Part 6

Until about 1815 the coachman’s box was not part of the body of the vehicle, and while the passengers rode comfortably on springs the unfortunate driver had a seat as comfortless as want of springs could make it. When this was done away with, it was quite in accord with British traditions that strong objections should be made, the chief being founded on the idea that if the coachman were made so comfortable he would go to sleep on his box. The Manchester Telegraph, celebrated as one of the smartest coaches of the day, was the first which was thus altered.

The guard was responsible for the punctuality of the coach, and each evening when leaving the General Post Office he was handed a watch officially set and officially locked in a case in such wise that it could not be tampered with. The guard also carried what was called a “snow book” from the fact that entries therein were most usually caused by heavy snowstorms. In this he recorded any such incidents as the hire of extra horses when these might be needed, of saddle horses to carry the mail bags forward if the coach came to grief, or of any other outlay.

“THE ROAD” IN WINTER.

Mention of the guard’s “snow book” suggests that a winter’s journey in the coaching days was an undertaking not to be lightly faced. One morning in March, 1812, the Bath coach arrived at Chippenham with two outside passengers frozen to death in their seats, and a third in a dying state. A snow shovel strapped behind his seat was a regular item of the guard’s winter equipment, but only too often a shovel was useless. In the winter of 1814, the Edinburgh mail had to be left in the snow and the mail bags forwarded to Alnwick on horseback; in the same week eight horses were needed to draw the York coach to Newcastle. When a coach was snow-bound it was the guard’s duty to get the mails forward; this he did when possible by taking two of the horses and riding one while the other carried the bags. Some of the best of Pollard’s coaching pictures represent such incidents as occurred in the severe winters of 1812, 1814, and 1836.

The winter of 1814 was long remembered for the great and prolonged fog which disorganised traffic; the fog was followed by a singularly severe snow storm which continued for forty-eight hours; while it lasted no fewer than thirty-three mails in one day failed to arrive at the General Post Office.

The Christmas season of 1836 is historical in meteorological annals for the unprecedented severity of the snowfall. The storm lasted for the best part of the week, and for ten days travelling was suspended. Christmas night was the worst, and scarcely a single coach ventured to quit London on the 26th and 27th, St. Albans was literally full of mails and stages that could not get forward; on December 27, no fewer than fourteen mail coaches were abandoned snow-bound on various roads; and the Exeter mail, on December 26, was dug out five times on the way to Yeovil. In flat and open country all traces of the roads were lost, and the coachman had to trust the safety of the vehicle to his horses’ instinct. In some places the snow drifts gathered to an enormous depth and made the roads utterly impassable.

It was an article of the coaching creed to “get forward” if humanly possible; and the feats of endurance and courage accomplished by guards and coachmen in these old times prove them to have been a remarkably fine class of public servant, deserving all that has been written of them.

PASSENGER FARES.

Passenger fares by mail coach were higher than by the ordinary stage; on the former the rates were from 4d. to 5d. per mile for “outsides,” and 8d. to 10d. per mile for “insides”; on the stage coach the outside passenger paid from 2½d. to 3d. per mile, and the inside from 4d. to 5d. Posting cost about eighteenpence per mile, and was therefore reserved to rich men.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STAGE AND MAIL COACH.

In the early days of the century, though the actual rate of travel was about eight miles an hour by the ordinary stage coach, much time was occupied over the journey. There appears to have been no such thing as a “time bill.” The coachman would go out of his way to set down or pick up a passenger: he would wait to oblige a friend if desired, and “Nimrod” in his famous article on “The Road” cites, as an example of the leisurely fashion prevalent, the civility of “Billy” Williams, who drove the Shrewsbury-Chester coach in his school days, and took twelve hours to cover the forty miles, Two hours were allowed for dinner at Wrexham, but this obliging coachman would come into the parlour and say, “The coach is ready, gentlemen, but don’t let me disturb you if you wish for another bottle.”

