afternoon—but developed by insensible degrees. The first incentive to this improvement was, doubtless, that acquaintance with the moneyed sporting world which began when the country gentlemen ceased to travel horseback and took to going by coach, and thence, from passive passengers, developed an interest in driving; sitting beside the coachman and learning from him something of what those worthies now, for the first time in their lives, began dimly to perceive was an art, and not merely an ordinary wage-earning occupation. When Jack Bailey, of the old “Prince of Wales,” who taught old John Warde, the first of the amateurs, how to drive, tutored him, he wrought a greater revolution than he knew. Acquaintance with, and tutorship of, the growing ranks of the amateurs brought a strange alteration in themselves. They taught the young sprigs of nobility coaching, and their pupils unconsciously initiated them in new manners of thought, speech and dress. The two classes strangely reacted on one another, for while the coachmen learned to discard top-boots and took to trousers, the amateurs thought it a fine thing to file their front teeth, so that they could splice whip-points and spit like the professionals, to wear the heavy “double Benjamins,” clumsy and many-caped, that were necessary for the coachmen, and to be, in fact, as thoroughly “down the road” in dress, manner and talk as though they were professionals themselves. Each exaggerated the most remarkable features of the other, so that the coachmen became caricature gentlemen, and the gentlemen the most wonderful travesties of the coachmen.

An admiring critic of coaching in its last decade enlarged with great satisfaction upon the complete dissimilarity between the modern “artists” and the “workmen” of old time. Their change of character and appearance had kept pace with the improvements in the different points of their profession. No longer did one see the dram-drinking, gin-consuming, jolly-looking rotundities of yore. Instead of those honest, wet old souls, the “ribbons” were handled by pinks of perfection, turned out at all points like gentlemen, and in character also like gentlemen, tasting nothing but their glass of sherry from end to end of a journey.

But side by side with these improvements upon the old order came what were known to our grandfathers as the “flash men,” who, at the extremity of ill-assumed gentility, were probably more objectionable than the rough-and-ready old fellows of an earlier generation. The flash coachman flourished very rankly indeed at Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, and other great commercial centres. He always dressed in the extreme of fashion, and perhaps a little in advance of it. His silken stock was swathed higher up his neck, his gold (or gilded) scarf-pin was bigger, his waistcoat had a more alarming pattern, his hat was more curly in the brim than others, and in his conversation and manners he dotted the “i’s” and crossed the “t’s” of his betters. He was, in fact, an unconscious caricature of those among the upper classes who took an interest in the road, and was a very loud, insufferable and offensive person, who, it was said, “had a missus at both ends,” smoked a dozen real Havanahs in a hundred miles, and hardly thanked you for half a crown. Such men imposed upon many of the good commercial folks of those trading towns who were foolish enough and inexperienced enough to take cigar-smoking for superiority and overdressed insolence for the hallmark of gentility; and these fellows became, in consequence, the curse of the roads. Borrow has, in his Romany Rye, a very vigorous chapter on their kind, but errs in so far as he seems to consider that they, and they only, formed the “stage-coachmen of England.”

