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

When Palmer first introduced his plan of mail-coaches he proposed that, while the contractors supplied coaches and horses and the men to drive them, the guards should be the servants of the Post Office, and should, considering the dangers of the roads, be retired soldiers, who, from their past training and habits of discipline, would be reliable servants and men capable of defending the mails against attack. This advice was not followed, and the first mail-guards were provided by the contractors, who employed such unsatisfactory men that in a very short time the Post Office was obliged to make the position of a mail-guard a Post Office appointment and the guards themselves servants of and directly responsible to the Department.

Placed on this footing, they were by no means fellow-servants with the coachmen, but their official superiors, and not properly concerned in any way with the passengers or any unofficial parcels or luggage. In practice, however, they took part in all these things, and although the coachmen were technically under their orders, it was only when ill-assorted and quarrelsome men came together on one coach that any disputes arose.

Mail-coaches had not long been established before the guards, those protectors of his Majesty’s mails, presuming upon their position, became the tyrants of the road. Pennant, writing in 1792, tells how, in his district of Wales, “the guards, relying on the name of royalty, in the course of the Irish road through North Wales, committed great excesses. One, on a trifling quarrel, shot dead a poor old gatekeeper.... In Anglesey another of these guards discharged his pistol wantonly in the face of a chaise-horse, drawing his master, the Rev. John Bulkeley, who was flung out and died, either on the spot or soon after. These guards shoot at dogs, hogs, sheep, and poultry as they pass the road, and even in towns, to the great terror and danger of the inhabitants.” As with the mail-guards, so with the mail-coachmen. “It has been a common practice with them to divert themselves with flinging out their lashes at harmless passengers, by way of fun. Very lately, one of these wretches succeeded so well as to twist his lash round a poor fellow’s neck in the parish where I live. He dragged the man under the wheels, by which one of his arms was broken.”

Not only Pennant complained of the early mail-guards. The country in general went in terror of them and their lethal weapons, the bell-mouthed blunderbusses which they carried to protect the mails and were wont to discharge at random as they went along. It was, with some pardonable exaggeration, said that the Post Office had conferred a licence for indiscriminate slaughter upon them; for not only were they armed against attack, but during the wars with France (and we were always fighting the French in those days) the Postmaster-General issued a kind of commission to mail-guards to shoot any prisoner of war breaking parole. To promote zeal in this direction, a reward of £5 was offered for every prisoner so winged or killed. Prisoners of war were plentiful then, and in Edinburgh Castle, on Dartmoor, and at “Yaxley Barracks,” near Norman Cross, on the Great North Road, were to be counted in thousands. At Yaxley, as also perhaps at other places, they were often allowed out on parole, with the understanding that they were not to leave the high road and were not to remain out after sunset. It is not on record that any prisoner was thus shot, but many inoffensive rustics were wounded by guards sportively inclined, or—with what St. Paul calls a “zeal not according to discretion”—eager to earn the reward offered.

The mail-guards were, indeed, very dangerous fellows to the law-abiding subjects of the King, however innocuous they may have been to the law-breakers. We may dismiss the cutlass with which they were armed. Not much damage could be accidentally wrought by that; but the blunderbuss was a terror to nervous passengers by the mail, for when the guard sportively loosed it off at the wayside sparrows, or at the ploughman busy against the sky-line, it exploded with the roar of a cannon, and some of its slugs generally whistled unpleasantly past the ears of the outsides or pierced their tall beaver hats. The guard, in fact, was a person to be shunned when he took his blunderbuss in hand, either for practice or examination; for it was not only dangerous as a gun, but was furnished with a bayonet which, folding back on a hinge against the barrel, was released by touching a powerful spring. How many persons were accidentally slain or mutilated by the guards’ awkward handling of this infernal contrivance we shall never know.

It was not, however, until 1811 that anything was done to stop this indiscriminate shooting on the part of the guards; but in that year an Act of Parliament came into existence which forbade the firing of their blunderbusses except for defence, and instituting a penalty of £5 for breaking this new law.

Meanwhile the position of mail-guard had become a dignified and desirable one, often obtained through Parliamentary and other influence brought to bear upon the Postmasters-General. Here, for example, is a copy of a letter of recommendation, unfortunately undated, but showing the methods in vogue:—

“To their Lordships
the Postmasters-General.

“My Lords,—

“The bearer of this, John Peters, is very well known at the General Post Office, and is desirous of becoming a Mail Guard, he is 23 years of age, and we beleive (sic) him to be a Sober, Steady Man, and deserving of the Situation.