Very different was the case with the Royal Mail: every second was economised: at some places horses were changed within the space of a minute, and so jealously punctual were the coachmen that the village people set their clocks by the mail as it sped along the street. The Royal Mail paid no tolls, and if a turnpike keeper had not his gate open ready for its passage he was fined 40s. The passing of the London coach was the event of the day in quiet villages during the coaching age, as the guard performed the functions now discharged by the newspaper and telegraph wire. “The grandest chapter in our experience,” says a regular traveller during the stirring times of 1805-1815, “was on those occasions when we went down from London with news of a victory.”

THE “GOLDEN AGE” OF COACHING.

The adoption of Macadam’s system of road-making gave birth to the brief “golden age” of coaching. John Macadam, an Ayrshire man, born in 1756, had devoted many years to the subject of road improvement, and between the years 1798 and 1814 travelled over some 30,000 miles of highway in Great Britain, His method of spreading small broken fragments of hard stone, none ever six ounces in weight, stamped or rolled into a compact crust, was finally approved in 1818, and “macadamised” roads were rapidly made all over the kingdom. The inventor was awarded a grant of £10,000, and in 1827 he was appointed Surveyor-General of Roads. He died in 1836, when fast coaching was at the zenith of its prosperity.

The portrait of which a reproduction is here given is believed to be the only one in existence. It was painted by Raymond, about the year 1835, and was given by Mr. Macadam’s widow to Mr. Allen of Hoddesdon, Essex, who for several years had made road-mending tools and appliances to the great road-maker’s patterns. The portrait was bequeathed to Mr. Allen’s granddaughter, by whom it was sold in 1902, to the present owner, Major McAdam.

To fully appreciate the enormous value of Macadam’s work it must be considered in conjunction with that of Telford the engineer, and with knowledge of the earlier methods of road-making. The original high-roads in England were the tracks made by travelling chapmen or pedlars, who carried their goods on pack horses. These naturally selected routes over the hills when they sought to avoid the bogs and quagmires of low-lying ground; and these routes, becoming in time the regular coach roads, left much to be desired in point of gradient and contour. Telford cut through the hills to obtain an easier ascent, and when Macadam had “made” the new road thus outlined it was as widely different from the original track it replaced as it is possible to conceive. “Nimrod,” writing in 1826, said, “Roads may be called the veins and arteries of a country through which channels every improvement circulates. I really consider Mr. Macadam as being, next to Dr. Jenner, the greatest contributor to the welfare of mankind that this country has ever produced.”

With good, firm and level roads the speed of the mail and stage coaches increased, and the endeavour to combine speed with safety brought about numerous minor but important improvements in coach-building, proprietors sparing neither pains nor money to insure the best materials and workmanship. The greatest improvements, says Mr. Thrupp, were those begun in 1820 by Mr. Samuel Hobson. He reduced the height of the wheels to 3 feet 3 inches in front, and 4 feet 5 inches behind, lengthened the coach body to better proportions and hung it lower, so that a double step would give access to the door instead of a three-step ladder. He wrought great improvements in the curves of the carriage, and did much to strengthen the details of the underworks.

FAST COACHES.

Coach driving became a favourite occupation among men of good birth who had run through their patrimony and could turn their hands to nothing more congenial. “Horsing” coaches was a business to which all sorts and conditions of men devoted themselves, and which did much to promote the spirit of rivalry that made for good service. Innkeepers and others contracted to supply horses for one, two, three, or more stages of a journey, and thus acquired a personal interest in the coach. The best coaches now ran at ten or ten and a half miles an hour, and faster over favourable stretches of road. The Quicksilver mail from London to Devonport, “Nimrod” tells us, was half a mile in the hour faster than most of the coaches in England, and did the fastest stage of the journey, four miles near Hartford Bridge, in twelve minutes. This coach on one occasion accomplished its journey of 216 miles in twenty-one hours, fourteen minutes, including stoppages.

