Part 3

Chaplin had in early days been a coachman himself. His career would have delighted that sturdy moralist, Hogarth, painter of the successful career of the Industrious Apprentice, for from that useful but humble position he rose to be the largest coach-proprietor in England, Deputy-Chairman of the London and Southampton (now London and South-Western) Railway, and Member of Parliament for Salisbury. He is said to have accumulated half a million of money. Twenty-seven mails left London every night, and of these Chaplin horsed fourteen for various distances. Very many stage-coaches were in his hands, and at the height of the coaching era he is said to have owned nearly two thousand horses. He was an entirely level-headed man, and, seeing at an early stage that railways must succeed, threw in his lot with them. Railway directors were exceedingly anxious to win over the coaching proprietors, and to induce them to withdraw from the road, so that with no coaches running the public should of necessity, whether they liked it or not, be compelled to travel by rail. Chaplin sold off his stock before the oncoming railways depreciated it, and, joining Benjamin Worthy Horne, of the “Golden Cross,” Charing Cross, founded the great carrying firm of Chaplin and Horne, which enjoyed the exclusive agency for the London and Birmingham Railway. There can be little doubt, although it was denied by the early officials of that line, that Chaplin and Horne were really bought off the road, and the sum of £10,000 has been mentioned as the price of their withdrawal. Before that time had come, coaches issued from Chaplin’s yard for many places on the north-western roads: the Carlisle Royal Mail; the Birmingham Royal Mail, “Courier,” and “Balloon Post Coach”; the Chester “New Coach”; Coventry “Light Post Coach”; Liverpool Royal Mail; Holyhead “New Mail” and a stage-coach without any particular name; and the Manchester Royal Mail, “Defiance,” “Regulator,” and “Prince Saxe-Cobourg.” The “Spread Eagle” in Gracechurch Street has also disappeared. It was at one time a house of Chaplin’s, and was afterwards owned in succession, together with the “Cross Keys” next door, by Mrs. Nelson and Mrs. Mountain.

[Picture: Modern sign of the “Swan with Two Necks”]

The “Green Man and Still,” the last of the quartet of inns inquired after by Mr. Locker-Lampson, is the only one now standing, and may be seen at the corner of Oxford and Argyll Streets, close by Oxford Circus. It was not a coaching hostelry in the fullest sense, being only a place of call for the Oxford “Age,” and for the Harrow and other north-westerly “short stages,” running between London and the suburbs. It is now a railway receiving-office. This curious sign probably alludes to the old profession of the “herb-doctors,” who distilled medicines from wild or cultivated herbs. There were other inns whence Great North Road coaches set out, but they have all vanished. The “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn, whence the famous “Stamford Regent” started, has long since been pulled down, and the “Inns of Court Hotel” stood on its site. The hotel building remains, but about 1912 it ceased to be a hotel, and has since been converted into offices for an Insurance Company. The “Regent” originally left London at six o’clock in the evening, but in 1822 the hour was altered to six in the morning, an unearthly time for those who had to go some distance to reach Holborn, and necessitating, perhaps, getting up at three o’clock. The announcement by the proprietors that this alteration was for the “more perfect convenience” of their patrons seems ironical:—

SIX O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING From London.

* * * * *

THE PROPRIETORS OF THE REGENT COACH

Respectfully inform the public and their friends in particular, that, for their more perfect convenience, and to keep pace with the daily improvements in travelling, the hour of its leaving London will be altered on Monday, the 13th of May (and continued during the summer months),

TO SIX O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, _Instead of Night_.

The arrangements that are forming in furtherance of this long-desired alteration will ensure a steady and punctual conveyance of Passengers to Stamford by a Quarter before Six o’clock, and to Melton by a Quarter before Nine o’clock in the Evening.

The hours of leaving Melton and Stamford will NOT be altered.

The proprietors take this opportunity to acknowledge their sense of the decided patronage shown to the REGENT COACH under their several regulations, and to repeat their promise that no exertion shall be wanting to make it one of the most desirable conveyances to and from London.