“We are,
“My Lords,
“Your Lordships’
“Obedient Servts.,

“Calthorpe;
“Rd. Spooner, Banker, Birmingham;
“Thomas Attwood, Banker, Birmingham.”

It was not the salary that made the position of a mail-guard so well worth having. He received only 10s. 6d. a week from the Department, and his uniform of trousers, top-boots, scarlet coat, frogged across the front of the body with gold lace, and a gold-banded black tall hat with a cockade. Out of his miserable half-guinea he had to himself provide the cost of oil for the hand-lamp in front of his seat on the dickey, and to pay the stable-helpers who cleaned his tools and tool-box, oiled and reloaded every day his blunderbuss and pair of pistols, and performed a variety of odd jobs that took live shillings a week out of his pocket. He obviously could not exist on his pay: how, then, did he live? That is a question soon answered. A mail-guard going a long distance—anything from a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles was a usual spell—generally looked for half a crown each from inside passengers and two shillings from the outsides. If you could not afford so much he would do with less, but then you lost the touch of the hat that accompanied the larger sum.

A full coach produced 16s. in tips; or, if the trip did not boast so good a waybill, guard and coachman by prescriptive right divided all short fares below 3s. A “good mail”—that is to say, a mail on one of the great direct roads—loading well, would produce sometimes as much as from £300 to £500 a year in tips and fees for services rendered to passengers and others. A guard’s income depended mainly upon his attention and civility to passengers, but there were many other sources. Before 1831 the sale of game was absolutely prohibited, yet a great trade was done in it, with the mail and stage-guards as intermediaries, and there can be no doubt that the coaches afforded every opportunity that poachers could desire of marketing the birds and ground-game that fell to their guns or nets in the darkling midnight woods.

Country squires knew this very well, and threatened and fumed without ceasing, but they or their keepers never by any chance saw those roadside scenes familiar enough to passengers on the up-mails; when, passing at midnight by some dense woodland bordering the road, a low whistle would be heard, and the coach would pull up while a couple of men handed a sack over to the guard, who, thrusting it into the hind-boot and stamping the lid down, called out “Good-night!” and the journey was resumed without comment. The curious or suspicious might connect such an incident with another which often happened on entering London. “Jack,” the guard would sing out, “Mr. Smith wants his luggage left at so-and-so,” and the coach would be brought to a momentary halt outside some public-house, and the sack, from whose neck the inquisitive might perhaps have seen something remarkably like pheasants’ tails projecting, handed to an expectant porter. Any interested person following that porter would observe that the sack was delivered at the nearest poulterer’s.

A guard pocketed half a crown each for all bankers’ parcels he was entrusted with; he was purveyor of tea and fish and buyer of meat to a hundred villages down the road; netted many a guinea from the lawyers in those days before ever the Judicature Act was thought of, when every answer filed in Chancery must needs be filed by special and sworn messenger; had a penny each for all letters picked up on the way, when post-offices were few and far between; was entrusted with great sums of money for payment into the London banks; and purchased wedding-rings for half the love-sick swains in a county. Every one knew him, trusted him, and fed him, and if he was a prudent man he had no difficulty in making money at express speed. One guard, it is recorded, was so earnest a fishmonger that he used the Post Office bags to carry his fish in, greatly to the disgust of the clerks, who found themselves smothered in scales and surrounded by a decidedly ancient, as well as fishlike, smell. They complained to the Postmaster-General, who reprimanded the delinquent, and with a quite unintentional pun observed that the “sole” reasons of his not being dismissed were his good character and long service.

The guard of the Southampton Mail had long been suspected of smuggling, and at last the Customs officers at that port, determined to search the mail. They accordingly attempted to stop it one evening, but the guard himself levelled his blunderbuss at them, swearing he would blow out the brains of the man who should lay a hand upon the horses or seek to search “His Majesty’s Royal Mail,” and so he got off, with the hind boot stuffed to bursting with excisable but unexcised goods in the nature of spirits and tobacco. A long correspondence between the Postmaster-General and the Commissioners of Customs arose out of this incident, each official jealous of his own Department’s rights as only Government officers can be; but the Postmaster-General, although declaring himself an enemy to smuggling, was indignant at the idea of the mail being searched and possibly detained; and although warning the guard, approved his conduct. It needs no great imaginative powers to picture that guard embarking upon a colossal smuggling scheme after finding himself thus secured from being searched.

