Part 12

Less than a mile down the road is that humble little public-house whose strange sign, the “Ram Jam,” has puzzled many people. Its original name was the “Winchilsea Arms,” and it bore no other sign than the armorial shield of the Earls of Winchilsea until long after coaching days were done; but in all that time it was known only as the “Ram Jam House,” and thereby hangs a tale, or several tales, most of them untrue. All kinds of wild legends of the house being so crammed with travellers that it was called “Ram Jam,” from that circumstance, have been heard. But travellers, as a matter of fact, never stayed there, for the inn never had any accommodation for them. It was more a beer-house than anything else. It’s fame began about 1740, when the landlord was an officer’s servant, returned from India. He possessed the secret of compounding a liqueur or spirit which he sold to travellers down the road, this eventually becoming as well-known a delicacy as Cooper Thornhill’s “Stilton” cheeses. He called this spirit “Ram Ján,” which seems to be an Indian term for a table servant, and sold it in small bottles, either singly, for consumption on the journey, or in cases of half-dozens or dozens. The secret of this liqueur was imparted to his son, but afterwards died out, and it is said that “Ram Jam” ceased to be sold before the beginning of the nineteenth century.

[Picture: Interior of a Village Inn. (After Morland)]

Although the “Ram Jam” was never more than a tavern of a very humble description, and probably never sheltered guests above the rank of cattle-drovers, it is noted as having been the house where Molyneux, the black, slept before his fight with Tom Cribb at Thistleton Gap, three and a half miles away, on September 28, 1811. Cribb, who was easily the victor, had his quarters at the “Blue Bull,” another small roadside house, which stood, until the beginning of 1900, at the cross roads on Witham Common, where roads go right and left to Bourn and Melton Mowbray. It has now been demolished.

Here we have passed the little Rutlandshire village of Stretton on the right, which obtained its name of “Street-town” from having been on the ancient road called the Ermine Way. Here we come again into Lincolnshire.

For some twenty miles the Great North Road runs through this broad county, the land of the “yellow-bellies,” as Lincolnshire folk are named, from the frogs and eels that inhabit their fens and marshes. North and South Witham, giving a name to Witham Common, lie unseen, off to the left, and the once famous old “Black Bull” stands, as it always has stood, solitary beside the road, out of sight from any other house. It consists of two separate buildings, at right angles to one another and erected at different times. The original house is a structure of rag-stone, placed a little way back from the road, and facing it. The second building, which bears a more imposing architectural character, and with its handsome elevation of red brick and stone, bears witness to the once extensive business of the “Black Bull,” stands facing south, with its gable-end to the road, thus forming two sides of a courtyard. Long ranges of stables extend to the rear. The place is now in use as a farmhouse and hunting-box, and a screen of laurels and other evergreen shrubs is planted on the site of the old coach-drive. Sturtle, who kept the house in the old days, is gathered to his fathers, and the railway whistle sounds across country, where the guards’ horns once aroused the echoes of Morkery Woods or Spittle Gorse.

How different the outlook now from the time when Sir Walter Scott made entries in his _Journal_. “Old England,” he writes, from his hotel at Grantham, “is no changeling. Things seem much the same. One race of red-nosed innkeepers are gone, and their widows, eldest sons, or head waiters exercise hospitality in their room, with the same bustle and importance. The land, however, is much better ploughed; straight ridges everywhere adopted in place of the old circumflex of twenty years ago. Three horses, however, or even four, are often seen in a plough, yoked one before the other. Ill habits do not go out at once.”

A few years later, and these things, which had changed so little, were revolutionised. The railway carried all the traffic and the roads were deserted, the “red-nosed innkeepers” so rarely seeing a guest, that when a stray one arrived they almost fell on his shoulder and wept. Agriculture, too, converted even Witham Common into a succession of fertile fields, and thus banished wayfaring romance to the pages of history or of sensation novels.