Passengers and Parcels booked at Mr. Weldon’s, and the Bull and Swan Inn, Stamford; and at Mr. Sharp’s, Bell Inn, Melton.—_Stamford_, _May_ 1, 1822.

[Picture: The “Spread Eagle,” Gracechurch Street]

The “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill, which must not he confounded with the other and equally celebrated “Saracen’s Head” in Aldgate High Street, was another very notable coaching establishment, and a galleried inn of picturesqueness and antiquity. Alas! that it has long since disappeared. Its history went back beyond the fifteenth century, and a reference made to it in 1522, when the suite of the Emperor Charles the Fifth lay here, speaks of the house as of some importance:—“The signe of the Sersyns hed: xxx beddes, a stable for xl horses.”

The sign, of course deriving from the Crusades, itself gives the inn a very high antiquity. It was a sign of a gruesome and savage aspect, and had its origin in the pictures the returning Crusaders drew of their adversaries. As Selden says:—“Our countrymen pictured them with huge, big, terrible faces, when in truth they were like other men. But this,” he adds slyly, “they did for their own credits.” The inn owed its later celebrity to Dickens, who made it the London inn of Mr. Squeers. Thus he describes it:—“Near to the jail, and by consequence near to Smithfield, on that particular part of Snow Hill where omnibus horses going eastward seriously think of falling down on purpose, and where horses in hackney cabriolets going westward not unfrequently fall by accident, is the coachyard of the Saracen’s Head Inn; its portal guarded by two Saracens’ heads and shoulders frowning upon you from each side of the gateway. The inn itself, garnished with another Saracen’s head, frowns upon you from the top of the yard. When you walk up this yard you will see the booking-office on your left and the tower of St. Sepulchre’s Church darting abruptly up into the sky on your right, and a gallery of bedrooms upon both sides.”

There is a “Saracen’s Head” on Snow Hill to this day, but it is a modern building. From the old house went the “Lord Nelson,” York, Newcastle, and Edinburgh coach; the “Post,” despite its name, a slow-coach, for Carlisle and Penrith, by Doncaster, Ferrybridge, and Greta Bridge, doubtless the one by which Mr. Wackford Squeers took his “dear pupils” to Dotheboys Hall; and coaches to Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Shrewsbury, besides others for the western roads. The “Saracen’s Head” was kept by Mrs. Mountain, in succession to her husband and her husband’s father. Her son, Peter, managed the business for her, but it must not be supposed that she took no active part in it. To the contrary, Mrs. Sarah Ann Mountain, like her contemporary, Mrs. Nelson, of the “Bull,” Aldgate, possessed the most brilliant business capacity. She built coaches, as well as horsing them, and earned a profit by charging her partners down the road the mileage which in the usual course of business would have been paid over to a coach-builder. There was no more expressive sight in the London of the beginning of the nineteenth century than the simultaneous starting of the mails every evening from the General Post Office. Londoners and country-cousins alike were never weary of the spectacle of the smart coaches, the business-like coachmen, and the resplendent, scarlet-coated guards preparing to travel through the night, north, south, east, or west, with his Majesty’s mails. Even the passengers shone with a reflected glory, and felt important as, one after the other, the twenty-seven mails began at the stroke of eight o’clock to move off from the double file that lined the street.

[Picture: The “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill]

That street was not the broad thoroughfare of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, but the narrow one of Lombard Street, in which the General Post Office was situated for many years, until 1829, when what is now called the “old” General Post Office, but was then the newly completed building of Smirke’s, was occupied. The old headquarters can still be seen, in the Lombard Street Post Office of to-day. It is from here that the picture of the mails starting, forming the frontispiece of this volume, was taken. To our eyes, accustomed to the crowded thoroughfare of modern times, the street appears supremely dull and desolate, but that is only a retrospective way of looking at it.