“The stage-coachmen of England, at the time of which I am speaking, considered themselves mighty fine gentry; nay, I verily believe, the most important personages of the realm, and their entertaining this high opinion of themselves can hardly be wondered at: they were low fellows, but masters at driving; driving was in fashion, and sprigs of nobility used to dress as coachmen, and imitate the slang and behaviour of the coachmen, from whom occasionally they would take lessons in driving, as they sat beside them on the box, which post of honour any sprig of nobility who happened to take a place on a coach claimed as his unquestionable right; and these sprigs would smoke cigars and drink sherry with the coachmen in bar-rooms and on the road; and when bidding them farewell would give them a guinea or a half-guinea, and shake them by the hand, so that these fellows, being low fellows, very naturally thought no small liquor of themselves, but would talk familiarly of their friends Lords So-and-so, the Honourable Misters So-and-so, and Sir Harry and Sir Charles, and be wonderfully saucy to any one who was not a lord or something of the kind; and this high opinion of themselves received daily augmentation from the servile homage paid them by the generality of the untitled male passengers, especially those on the forepart of the coach, who used to contend for the honour of sitting on the box with the coachman when no sprig was nigh to put in his claim. Oh! what servile homage these craven creatures did pay these same coach fellows, more especially this or t’other act of brutality practised upon the weak and unoffending—upon some poor friendless woman travelling with but little money, and perhaps a brace of hungry children with her, or upon some thin and half-starved man travelling on the hind part of the coach from London to Liverpool, with only eighteen-pence in his pocket to defray his expenses on the road; for as the insolence of these knights was vast, so was their rapacity enormous; they had been so long accustomed to have crowns and half-crowns rained upon them by their admirers and flatterers that they would look at a shilling, for which many an honest labourer was happy to toil for ten hours under a broiling sun, with the utmost contempt; would blow upon it derisively, or fillip it into the air before they pocketed it; but when nothing was given them, as would occasionally happen—for how could they receive from those who had nothing? and nobody was bound to give them anything, as they had certain wages from their employers—then what a scene would ensue! Truly, the brutality and rapacious insolence of English coachmen had reached a climax; it was time that these fellows should be disenchanted, and the time—thank Heaven!—was not far distant. Let the craven dastards who used to curry favour with them, and applaud their brutality, lament their loss now that they and their vehicles have disappeared from the roads.”

Here the Borrovian fury overreaches itself, and fails to convince the reader of that brutality of a whole class he would fain have you believe in. Were the later coachmen, indeed, moulded in so unvarying a form? Assuredly not, for character still survived in the individual before the railway age dawned, and nowhere was more marked than on the box-seat. The sole person convicted of brutality in that attack is Borrow himself, consigning all the objects of his dislike to misery and want.

Such men might have been found; but we have only to mention old Thomas Cross, the dreamy, poetical, shiftless, other-worldly coachman of the “Lynn Union,” the Wards, and John Thorogood, on the Norwich Road, to see that the road was not handed over entirely to ruffians of the kind Borrow draws. But in all coachmen reigned an autocratic spirit, born of their mastery over four horses. In some this was expressed by contemptuous replies when passengers unqualified for the task endeavoured to talk about coaching and horsey matters; in others it was manifested by a faraway and unapproachable meditation or contemplation—or perhaps even vacuity of mind—like that of some Indian fakir dwelling upon the perfections of Buddha; beside which many a box-seat passenger felt a mere worm.

It was difficult to penetrate this professional reserve. A remarkable character of this type was John Wilson, who drove the “Everlasting” coach between Wolverhampton and Worcester; a coach so called because, at a time when all the direct routes were being abandoned to railways, this cross-country journey was left open and unchallenged for many years. John, in addition to being a coachman, was host of the “King’s Head,” a minor house in Bell Street, Wolverhampton, but was a taciturn and grumpy individual. He drove only at the jog-trot of eight miles an hour, and so had no excuse on that score for silence. He cherished the greatest dislike to being questioned, and his replies, especially to strangers, were of the briefest and surliest. On the occasion of the British Association visiting Dudley in 1849, a gentleman residing at Worcester, being very anxious to attend the meetings of so learned a body, secured a box-seat on the “Everlasting” to Dudley. John was the coachman on that occasion. The historian of it is the passenger himself:—

“‘A nice mild day, coachman,’ I said, as he mounted and took the ribbons.

“‘’Tis, sir.’

“(After a pause of five minutes.) ‘What time do you get to Dudley?’

“‘Eight o’clock.’

“(A quarter of an hour’s pause.) ‘Capital crop of turnips this year, coachman.’

“‘Ees.’

“(A pause of twenty minutes, varied only by some long yawns from the coachman, and some responsive ones from myself.)

“‘I say, driver, can you tell me who’s dead at that house?’

“‘Don’t know. ‘Niver inquires about nothing—yaw—haw—a-haw,’ yawning prodigiously.

“Here a passenger pointed out to ‘coachey’ a covey of partridges in an adjoining field, and asked him if he knew the price of birds at Worcester.

“‘No,’ says he, ‘I don’t—yaw-he-haw; but fresh herrings at Wolverhampton be mighty cheap at thirty a shilling.’