Although the mail-guards were as a body a brave and devoted class of men, determined to do their duty and to carry his Majesty’s mails in the face of all difficulties of snowstorms, winds, and floods, yet they gave Thomas Hasker, Chief Superintendent of Mail-coaches, a good deal of trouble. They numbered 268, and he exercised the supreme control of them. Complaints continually reached him from one quarter or another of the mails being late, of the guards being impertinent, and of the hind-boot, sacred to the mail-bags, being used by the guards as a receptacle for things quite unauthorised and unofficial. To stop some of these practices he was obliged to issue this notice, which reads somewhat curiously nowadays: “In consequence of several of the mail-guards having been detected in carrying meat and vegetables in the mail-box, to the amount of 150 pounds weight at a time, the superintendents are desired to take opportunities to meet the coaches in their district, at places where they are least expected, and to search the boxes, to remedy this evil, which is carried to too great a length. The superintendents will please to observe that Mr. Hasker does not wish to be too hard on the guards. Such a thing as a joint of meat, or a couple of fowls, or any other article for their own families, in moderation, he does not wish to deter them from the privilege of carrying.”

Loading the roof with heavy or bulky articles was a thing he could not allow as a usual thing. “Such a thing as a turtle tied on the roof, directed to any gentleman once or twice a year, might pass unnoticed, but for a constancy cannot be suffered.”

In one respect the lot of a mail-guard did not compare favourably with that of his plebeian brethren on the stage-coaches. He rode throughout the night in a solitary position on the little seat on the hind-boot called the “dicky,” with the two outsides on the front part of the roof facing away from him. It was a rule for many years strictly enforced that the outside passengers of a mail-coach should be limited to three: one on the box-seat beside the coachman, and the other two with their backs to the guard, as described. It had its origin in the fear that, if more were allowed, it would be an easy matter for desperadoes to overpower coachman and guard, and to rob the mail. For the same reason, the only means of access to the hind-boot, in which the mails were stowed away in those early days, before the expansion of mail-matter caused the roof to be piled up with great sacks of letters and packets, was by a trap-door at the top, carefully locked, and on which the guard had his feet placed during the whole of the journey. Any infraction of the rule against allowing a passenger on the hind part of the coach was sure to bring instant dismissal, and for permitting an extra passenger on the roof the guard was fined £5.

But some of the joys of a mail-guard’s life are recounted in the old verses:—

Something of the old mail-guard’s welcome is reflected in those lines. That he was, in the eyes of the country folk a highly important personage admits of no doubt, and that, even among the upper classes, he was a trusted emissary and purveyor of news is equally sure. He was, in fact, news embodied. Winged Mercury might, in the ancient world, and may be now, the personification of intelligence, hot and hot; but from 1784 until the first railways began to outstrip the mail-coaches, the mail-guards were the better type. They brought the first rumours of joy or sorrow, of victory or defeat, down with them on the Royal Mail; and as we were warring almost incessantly all over the world during the mail-coach era, few were those occasions when the advent of these official carriers was not awaited with bated breath. The tale has often been told how the mail-coaches, carrying down with them the news of Trafalgar, of Vittoria, and—culminating victory—of Waterloo, went down into the country wreathed with laurel and flying jubilant flags, and how the guards, hoarse at last and inaudible from continual shouting, resorted to the expedient of chalking the words “Glorious Victory” in large letters on the dickey, for the villagers to read as they dashed along the roads. Often, under these circumstances, a mail-guard was journalist as well, for when he could string sentences together with a fair approach to grammar, his contributions to the provincial press were welcomed and well paid for.

The duty of a mail-guard, besides the primary one of protecting the mails, for which he was provided with a blunderbuss, a pair of pistols, and a cutlass carried in a case, was to see that time was kept according to the official time-bill handed to him. For the purpose of checking speed on the road, and of keeping to that time-table, the Post Office furnished every one of its guards with an official time-piece enclosed in a wooden box in such a way that it was impossible for any one to tamper with it, or to alter the hands, without being discovered. These clocks were regulated to gain or lose so many minutes in twenty-four hours, according to the direction in which the coach travelled, in order that local time might be kept. The timepiece was invariably carried in the leather pouch with a circular hole cut in it that all mail-guards wore, so that the time could instantly be seen.

To every guard the superintendent supplied a list of instructions comprising twenty-six items. Prominent among these was the obligation to date and sign the time-bill correctly at every place, or to see it signed and dated by the postmasters on the way. How this was always accomplished in snow and wind and rain, with numbed fingers, is not easily understood. Often the time-bills must have been reduced to something like pulp by the time the trip was ended.

It was also the guard’s duty to report any horses unfit for service, and any defective harness, and to see that the coaches were in proper condition. He was urged to look to the lamps, to behave with civility to the passengers, and to sound his horn on several occasions and in certain contingencies duly specified.