Here is a testimony to the beauty of the scene. It is eloquent testimony, for it is De Quincey’s:—“On any night the spectacle was beautiful. The absolute perfection of all the appointments about the carriages and the harness, their strength, their brilliant cleanliness, their beautiful simplicity—but, more than all, the royal magnificence of the horses—were what might first have fixed the attention. Every carriage, on every morning of the year, was taken down to an official inspector for examination—wheels, axles, linchpins, poles, glasses, lamps, were all critically probed and tested. Every part of every carriage had been cleaned, every horse had been groomed, with as much rigour as if they belonged to a private gentleman; and that part of the spectacle offered itself always. . . . Every moment are shouted aloud by the post-office servants, and summoned to draw up, the great ancestral names of cities known to history through a thousand years—Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Stirling, Aberdeen—expressing the grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its towns, and the grandeur of the mail establishment by the diffusive radiation of its separate missions. Every moment you hear the thunder of lids locked down upon the mail-bags. That sound to each individual mail is the signal for drawing off, which process is the finest part of the entire spectacle. Then came the horses into play. Horses! Can these be horses that bound off with the action and gestures of leopards? What stir! what sea-like ferment! what a thundering of wheels! what a trampling of hoofs! what a sounding of trumpets!”

IV

NOW for Post Office history. Much has been made at the “old” General Post Office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand; and although the building was not in existence until 1829, it has sent forth and received many mail-coaches. Its disappearance in 1912, we say, therefore severs the last link by which this busy quarter was connected with the old days.

[Picture: The Mails starting from the General Post Office, 1832]

The story of the Post Office goes back long before the G.P.O. was situated either here or at Lombard Street. The original Post Office was off Eastcheap. When it was there, the course of post between London and Edinburgh took three days. The first regular service was established in 1635, when Charles the First, to end the inefficiency of the communications between the two capitals, inaugurated “a running post or two, to run night and day, between Edinburgh and London, to go thither and come back again in six days.” We may suppose that this did not work very well, for in 1649 we find the city of London establishing a post of its own with a regular staff of runners and postmasters between London and the North.

But with the Restoration came the establishment of the General Post Office and an instantaneous decline in the efficiency of the post, six days instead of three being taken for the single journey to or from Edinburgh. This roused the towns on the way to indignant protests, and the post was accelerated to “three and a half or four days,” the acceleration being slower than the original time.

But however keenly the intermediate towns may have felt this, it could not have mattered much to Edinburgh, whose mail-bag was very scanty. One day in 1745, we are told, the mail brought only one letter, for the British Linen Company; and on another day in the same year only one was despatched to London, for Sir William Pulteney, the banker.

In 1750 things were no better, but eight years later an Edinburgh merchant, George Chalmers, procured an improvement. Before 1758 the Great North Mail set out three times a week and took eighty-seven hours in going north, and not fewer than one hundred and thirty-one from Edinburgh to London. This last itinerary was lengthened so greatly in time on account of stoppages made at Berwick and at Newcastle, ranging from three hours at one to twenty-four at the other. These delays Chalmers, in corresponding with the officials, proved to be quite needless. He also induced them to avoid the old and longer route through Thorne and York and to take the alternative road by Boroughbridge, thus shortening the journey by twelve miles. The times were then fixed at eighty-two hours for the northward-bound mail, and eighty-five for the south. For his services the Government made Chalmers a grant of £600. Some years afterwards he induced the Post Office to run the mails six days a week.

