The period at which this chapter begins is that when outside passengers were first enabled to ride on the roofs of coaches without incurring the imminent hazard of being thrown off whenever their vigilance and their anxious grip were relaxed. It was about 1800 that fore and hind boots, framed to the body of the coach, became general, thus affording foothold to the outsides. Mail-coaches were not the cause of this change, for they originally carried no passengers on the roof.

We cannot fix the exact date of this improvement, and may suppose that, in common with every other innovation, it was gradual, and only introduced when new coaches became necessary on the various routes. The immediate result was to democratise coach-travelling. Exclusive insides, who once with disgust observed the occasional soldier or sailor dangling his legs in the windows, now were obliged to put up with a set of cheap travellers who, if they did no longer so dangle their common legs, being provided with seats and footholds, were always to be found on the roof, laughing and talking loudly, enjoying themselves in the elementary and vociferous way only possible to low persons, and disturbing the genteel reflections of the insides. Let us pity the sorrows of those superior travellers, unwillingly conscious of those stamping, noisy, low-down creatures on the roof!

The revulsion of those sensitive persons led to the establishment of a superior class of coach, carrying insides only; and accordingly, we find the original improvement of seats on the roof bringing far-reaching consequences in its train. While democratising coaches, it at the same time necessitated another class, and thus directly brought about a numerical increase. The exclusive were thus enabled to keep their exclusiveness by going in such conveyances as that announced in the advertising columns of the high-class papers:—

For Portsmouth.

A New Carriage on Springs,
called
THE LAND FRIGATE,

Sets out from the Bell Savage, Ludgate Hill, to the Red Lyon at Portsmouth, every Tuesday and Saturday, at 6 a.m. Fare, 15s. each Passenger. Ladies and Gentlemen are requested to Observe that the Frigate is elegantly sashed all round, and in order to preserve the gentility and respectability of the vehicle, no outside passengers are carried.

The period now under consideration was in other ways a very great and progressive one. In this space of twenty-five years were included the two most significant advances in the whole history of the road—the introduction about 1805 of springs under the driving-box, and the shortening of the stages. Without either of them, the acceleration that resulted in the Golden Age of coaching, beginning in 1825, would have been impossible.

The placing of springs under the driving-box was due to the suggestion of John Warde, earliest of the coaching amateurs, who had been taught the art of driving a stage-coach by Jack Bailey, a famed coachman on the old “Prince of Wales,” between London and Birmingham. He had found the jolting received directly from the axle an intolerable infliction on a long drive, and urged coach-proprietors to provide springs. Said “Mr. Wilkins of the ‘Balloon’”—a character in Nimrod’s Life of a Sportsman—“they do say they are going to put the boxes of all stage-coaches on springs, but Heaven knows when that will be—not in my time, I fear. Our people say it won’t do; we shall go to sleep on them. No danger of a man doing that now, even if he should be a bit overtaken with drink.” Under these circumstances there was, as Mr. Wilkins went on to show, “a great deal of hart in sitting on a coach-box,” as well as driving four horses. “Your body must go with the swing of the box, and let your lines (loins, he meant) be as lissom as you can. It would kill a man in a week to drive as far as I do, if he did not do as I say.”

When it became clear to coach-proprietors that a coachman could drive a longer distance when his body was not racked so intolerably, they provided springs, and risked the remote chance of coachmen going to sleep on the box.