The mail coaches, it should be said, carried three outside passengers at most, and no luggage at all on the roof. Of course these rates of speed, so much higher than had been known theretofore, called forth protests. “Old Traveller,” writing to the _Sporting Magazine_ in 1822, objects to the encouragement given such hazardous work by “Nimrod.” In his younger days, he says, when about to start on a journey, his wife’s parting hope was that he would not be robbed; now she had changed it to the hope that he would not get his neck broken. It was no uncommon thing, at the beginning of the century and earlier, for a Birmingham merchant to make his will before he set out on a journey; and with all respect to the “Old Traveller,” the risks he encountered on the road in the days before Macadam were as great from ruts and holes as from highwaymen.

Travelling on May-day was avoided by those who objected to fast work, for it was customary for rival stages to race each other the whole journey on that day, and old sporting papers contain occasional record of the fact that a coach had accomplished its entire journey at a rate of fifteen miles an hour. A law passed in 1820, to put an end to “wanton and furious driving or racing,” by which coachmen were made liable to criminal punishment if anyone were maimed or injured, did not stop this practice. For on May 1, 1830, the Independent Tallyho ran from London to Birmingham, 109 miles, in 7 hours, 39 minutes. The writer in _Baily’s Magazine_ of June, 1900, before referred to, gives a graphic account of a May-day race between two of the smartest West country coaches, the Hibernia and l’Hirondelle, from which it appears that these contests were not always free from foolhardiness, though it must be admitted that they produced wonderful displays of coachmanship. Captain Malet gives the following as the fastest coaches in England in 1836:—

London and Brighton, 51½ miles, time five hours, fifteen minutes; London and Shrewsbury, 154 miles, time fifteen hours; London and Exeter, 171 miles, time seventeen hours; London and Manchester, 187 miles, time nineteen hours; London and Liverpool, 203 miles, time twenty hours, fifty minutes; London and Holyhead, 261 miles, time twenty-six hours, fifty-five minutes.

Some of the smartest coaches in England ran from London to Brighton, which, owing to George III’s patronage, had since 1784 risen from a mere fishing village to the most fashionable of seaside resorts. In 1819, says Bradfield, upwards of 70 coaches visited and left Brighton every day; in 1835, says Bradfield, there were 700 mail coaches and rather under 3,300 stages running in England; he estimates the number of horses used at over 150,000, while 30,000 men were employed as coachmen, guards, horse-keepers, ostlers, &c. Mr. W. Chaplin, the member for Salisbury, was the largest proprietor; he had five “yards” in London and owned 1,300 horses. Messrs. Horne and Sherman ranked next to Mr. Chaplin; each had about 700 horses.

HEAVY TAXATION OF COACHES.

The heavy taxes laid upon the stage coaches were a fruitful source of complaint among proprietors. In 1835 a coach conveying eighteen passengers paid 3½d. per mile run to the revenue. To show the decline of coaching, it may be said that in 1835 the total revenue from the stage coaches amounted to £498,497 and in 1854 it had fallen to £73,903. The taxes were estimated to be one-fifth of the receipts, and this being the case it is not remarkable that, in the earlier days of the railroad, the people in country districts remote from railways should have suffered more inconvenience than they had ever known. It no longer paid to run a coach in such districts; and persons in the humbler walks of life found themselves set down at the station, ten, fifteen or twenty miles from home, with no means of getting there other than their own legs. Such districts saw a revival of old postal methods in the shape of boys mounted on ponies.

The unequal competition between coach and train was continued for many years, ruinous taxation of the former notwithstanding. While the coaches were paying 20 per cent. of their earnings to the revenue, the railways paid 5 per cent., and carried passengers more rapidly and more cheaply. The coaches held their place with great tenacity, aided no doubt by the innate British tendency to cling to old institutions.