[Picture: House, formerly the “Black Bull,” Witham Common]

XXIV

LET us rest awhile by this sunlit stretch of road, where the red roofs of distant farmsteads alone hint of life; always excepting the humming telegraph wires whispering messages to Edinburgh and the Far North, or perhaps the summer breeze bringing across country the distant echo of a train. If it does, why then the sound renders our solitude the more complete, and gives flight to a lagging imagination. It reminds us that it was here, and not there, three miles away over the meadows in a railway cutting, that the traffic of two kingdoms went, sixty years ago.

These green selvedges of grass that border the highway so delightfully were not then in existence. They were a part of the road itself, which was, for all that, not too wide for the mail-coaches, the stages, the fly-wagons, private chariots, post-chaises, and especially the runaway couples _en route_ for Gretna Green, who travelled along it. “The dullest road in the world, though the most convenient,” quoth Sir Walter Scott, in his diary, when journeying to Abbotsford in 1826. Dull scenically, but not historically. Had it been an unlettered cyclist who had made this criticism, a thousand critical lashes had been his portion—and serve him right; but what shall we say of the author of _Waverley_? Dull! why, the road is thronged with company. One can—any one can who has the will to it—call spirits from the vasty deep with which to people the way. No need to ask, “Will they come?” They cannot choose but do so; they are here.

A strange and motley crowd: the pale ghosts of the ages. From Ostorius Scapula and the Emperors Hadrian, Severus, and Constantine the Great, down through the Middle Ages, they come, mostly engaged in cutting one another’s throats. York and Lancaster, as their fortunes ebbed or flowed, setting up or taking down the heads of traitors; obscure murderers despatching equally obscure victims by the way, and in later times—the farcical mingling with the more tragic humours—we see James the First journeying to his throne, confirmed in his good opinion of himself as a second Solomon by a sycophantic crowd of courtiers; Lord Chancellor Littleton, fleeing from Parliament to Charles the First at York, carrying with him that precious symbol of Royal authority, the Great Seal (the third Great Seal of that reign), made in the year the Long Parliament began to sit; Charles the First, a few years later, conducted by the victorious Parliament to London, and, at the interval of another century, the Rebel Lords. “The ’45,” indeed, made much traffic on this road: the British army going down, with Billy the Butcher at its head, to crush the rebellion, and the prisoners coming up—their last journey, as they knew full well. They were pinioned on the way, for their better custody, and so that Hanoverian heads might sleep the sounder at St. James’s. The Hanoverians themselves rarely came this way, nor would their coming have added greatly to the romance of the road. George the Third passed once. He was a stay-at-home king, and of roads knew little, save of those that led from London to Windsor, or to that western _Ultima Thule_ of his, Weymouth. Indeed, it is said, on what authority it is difficult to determine, that the third George never voyaged out of the kingdom. Even Hanover, beloved of his forbears, he never knew, although the Jacobites ceased not with their brass tokens, to wish him there. {165} His furthest journey is said to have been to York.

His son, afterwards George the Fourth, had occasion to remember this road, for he was upset on it in 1789, when returning from a visit to Earl Fitzwilliam at Wentworth Woodhouse. Two miles from Newark, a cart overturned his carriage in a narrow part of the highway. It rolled over three times down an incline, and fell to pieces like a box of tricks, but the prince was unhurt.

Of bygone sporting figures with which, in imagination, to people the way we have a crowd. There has always been something in the great length of the road to York, and of its continuation to Edinburgh, that has appealed to sportsmen and all those interested in the speeds of different methods of progression. Pedestrians, horsemen, and coaches—and in recent times cyclists—have competed in their several ways, from an early period until our own day, and the rival railways even have had their races to Edinburgh.