Besides these ordinary official duties there were the extraordinary ones, in the case of a breakdown or in the event of a snowstorm. The guard had his tool-box and an assortment of spare parts at hand, so that he could help the coachman in effecting roadside repairs to harness or the coach itself; and when, from snowstorm or any other cause, the coach could be driven no farther, it was the guard’s duty to impress one of the mail horses and ride to the next stage, or to secure post-chaises or saddle-horses, and personally convey the mail-bags. No matter what became of the passengers, his first care was for His Majesty’s mails.

Coachmen, although not the servants of the Post Office, were fined heavily for being late, and for stopping at unauthorised places, and the guards were fined as well for allowing them to do so. To one guard, who had been severely reprimanded for not keeping time, and excused himself by saying he could not get the passengers away from their dinner, Hasker said, “Stick to your time-bill, and never mind what passengers say respecting waiting over-time. Is it not the fault of the landlord to keep them so long? Some day, when you have waited a considerable time (suppose five or eight minutes longer than is allowed by the bill) drive away and leave them behind. Only, take care you have witness that you called them out two or three times. Then let them get forward how they can.”

Beyond his weekly half-guinea, an annual suit of clothes, and a superannuation allowance of seven shillings a week, a mail-guard had no official prospects. It is true he might rise to become a travelling inspector of mails, when he would receive up to £100 a year, with 15s. a day travelling expenses. But inspectorships were naturally few, and in any case it is not conceivable that a guard on a “good mail” would ever have exchanged places with an inspector, who certainly drew the higher salary but acquired no tips.

It has already been shown that guards did very well indeed on the mainroad mails, and could very well have afforded to take the situation without any salary at all, or even, like waiters at modern restaurants, to pay for the privilege of receiving fees and tips. The salary was, in fact, merely a nominal retaining-fee, to give the Department a hold upon them. But there were a number of cross-country mails that were not nearly so profitable as those that ran direct from London, and it is to be feared that their guards did not always do so particularly well. Nor even did those on the great mail-coaches keep their handsome incomes at the last. Railways impoverished many a mail before they were finally withdrawn, and it was then that the guards agitated for higher salaries. Their perquisites had reached the vanishing-point, and at last the Post Office agreed to a new scale of pay. From 1842 the guards were to receive from £70 to £120 a year, according to length of service, but at the same time were forbidden to receive gratuities. This looks like a concession made by some malevolent humorist, for already most of the mails had been withdrawn.

But mail-guards were, as a class, more fortunate than their brethren of the stage-coaches when railways ran them off the road. It is true that they keenly felt the loss of the great popularity they had enjoyed, and more keenly still did they miss the very handsome incomes they in many instances had made; but as officials directly employed by the Post Office, it was incumbent upon that Department to find them employ or to pension them. No such assured future could, or did, cheer the lot of the coachmen of the mails, or the coachmen or the guards of the stages.

The mail-guards in many instances were drafted to the great railway stations, where they assisted in despatching the mails by railway. Most prominent among all whose career was thus diverted was Moses James Nobbs, who died in 1897, half a century after the road as an institution came to an end.

The career of this old servant of the Post Office is, from a variety of circumstances, exceptionally interesting. He was born on May 12th, 1817, at Angel Street, Norwich, and was the son of a coachbuilder. Entering the Post Office service on June 27th, 1836, as guard of the London and Stroud Mail, he was shortly transferred to the Peterborough and Hull Mail, and then to the Portsmouth and Bristol. In 1837 he was on the new Exeter Mail, just started, on the accession of Queen Victoria, to go through Salisbury and Yeovil—-170 miles in 18¼ hours, doing the journey to Exeter in two minutes’ less time than the famous “Quicksilver” mail, which with this year varied its route and, avoiding Salisbury and Yeovil, went by the slightly shorter route through Amesbury and Wincanton. Nobbs went the whole distance, resting the following day. The following year found him as guard on the Cheltenham and Aberystwith Mail, on which he remained until 1854—sixteen years of nightly exposure on a route one hundred miles long, through the difficult and mountainous districts of mid-Wales. One of his winter experiences may be given as a sample.