The _Quarterly Review_ of 1837 mentions as a curious and striking instance of enterprise and the advantages of free competition that a day coach then performed the journey between London and Manchester in time which exceeded by only one hour that occupied by the combined agency of coaches and the Liverpool and Birmingham railway. The Act for transmitting the mails by railway was passed in 1838, eight years after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, and then it may be said coach proprietors recognised that their industry was doomed; but they maintained fares at the old scales until the coach was nearly extinguished.

EARLY CABS.

We must now retrace our steps and endeavour to trace the progress made in vehicles other than stage and mail coaches. In 1740 the first patent was granted for a two-wheeled carriage; it is briefly described as a “double shaft and pole carriage with two wheels drawn by two horses harnessed abreast.” Another “coach with two wheels” was patented in 1786. Mr. Thrupp states that 27,300 two-wheeled vehicles paid duty in the year 1814, a fact which shows how rapidly they grew in favour. It is therefore somewhat curious that the first two-wheeled hackney cab in London should not have appeared in London until 1823, when Mr. David Davis built twelve of these vehicles.

“The body was a little like a hansom cab but smaller; it had a head, of which the hinder half was stiff and solid, and the fore part made to fold. This arrangement was probably an imitation of the gentleman’s cabriolet, the hood of which was rarely put down altogether, as the groom had to hold on by it. Outside the head on one side was a seat for the driver of the cab, and the whole was hung upon stiff shafts. These cabs were, I think, painted yellow, and stood for hire in a yard in Portland Street close to Oxford Circus.”

Cabs of this kind stood for hire in the streets, a few years later, if we may accept the authority of Charles Dickens. Readers of the _Pickwick Papers_ which was published (in monthly parts) in 1837 and 1838, will remember how Mr. Pickwick, when he set out upon his travels took a cab from “the coach stand at St. Martins-le-Grand”; and took notes of the driver’s account of his horse as he drove to Charing Cross. On another page we find Mr. and Mrs. Raddle and Mrs. Cluppins “squeezed into a hackney cabriolet, the driver sitting in his own particular little dickey at the side.” This vehicle was perhaps the light two-wheeled cab with a fixed panel top, built to carry only two persons inside, which was introduced about 1830. The driver sat on a little seat over the off-side wheel.

This vehicle was succeeded by Mr. Boulnois’ patent cab, of which an illustration is given. It opened at the back, and the driver’s seat was on the roof; the passengers sat facing one another. This cab was light and convenient, but appears to have fallen into disuse because the fore part was within too easy reach of the horse’s heels to make it quite acceptable to nervous passengers, Harvey’s “Quarto Bus” to carry four was the next popular conveyance, but it was superseded about 1836 by the “brougham cab” for two. This cab was rather smaller than the vehicle to which Lord Brougham’s name was given in 1839. From this conveyance was developed the “clarence cab,” which remains with us still as the familiar “four-wheeler.” It should be mentioned that the first four-wheeled cabs appeared in London about 1835; these however, carried only two passengers inside. The modern hansom belongs to a later period. In 1802 there were 1,100 hackney carriages in London, and in 1855 the number was 2,706.

In 1824 was published _The Hackney Coach Directory_; this book, which must have been hailed as a real boon to the users of cabs in London, was compiled by James Quaife, “Surveyor to the Board of Hackney Coaches.” It set forth the “Distances checked from actual admeasurement from eighty-four coach stands in and about the Metropolis,” and the title page tells us “The number of fares set forth is nearly eighteen thousand.”

PRIVATE AND STATE COACHES, 1750-1830.