“Another quarter of an hour’s profound silence, and we arrived at the ‘Crown,’ Ombersley. Seeing the fate that awaited me, of being linked to this dreary fellow for a journey of nearly thirty miles, I proposed to him a gentle stimulant, and expressed my apprehension that he was considerably out of condition.

“‘Well, then, I’ll ha’ some brandy, I s’pose,’ he replied, with as much politeness and satisfaction at this sixpenny treat as a porker may be supposed to entertain on his first introduction to a bucket of grains. Too soon, however, I found this investment of my capital was more than useless—the man with the whip would not be drawn out. His horses, too, seemed to be under the influence of the same stupifying medium, jogging along at a rate which rendered our arrival at Dudley a probability somewhat remote.”

John, oddly enough, was succeeded by another Wilson, but not a relative. William Wilson was the direct antithesis to his predecessor, and when the “Everlasting,” belying its proud name, went off the road before the advance of the Great Western Railway from Oxford to Worcester, he left pleasing memories.

Jo Walton, on the Cambridge Road, was a notable whip of the smarter kind. No unwieldy stout man he, but tall and slim, faultlessly dressed, and one of the best coachmen that ever drove. The railway spoiled him in mid-career, but not before the very knowing gentlemen who wrote for the sporting periodicals of the age had made his a classic figure. The Cambridge Road alone was Walton’s ground. He drove the “Safety,” and then the “Times,” in six hours; but it was not until he succeeded to the box-seat of the “Star of Cambridge” that he came into notice. That coach performed the fifty-two miles between the “Belle Sauvage” and the “Hoop” at Cambridge in five hours. With fifteen minutes deducted for breakfast on the way, and another fifteen for changing, this gives four hours and a half actual running, or a speed of nearly eleven and three-quarter miles an hour: an incredible rate of progress, but vouched for by a contributor to the New Sporting Magazine in 1833.

Jo Walton drove the “Star” double, every day except Sunday, leaving the “Hoop,” at Cambridge at 7 a.m., reaching London at noon, and setting forth again for Cambridge the same afternoon. This feat of driving over a hundred miles a day he continued until the railway by degrees caused the splendour of the “Star” to wane.

The Cambridge Road has, of course, many dead level stretches, and Walton was sometimes known to put the coach along a certain five miles in twenty minutes. Yet, according to the enthusiastic chronicler of these things, he was among the safest of coachmen—a testimony not supported by the fact that he twice upset the “Star” between Royston and Buntingford. His determination to keep his time was, we are told, superior to all mercenary considerations or regard for the “short pocket.” Thus, although he pulled up on one occasion when hailed on the road by a gentleman in a phaeton, saying he “might as well have this half-crown as not,” he drove off again because the passenger did not come instantly.

He was, according to the admiring testimony of the time, a fixture on the box—nothing could throw him off. A scientific punisher of refractory horses, too; accompanying the corrective discipline of the whip with much grim humour. Passing through Buntingford one day, the chestnut near leader attempted to bolt into a public-house. “I didn’t know your friends lived there,” said Walton. “Come, come, now you are got into this coach you must give up low company,” and two slashing strokes of the whip followed. Walton, it was said, had the temper of an emperor and a tongue as fluent and free as that of a bargee. The story was told that he refused to pull up for a passenger who had lost his hat, and that the passenger thereupon pushed Walton’s off, compelling him to halt; but that tale was either untrue or the passenger unacquainted with Walton. It was not likely that any one who knew him would have taken such a liberty. We are not told what became of that impulsive passenger.

The characteristics of coachmen had every opportunity of being well impressed upon box-seat passengers down the long monotonous miles, and their peculiarities have accordingly been well preserved in travellers’ recollections. One choice spirit, who drove the Leeds “Union” from the “George and Blue Boar” in Holborn to Eaton Socon, let his leaders down in Biggleswade street, so that they broke their knees. He observed that they had made a terrible “fore paw,” but whether that was conscious or unconscious humour remains uncertain.