Of these feats, that of Sir Robert Cary, son of Lord Hunsdon, is not the least remarkable. He carried the news of Queen Elizabeth’s death to James at Edinburgh, and was the first to hail him King of England. Riding in furious haste, and with fresh horses wherever he could obtain them, he succeeded in covering the distance in the sixty hours between a Thursday morning and a Saturday night. Again, a very few years later—in May 1606—a certain esquire of James the First’s, John Lepton of York, undertook for a wager to ride on six consecutive days between that city and London. He started from Aldersgate on the 20th of May, and accomplished his task every day before darkness had fallen; “to the greater praise of his strength in acting than to his discretion in undertaking it,” as Fuller remarks. He also, of course, had relays of horses. Among the pedestrians is Ben Jonson, who walked to Scotland, on his visit to Drummond of Hawthornden, starting in June 1618; but he footed it less for sport than from necessity.

When Charles the First was at York, according to Clarendon, it was a frequent occurrence for gentlemen couriers to ride with despatches between that place and London, completing the double journey—400 miles—in thirty-four hours. Thus, a letter sent by the Council in London on the Saturday, midnight, was answered on its arrival at York by the king, and the answer delivered in London at ten o’clock on the Monday morning.

Then there was Cooper Thornhill, landlord of the “Bell” at Stilton, who for a wager rode to London and back again to Stilton, about 1740. The distance, 154 miles in all, was done in eleven hours thirty-three minutes and forty-six seconds. He had nineteen horses to carry him, and so is no rival of Turpin’s mythical exploit in riding to York on his equally mythical Black Bess; but he was evidently considered a wonderful person, for there was a poem published about him in 1745, entitled “The Stilton Hero: O Tempora! O Mores:” a sixpenny quarto of fourteen pages.

Foster Powell is easily first among the pedestrians. He was an eighteenth century notability, a native of Horsforth, near Leeds, and born in 1734. Articled to an attorney, he remained a solicitor’s clerk, undistinguished in the law, but early famed for his walking powers. In 1764 he backed himself for any amount to walk fifty miles on the Bath Road in seven hours, and having accomplished this, despite his wearing a heavy greatcoat and leather breeches at the time, he visited France and Switzerland, and fairly walked the natives off their legs. It was in 1773 that he performed his first walk from London to York and back, doing the 400 miles in five days and eighteen hours. This was followed by a walk of 100 miles, out and home, on the Bath Road, done in twenty-three hours and a quarter. His three great pedestrian records on the Great North Road in 1788 and twice in 1792 are his most remarkable achievements. Although by this time he had long passed the age at which athletics are commonly indulged in, he performed the London to York and back walk of 1788 in five days twenty hours, and its repetitions of 1792 in five days eighteen hours and five days fifteen hours and a quarter, respectively. The starting and turning-points were Shoreditch Church and York Minster. This last effort probably cost him his life, for he died, aged fifty-nine, early the following year. Powell figures—rightly enough—as one of Wilson and Caulfield’s company of “Remarkable Characters,” in which he is described as about five feet nine inches in height, close-knit body, of a sallow complexion, and of a meagre habit. He lived on a light and spare diet, and generally abstained from drink, only on one of his expeditions partaking of brandy. He took but little sleep, generally five hours.

[Picture: Foster Powell]

Robert Barclay of Ury, born 1731, died 1797, walked from London to Ury, 510 miles, in ten days. He is described as having been well over six feet in height. He married, in 1776, Sarah Ann Allardice, and was the father of the next notable pedestrian.