But a greater than Chalmers was at hand in Palmer, the organiser of the mail-coach service. Palmer accomplished, according to De Quincey, “two things very hard to do on our little planet, the earth, however cheap they may be held by eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had married the daughter of a duke. He was therefore just twice as great a man as Galileo, who did certainly invent (or, which is the same thing, discover) the satellites of Jupiter, those very next things extant to mail-coaches in the two capital pretensions of speed and keeping time; but, on the other hand, who did not marry the daughter of a duke.” Palmer married, in point of fact, Lady Madeline Gordon, daughter of the Duke of Richmond, but De Quincey does not lay the stress he should have done on his having fought his postal scheme to success against the obstinacy and red-tapeism of the Post Office officials, itself an enterprise sufficient to daunt any but the stoutest heart. Government officials have a wonderful power of passive resistance and an insensibility to argument and proof which might be envied by a lamp-post. It was thought a brilliant rejoinder when one of these Post Office dunderheads replied to Palmer’s scheme for supplanting the slow and uncertain post-boys by fast coaches with the observation that there was no reason why the post should be the swiftest conveyance in England! No doubt this witty gentleman resigned in an access of mortification when Palmer actually succeeded in being appointed Controller-General of the Post Office, with a salary of £1,500 a year and a two and a-half per cent. commission on a rise of the income above the £240,000 at which it stood when he was placed at the head of affairs. The first mail-coach was put upon the Bath Road on the 8th of August 1784, and its success was so great and immediate that the chief towns of the kingdom presently began to petition for similar facilities to be accorded them. York was the first successful applicant, and a mail was put on the road between London, York, and Edinburgh in October of the same year, taking three nights and two days to perform the journey. This was not a very remarkable rate of speed, to be sure, but the times were not so hurried then. A greater speed was attained when the roads began to be reorganised by Telford and Macadam. Macadam’s method of metalling the existing roads and Telford’s reconstruction of steep and winding highways produced great results. To Macadam was due the greater speeds attained at last on the mail route between London and Edinburgh; for, although Telford’s improved road was begun in 1824, it was never completed owing to the introduction of railways. Government had, in fact, by this time recognised the necessity of good roads, and, fresh from the reorganisation of the mail route between London and Holyhead, had determined on an improved communication between England and Scotland. This road, already referred to, was to be straight and as flat as engineering science could contrive it, and a portion—that between Edinburgh and Morpeth—was constructed about 1824, going by way of Soutra Hill, Lauderdale, Coldstream, and Wooler. The route between London and Morpeth was also surveyed and authorised, and portions between London and York actually begun, when the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825 convinced the authorities that the days of the road were numbered.

But although it was long apparent that a change was impending, coaches were not entirely run off the Great North Road for another twenty years, and Post Office surveyors were still busy expediting the mails over short cuts and roads of more favourable gradients. Thus in 1832 we find the Scotch mail going by way of Selby. Here is the official time-bill for that year:—

MILES LONDON dep. 8.00 P.M. 12½ Waltham Cross arr. 9.25 ,, 22 Ware ,, 10.26 ,, 35½ Buckland ,, 11.52 ,, 45½ Arrington ,, 12.57 A.M. 60 Huntingdon ,, 2.30 ,, 65¼ Alconbury Hill ,, 3.03 ,, 72¼ Stilton ,, 3.45 ,, 87 Stamford ,, 5.15 ,, 95 Stretton ,, 6.03 ,, 108½ GRANTHAM arr. 7.23 ,, dep. 8.03 ,, 115½ Long Bennington arr. 8.53 ,, 122¼ Newark ,, 9.30 ,, 132¾ Scarthing Moor ,, 10.34 ,, 145½ Barnby Moor ,, 11.49 ,, 155¼ Rossington Bridge ,, 12.47 P.M. 159½ Doncaster ,, 1.12 ,, 166¼ Askerne ,, 1.55 ,, 179¾ Selby ,, 3.21 ,, 194 YORK arr. 4.54 ,, dep. 5.34 ,, 207¼ Easingwold arr. 6.54 ,, 218 Thirsk ,, 7.58 ,, 227 Northallerton ,, 8.52 ,, 243 Darlington ,, 10.28 ,, 261½ Durham ,, 12.23 ,, 276 NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE arr. 1.50 ,, dep. 1.53 ,, 290½ Morpeth arr. 3.22 ,, 300½ Felton ,, 4.23 ,, 309¾ Alnwick ,, 5.17 ,, 324½ BELFORD arr. 6.47 ,, dep. 7.17 ,, 329¾ Berwick-on-Tweed arr. 8.47 ,, 353½ Houndswood ,, 10.09 ,, 369¼ Dunbar ,, 11.41 ,, 380¼ Haddington ,, 12.45 P.M. 397¼ EDINBURGH ,, 2.23 ,, _Time_—42 hours 23 minutes

The “up” mail was timed considerably slower, 45 hours 39 minutes.