A sharp distinction was drawn between London and provincial coachmen, and between coachmen on main roads and those on by-ways. Yorkshire by-roads, in particular, were regarded by coaching critics, from Nimrod downwards, with contempt, alike for their coaches and coachmen. Thus, one tells in 1830 of a dirty coach in Yorkshire, drawn by a team of “tike” horses known to the coachman by the names of Rumbleguts and Bumblekite, Staggering Bob and Davey. On the cross-roads of that many-acred shire the coachmen changed with every stage, and cleaned and harnessed their own horses. They were, in fact, in those remote parts, a hundred years behind the age, and one might in the nineteenth century have studied the manners and customs of the early eighteenth. The same thing was noticed by Hawker in 1812, on the Glasgow and Carlisle road, where the stage-coachmen resembled “a set of dirty gipsies,” driving but one stage each, and then looking after their horses.

Those country hands were not in general very great respecters of rank or station. The London coachmen were civil, had a peculiar humour about them, and did not consider themselves quite the equal of the box-seat passenger who sat beside them; but the provincial performer poked one in the ribs when he wanted to say anything, and perhaps nearly ejected one from the box by his “knowing” jerk of the elbow when he considered emphasis necessary to point his remarks. The old six-inside coaches survived here long after they had been forgotten in most other parts of the country, often driven by a coachman as comfortable as a “drop” of gin could make him, and drawn by horses as weak as the water he forgot to put into his last tumbler. In such an ominous combination, the passengers involuntarily repeated the prayer in the Litany for “all travellers by land.”

Drunken coachmen are heard of in the old coaching annals, and accidents caused by them when in that state stand on record, but they are comparatively few. It was not so easy a matter to make a seasoned coachman—even one of only a few years’ experience—drunk. The capacity of coachmen for drink was marvellous. As throwing some light upon it, a meeting with Harry Ward at the “White Hart,” Andover, may be instanced. He was then on the famous “Quicksilver” Devonport Mail.

On this occasion it was a cold winter’s night, and Ward was waiting for the “Quicksilver” to come up, and to take his stage.

“How many brandys-and-water does that make to-day?” asked a passenger who had just stood him one, hot.

“This is the twentieth,” replied Ward. (A glass of brandy-and-water then cost 1s.)

He was not regarded by his contemporaries as an intemperate man, and was never known to be the worse for drink; but he felt called upon to explain those twenty glasses, and said, “You soon get it blown out of you, crossing Salisbury Plain.”

This was in 1837, and Ward was then only twenty-four years of age. “Youthful depravity,” some might say, and surmise an early and unhappy end. But facts controvert such views. Harry Ward, who had already, in 1833, driven on the London and Glasgow Mail, and was then the youngest coachman on the road, was also among the steadiest, and owed his transference to the Devonport “Quicksilver” to that already established reputation. To his last days—he died in 1894, in his 81st year—he was proud of the fact that he never had an accident on any road.

Coachmen seem never to have been averse from loading their coaches to their fullest capacity, except in one particular. Barrels of oysters, kegs of spirits, hampers of game, and such heavy and bulky things, seem never to have roused objections; but they nursed a grudge against literature, for when the quarterly reviews were published and magazine-time came round, and the fore and hind boots of the night coaches were crammed with the damp sheets just issued from the press, they discovered that the weight severely tried weak teams over long stages, Edinburgh and Quarterly reviewers prided themselves on their literary weight, which was an unknown quantity to the coachmen, who cursed them for their avoirdupois.

These old Automedons rarely took a holiday, and when they did were at a loss how to use it. Like London omnibus drivers of the present time under similar circumstances, they generally spent their off-time in riding on some other coach and criticising the driving. The postboys were alike in this respect. One of the fraternity—Tom King, of the “Crown,” at Amersham, spent his holiday in a most peculiar manner. He had had the honour, on one occasion, of driving “Farmer George” post, after hunting with the Royal Staghounds, from Amersham to Windsor; and to the end of his life he would do no work on the anniversary of that day. After breakfast he repaired to the same yellow post-chaise, and sat in it till nightfall, on the seat his Sovereign had occupied. Throughout the day he refreshed himself liberally with pots of ale, and if he took his pipe from his lips at intervals, it was only to replace it with a key-bugle and to play “God save the King.” His master humoured his fancy, and visited the post-chaise with many others during the day, to see Tom indulging in these quaint Pleasures of Memory.