Captain Barclay of Ury, an eighteenth century stalwart, born in 1779 and living until 1854, walked the whole way from Edinburgh to London and back. He was at the time Member of Parliament for Kincardineshire. Another of his feats of endurance was driving the mail for a wager from London to Aberdeen. He then offered to drive it back for another wager, but Lord Kennedy, who had already lost, was not inclined to renew. Barclay started the “Defiance” coach between Edinburgh and Aberdeen in July 1829. He only once upset it, and thus described the event:—“She fell as easy as if she had fallen on a feather bed, and looking out for a soft place, I alighted comfortably on my feet.” A favourite axiom with him was that no man could claim to be a thoroughly qualified coachman until he had “floored”—that is, upset—his coach; “for till he has done so he cannot know how to get it up again.” Barclay was the claimant of the Earldom of Monteith and Ayr, and it was a source of genuine anxiety with him whether, in the event of his proving his claim, he would have to give up the reins. He consulted his friend the Duke of Gordon on this point. “Why,” replied his Grace, “there is not much difference between an earl and a marquis, and as the Marquis of Waterford drives the Brighton ‘Defiance,’ I see no reason why you may not drive its Aberdeen namesake. At all events, if there be any objection to your being the coachman, there can be none to your being the guard.” Barclay was snubbed!

As for the many great people who were furiously driven back and forth, up and down the road, the historian is dismayed at the prospect of chronicling their whirling flight. Let us respectfully take the most of their performances on trust. There was no occasion for all this haste, save the spirit of the thing, as Byron hints:—

“Now there is nothing gives a man such spirits, Leavening his blood as cayenne doth a curry, As going at full speed—no matter where its Direction be, so ’tis but in a hurry, And merely for the sake of its own merits; For the less cause there is for all this flurry, The greater is the pleasure in arriving At the great end of travel—which is driving.”

Thus there was Lord Londonderry, who made a speech in the House one night, and the next evening was at his own place in Durham, 250 miles or so away, having travelled down in his “chariot and four.”

There were those, however, who scorned these effeminate methods. Like Barclay of Ury, they walked or rode horseback, long after the introduction of coaches. Foul-mouthed old Lord Monboddo, for instance, a once famous Scots Lord of Session, persisted in the use of the saddle. He journeyed between the two capitals once a year, and continued to do so until well past fourscore years of age. On his last journey to London he could get no further than Dunbar, and when his nephew asked him why he gave up, “Eh, George,” said he, “I find I am noo auchty-four.” He was, in fact, suffering from the incurable disease of “Anno Domini.” He held it unmanly “to sit in a box drawn by brutes.” Would that we could have his shade for a companion on a ’bus ride from Charing Cross to the Bank!

At that period the stage-wagons performed the journey in fourteen days, carrying passengers at a shilling a day.

XXV

THE list of equestrians is long and distinguished. Lord Mansfield rode up from Scotland to London when a boy, on a pony, and took two months over the enterprise. Dr. Skene, who left town in 1753 in the same fashion, reached Edinburgh in nineteen days. His expenses, having sold his mare on arrival for eight guineas—exactly the sum he had given for her—amounted to only four guineas.

This, indeed, was the usual plan to purchase a horse for the journey and to sell it on arrival; a method so canny that it must surely be of Scots invention. It had the advantage that, if you found a good market for your nag, it was often possible to make a profit on the transaction.

But it behoved the purchaser to make some inquiry as to the previous owners, as no doubt the Scotsman, leaving London with one of these newly bought mounts, discovered, after some embarrassing experiences. He went gaily forth upon his way, and nothing befell him until Finchley Common was reached. On that lonely waste, however, he met another horseman; whereupon his horse began to edge up to the stranger, as though to prevent him from proceeding. The Scotsman was at a loss to understand this behaviour, but the other traveller, thinking him to be a highwayman, was for handing over his purse forthwith. This little difficulty explained away, our friend resumed his journey, presently meeting a coach, when the performance was repeated. This time, however, blunderbusses were aimed at him, and, the nervous passengers being in no mood to hear or understand explanations, he had a rather narrow escape of his life. At Barnet he sold this embarrassing horse for what he could get, and continued his journey by coach.