The punctuality of the mails was so great that the Glasgow and the Edinburgh mails, which went by Shoreditch and Islington respectively, and took different routes as far as Alconbury Hill, where their roads met, could always be depended upon to keep the official interval of four minutes which divided them at that point. Their route was identical between Alconbury Hill and Doncaster, where the Glasgow mail branched off to the left to Ferrybridge and Greta Bridge.

This was the _ne plus ultra_ of Post Office enterprise on the Great North Road, and closes an era.

V

WE have seen with what extraordinary speed letters were carried in the time of Charles the First between London and Edinburgh; but how did folk travel? They rode horseback, from kings, to nobles, and down to merchants; princesses, madam, or my lady riding pillion. Private carriages—“coaches,” they were called—had been introduced in 1553, when Queen Mary rode in one, as a novelty, from London to Westminster, drawn by six horses. In 1556 Sir Thomas Hoby had one of these strange machines, and just because the fact is expressly mentioned we see how rare they were. In fact, they went out of use altogether for a time, and were reintroduced by William Boonen, Queen Elizabeth’s Dutch coachman, in 1564. On this occasion they came into better favour, and their numbers must have greatly increased, for a Bill “to restrain their excessive use” was introduced to Parliament, and rejected, in 1601. But both their make and the fearful condition of the roads forbade them being used in the country. Moreover, they had only shutters in place of windows, the first “glass coach” being that used by the Duke of York in 1661.

It was in 1658 that the first stage-coach between London and Edinburgh was put on the road. It set out once a fortnight, but the length of the whole journey and just what kind of vehicle it was are unknown. Four days, however, and two pounds were consumed in travelling between London and York. The cost of the whole journey was four pounds.

In 1734 things do not seem to have been much better, John Dale advertising in the May of that year that a coach would take the road from Edinburgh for London “towards the end of each week, to be performed in nine days, or three days sooner than any coach that travels that road.” After this matters went from bad to worse, and speed was slower twenty years later than it had been for a long time.

The _Edinburgh Courant_ of 1754 contained the following advertisement:—

THE EDINBURGH STAGE COACH,

for the better accommodation of passengers, will be altered to a new genteel, two-end, glass coach machine, being on steel springs, exceeding light, and easy to go in ten days in summer and twelve in winter; to set out the

FIRST TUESDAY IN MARCH,

and continue it from HOSEA EASTGATE’S, the COACH AND HORSES in DEAN STREET, SOHO, LONDON, and from JOHN SOMERVILLE’S in the CANONGATE, EDINBURGH, every other Tuesday, and meet at BURROW BRIDGE on Saturday night and set out from thence on Monday morning, and get to LONDON and EDINBURGH on Friday. In winter to set out from LONDON to EDINBURGH every other (alternate) Monday morning, and to go to BURROW BRIDGE on Saturday night. Passengers to pay as usual.

Performed, if God permits, by

Your dutiful servant, HOSEA EASTGATE.

Even Hosea Eastgate’s conveyance stands forth as a miracle of swiftness and frequency when compared with the coach of 1763, which set out once a month and took a _fortnight_, _if the weather was favourable_! Probably this degeneracy of coaches was due to the practice of travellers clubbing together to hire a post-chaise for the journey. This was a plan eminently characteristic of the Scottish mind. It both secured quicker travelling and saved expense. The Edinburgh papers of that time often contained advertisements inquiring for a fellow-passenger to share these costs and charges.