Another reform, humane to the horses and directly productive of increased speed and efficiency on the road, was the introduction of shorter stages. From those almost incredible times when a coach went from end to end of a long trip and returned with the same team, to those when the stages were twenty miles long constituted, no doubt, a great advance; but that was by this time no longer sufficient. The mail stages, as we have seen, rarely at the earliest times exceeded ten miles, and were often much less. The mails also travelled at night, a thing the stage-coaches did not in the old times dare attempt. In the early days of Pennant, and other chroniclers contemporary with him, the coaches inned every evening. None dared travel when the sun had set and darkness brooded over the land, for there were not only the highwaymen to be feared—and they still continued to increase—but the badness of the roads had constituted a danger even more dreaded. Now, however, roads—thanks to Post Office insistence—were greatly improved; and if the mails could go through the darkness, why not also the stages? Coincident with these things, great minds perceived that by changing horses every ten miles or so, and coachmen at intervals, a coach might, in the first place, be made to go much faster, and secondly, might put into twenty-four hours of continuous running what had formerly been the work of three days. It is obviously easy to go over a hundred miles in the twenty-four hours even if you only go five miles in every hour. These great truths once perceived and acted upon, the coaching world was revolutionised.

No longer did coaching announcements propose to perform journeys in so many hours if the roads were good. They boldly promised that they would complete their course by a certain time, and altogether disregarded contingencies. By this time the “God-permits” had also become things of the past, and no proprietor was so old-fashioned as to announce that his coach would set out or arrive, “God permitting,” as aforetime had been the cautious or pious proviso. They now “started” instead of “setting out,” and arrived, as an irreverent wag observed, “God willing, or not.”

In fine, the world was made to go according to time-tables, and much faster than of old. Coaches actually, as an ordinary everyday thing, went at a quicker pace than an able-bodied man could walk, and it was no longer possible for a weary traveller when offered a lift, to decline with the bonâ-fide excuse that he was in a hurry; and so, continuing afoot, to arrive before the coach. Fielding shows us Parson Adams outwalking the coach, about 1745; but in this era the passengers just too late for the stage could by no means hope to catch it up. Why, it commonly went at eight miles an hour, and often nine! Thus we see Rowlandson’s anxious travellers, unable to attract the attention of the coach in front of them and equally unable to overtake it, left lamenting.

This, too, was the age of increased competition, when a continuous smartening-up alone kept some of the old-stagers going. Thus, in 1805, when three coaches left London every day for Sheffield, the quickest took over thirty hours. In 1821 it left the “Angel,” Angel Street, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, at 3.30 p.m., and arrived at Sheffield at 8 the next evening,—163¼ miles in 28½ hours, or at the rate of 5¾ miles an hour, including stops. In 1824 it started an hour later and arrived at the same hour as before; and in 1827 was expedited by another half-hour. That was very poor travelling, and it is not surprising that after 1827 it is heard of no more. More strenuous rivals usurped the route.

Here we see that coach drawn up in front of a wayside hostelry,—the “Bull’s Head”—at some unnamed spot. Let us not criticise the drawing of it too narrowly, for the painting whence this illustration was engraved was the work of the coachman, Alfred Elliot. He was coachman first, and artist afterwards.

Another result of competition was the gorgeous livery a coach on a hotly contested route would assume, and the number of places it would pretend to serve. In the illustration of the “Express” London and Birmingham coach—represented in the act of leaving the “Hen and Chickens,” New Street, Birmingham, and reproduced from a curious contemporary painting executed on sheet tin—an extraordinary number of place-names are seen; some those of towns this coach could not possibly have served. The explanation is that the “Express” made connections with other routes and booked passengers for them, whom they set down at ascertained points to wait for the connecting coach. This in itself, an early attempt at the through booking and junction system obtaining on railways, is evidence of the progress made towards exact time-keeping in this era.

De Quincey, as a mail-passenger, has a scornful passage reflecting upon the gold and colour that adorned these stage-coaches, which, being furiously competitive, could not afford to be quiet and plain, like the mails. “A tawdry thing from Birmingham,” was his verdict upon the “Tally-Ho” or “Highflyer,” that overtook the Holyhead Mail between Shrewsbury and Oswestry. “All flaunting with green and gold,” it came up alongside. “What a contrast with our royal simplicity of form and colour is this plebeian wretch, with as much writing and painting on its sprawling flanks as would have puzzled a decipherer from the tombs of Luxor!” Precisely the same things might be said of omnibuses in our own days.