It was in 1756 that Mrs. Calderwood of Coltness travelled to London from Edinburgh in her own post-chaise, her sturdy serving-man, John Rattray, riding beside the vehicle on horseback, armed with pistols and a broadsword by his side. She set out from Edinburgh on the 3rd of June and reached London on the evening of the 10th—an astonishing rapid journey, it was thought. Let it not be supposed that the armed serving-man, or the case of pistols the good dame carried with her inside the vehicle, showed an excess of precaution. Not at all; as was instanced near that suspicious place, Bawtry, in whose neighbourhood a doubtful character whom they took to be a highwayman made his appearance. However, when John Rattray began talking ostentatiously about powder and ball to the post-boy, the supposed malefactor was nonplussed; and on John Rattray furthermore “showing his whanger,” the fellow made off. And so Cox—and Box—were satisfied. Strangest of all travellers, however, was Peter Woulfe, chemist, mineralogist, and eccentric, whose specific for illness was a journey by mail-coach. He indulged this whim for years, riding from London to Edinburgh and back, until 1803, when the remedy proved worse than the disease, for he caught cold on these bleak miles and died.

John Scott, afterwards Earl of Eldon and created Lord Chancellor, left a record of his early travels along this road—surely it were better named the Road to Fortune! He left school at Newcastle in 1766 to proceed to London on the way to Oxford, and travelled in a “fly,” so called because it did the journey in the previously unheard-of time of three days and four nights. This “fly” had probably once been a private carriage, for it still bore the motto, “_Sat cito_, _si sat bene_”—that is to say, “Quick enough, if well enough”—exquisitely appropriate, however, to that slow pace. Young Scott had noticed this, and made an impudent remark to a fellow-traveller, a Quaker, who, when they halted at Tuxford, had given sixpence to a chamber-maid, telling her that he had forgotten to give it her when he had slept at the inn two years before. “Friend,” said he to the Quaker, “have you seen the motto on this coach?”

“No,” said his companion.

“Then look at it,” he rejoined, “for I think giving her sixpence now is neither sat cito nor sat bene.”

It is astonishing, indeed, how many future Lord Chancellors came from the North. Lord Chancellor Campbell, who as a boy came up to London from Fife in 1798, was among the early arrivals by mail-coach. At that time his father was the admiration of his Fifeshire village, for he was the only one in the place who had been to London. Every one, accordingly, looked up to, and consulted, so great a traveller. He had seen Garrick, too, and was used to boast of the fact, although, it is to be supposed, with discretion and amid the inner circle of his friends, for play-actors were not yet favourites in the dour Scottish mind. Great was the excitement when young Campbell left home. The speed of the coaches had been accelerated, and they now began to reach London from Edinburgh in two days and three nights. Friends advised him to stay in York and recuperate for a day or two after a taste of this headlong speed, lest he—as it was rumoured had happened to others—should be seized with apoplexy from the rush of air at that rate of travelling. But, greatly daring, he disregarded their advice, and came to town direct and in safety.

When railways were introduced, they meant much more than cheap and speedy travelling; they prefigured a social revolution and an absolute reversal of manners and customs. The “great ones of the earth” were really great in the old days; to-day no one is great in the old exclusive sense. Every one can go everywhere—and every one does. Dukes travel in omnibuses and go third-class by train because there is no fourth. If there _were_, they would go by it, and save the difference.

The judges kept up the practice of going on circuit in their carriages for some little while after railways had rendered it unnecessary; and barristers who used to post to the assizes were for a few years unwilling to be convinced that it was quite respectable and professional to go by train. The juniors were the readiest converts, for the difference in cost touched them nearly. The clergy soon embraced the opportunity of travelling cheaply, for the cloth has ever had, at the least of it, a due sense of the value of money.

Dignified and stately prelates therefore speedily began to look ridiculous by contrast, and the old picture in _Punch_, once considered exquisitely humorous, of a bishop carrying a carpet-bag, has lost its point. Samuel Wilberforce, when elevated to the Bishopric of Oxford in 1845, was probably the first Bishop to give up his coach and four and his gorgeous lackeys. He rode, unattended, on horseback, and scandalised those who saw him. How much more scandalised would they have been to see bishops ride bicycles: a sight not uncommon in our time.