A volume might easily be filled with the particulars of private carriages which came into use between the middle of the eighteenth century and the end of the coaching era. Great ingenuity and a great deal of art of a florid kind was expended on the private coaches of the upper classes. A patent granted in 1786 gives us an idea of the materials used for the purpose; the patent was for a method of “ornamenting the outsides of coaches and other carriages with foil stones, Bristol stones, paste and all sorts of pinched glass, sapped glass and every other stone, glass and composition used in or applied to the jewellery trade.” Mr. Larwood writes of the carriages in Hyde Park:—

“The beautiful and somewhat vain Duchess of Devonshire had a carriage which cost 500 guineas without upholstery. That of the Countess of Sutherland was grey, with her cypher in one of Godsell’s newly-invented crystals. A Mr. Edwards had a _vis-à-vis_ which cost 300 guineas, and was thought ‘admirable’; while another nameless gentleman gladdened the eyes of all beholders with a splendid gig lined with looking glass; while the artistic curricle, with shells on the wheels, of Romeo Coates, was one of the features of Hyde Park.”

Six horses were not uncommonly driven. Sir John Lade drove a phaeton and six greys. The Prince of Wales, in 1781, drove a pair caparisoned with blue harness stitched in red, the horses’ manes being plaited with scarlet ribbons while they wore plumes of feathers on their heads.

The decorative art as applied to vehicles naturally found greatest scope in State coaches. The State carriage of Queen Victoria was built in 1761 for George III. from designs by Sir William Chambers, a famous architect, who was born in 1726. The length of this coach is 24 feet, the height 12 feet, the width 8 feet, and the weight is between 3 and 4 tons; the various panels and doors are adorned with allegorical groups by Cipriani. This superb carriage, having only been used on rare occasions, is still in a good state of preservation. It cost £7,562 to build and adorn. The State coach of the Lord Mayor of London has been of necessity more frequently used, and alterations and repairs have left comparatively little of the original vehicle built in 1757. In style it is generally similar to the Royal State coach,

While money and artistic talent were lavished freely on the adornment of the carriages built for pleasure or display in London, it must not be supposed that sound workmanship was neglected. The highly decorated vehicles driven in the Park were well built, but the best and strongest work was necessarily put into carriages which were required for more practical purposes, and we must therefore discriminate between the pleasure carriage and that used for travelling.

The mail and stage coaches were used by nearly all classes of society, but these worked only the main roads throughout the kingdom; therefore country gentlemen who resided off the coach routes had to find their own way to the nearest stage or posting house; moreover, wealthy men who could afford the luxury of taking their own time over a journey, were still much addicted to the use of private travelling carriages drawn by their own horses or, more often, horsed from stage to stage along the route by the post masters.

For many years after Mr. McAdam’s methods had been applied to the main highways, the narrower and less used by-roads left much to be desired; and however good the roads it is obvious that lavishly adorned carriages would have been out of place for travel in all weathers. A single day’s journey through mud or dust would play havoc with ornamentation contrived of “foil stones, Bristol stones, sapped glass” and similar materials; what was required in the travelling carriage, such as that so well portrayed by the late Charles Cooper Henderson, was the combination of strength and lightness. Hence the best of the coach-builder’s art, the finest workmanship in the practical, as opposed to the decorative sense, was applied to the travelling carriage, which was constructed to secure the greatest comfort to the occupants, together with the greatest strength to withstand rapid travel over roads of all kinds with the least weight.

The picture by Cooper Henderson, from which the illustration is reproduced, refers to the period about 1825-35, and it will be observed that while the body of the carriage is hung lower than the posting carriage of seventy years earlier, the general plan is not greatly dissimilar.

VARIETIES OF CARRIAGE.

About 1790 the art of coach-building had arrived at a very high degree of perfection,[25] and carriages in great variety of shape were built. A feature common to all, or nearly all, was the height of the wheels. The highest were 5 feet 8 inches in diameter; these had 14 spokes, and the number of spokes were reduced in ratio with the size of the wheel, till the smallest, 3 feet 2 inches in diameter, had only 8 spokes. A good example of the coach of 1790 may be seen in the South Kensington Museum; it belonged to the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and, save for the greater size of the body, the flatness of its sides and greater length above than below, is not widely dissimilar from coaches of the present day.

[25] _Treatise upon Carriages and Harness._ W. Felton, London, 1794.