“We had left Gloucester,” he says, “and all went on pretty well until we came to Radnor Forest, where we got caught in such a snowstorm that it was impossible to take the coach any farther, so we left it. I took the mail-bags, and with the assistance of two shepherds made my way over the mountains. It took us five hours to get to the other side, to an inn at Llandewy. There we met the up-guard, Couldery, who took my guides back again. It was not many hours before the abandoned coach was completely covered with snow, and there it remained buried for a week. Well, Couldery, it seems, fell down in the snow from exhaustion, and had to be carried by the two shepherds to the ‘Forest’ inn, on the other side of the mountain, and there he remained for some days, to recover. I had to proceed with my bags, so I got a chaise and pair from Pen-y-Bont and another at Rhayader, but was unable to take that very far owing to the snow. There was nothing for it but to press on again on foot, which I did for many miles, until I came to Llangerrig. There I found it was hopeless to think of going over Plinlimmon, and was informed that nothing had crossed all day; so I made up my mind to go round by way of Llanidloes, and a night I had of it! I was almost tired out and benumbed with cold, which brought on a drowsiness I found it very hard to resist. If I had yielded to the feeling for one instant I should not be telling these tales now. When I got about eight miles from Aberystwith I found myself becoming thoroughly exhausted, so I hired a car for the remainder of the journey, and fell fast asleep as soon as I got into it. On arriving I was still fast asleep, and had to be carried to bed and a doctor sent for, who rubbed me for hours before he could get my blood into circulation again. I had then been exposed to that terrible weather for fifty hours. Next day I felt a good deal better, and started back for Gloucester, but had great difficulty in getting over the mountain. I had the honour of receiving a letter from the Postmaster-General complimenting me on my zeal and energy in getting the mail over the mountain. Even when there was no snow; the wind on the top of Plinlimmon was often almost more than we could contend with. Once, indeed, it was so strong that it blew the coach completely over against a rock; but we soon got that right again, and always afterwards took the precaution of opening both the doors and tying them back, so that the wind might pass through the coach.”

On another occasion Nobbs and the mail escaped in a miraculous manner. The snow had been falling for many hours on Plinlimmon, and it was a fearful night. They safely passed the summit at Stedfa-gerrig, but, after going down for a mile, lost their way in a dense combined fog and snowstorm. A postboy was riding one of the leaders, but he took the coach over a precipice about sixty feet deep, and Nobbs and the coachman performed two somersaults in the involuntary descent. When they reached the bottom they blessed that same snowstorm which they had been regarding in quite another light, for the drifts made a soft and safe resting-place. There were only two passengers, who were, of course, riding inside on such a night. They were greatly cut by the breaking of the glass, and two horses were killed. But in two hours the coach was righted, and, having found an old Roman road in the hollow and harnessed the two remaining horses, they drove off, and actually succeeded in reaching Cheltenham in time to catch the up London mail.

When the Cheltenham and Aberystwith Mail came off the road, in 1854, Nobbs was appointed travelling inspector to the Post Office on the Great Western Railway between Paddington and Exeter, and was shortly afterwards transferred to Paddington, where he remained for the rest of his official career, superintending the receipt and despatch of the mails until retired and pensioned off in 1891, under the Post Office regulations. He had thus performed fifty-five years’ service, and had seen the business of the Post Office grow from the one hundredweight of mail-matter in his charge on the Cheltenham and Aberystwith Mail at Christmas 1839, to the twenty tons despatched from Paddington on Christmas Eve 1889.

A very curious experience fell to the lot of this veteran in 1887, when a revival of the old days of the road took place, in consequence of the Post Office deciding to send the London and Brighton Parcel Mail by horsed van along that classic highway instead of by rail. By the Post Office agreement with the railway companies of 1882, the year when the Parcel Post was introduced, the companies were given 55 per cent. of the total receipts; but as it presently appeared that this was an extravagant proportion, and that the parcels could be conveyed by van along the road at a much smaller cost, the road service now in force was at length inaugurated, on June 1st, 1887.

To Nobbs, as the oldest guard in the service, fell the distinction of acting in that capacity on the Brighton Parcel Mail on its trial-trip. Again he wore the gold-banded hat and the scarlet coat, and sentimental souls not only provided one of the old timepieces, but included a blunderbuss in the equipment, while an even more enthusiastic admirer of the bygone days produced a key-bugle, so that Nobbs might play “Auld Lang Syne.” He tried, but the attempt was not a success. The results were feeble, in consequence, as he explained, of his having lost his front teeth.

Nobbs died, May 18th, 1897, in his eighty-first year, at Uxbridge. His portrait is one of the cherished items in the Post Office Record Department.

One of those who, for some reason or another, was not continued in Post Office employment was an odd character popularly called “Cocky” Murrell, who for many years afterwards was a solicitor’s clerk at Downham Market, Norfolk. “Cocky” he was called from his prodigious amount of bounce. He had formerly been guard of the mail between Ely and King’s Lynn, and though not much taller than the horn he blew, assumed as much authority as though he had been the Postmaster-General himself.