Part 2

The memorial to his work on the comparatively small stage of Birmingham, before he trod the boards of Westminster, takes the form of a Gothic canopied fountain, with a profile portrait medallion, whereon one may trace in the aggressive, sharp-pointed nose a striking likeness to William Pitt, and that suggestion of the crafty fox the venomous caricaturists of a later day have seized and used to such advantage.

III

Sir William Dugdale, in his diary, under date of July 16th, 1679, mentions the first Birmingham coach we have any notice of. He says, “I came out of London by the stage-coach of Bermicham to Banbury.” That is all we learn of specifically Birmingham coaches until 1731, when Rothwell’s began to ply to London in two days and a half, according to the old coaching bill still preserved.

Afterwards came the Flying Coach of 1742, followed in 1758 by an “improved Birmingham Coach,” with the legend “Friction Annihilated” prominent on the axle-boxes. This the _Annual Register_ declared to be “perhaps the most useful invention in mechanics this age has produced.” Much virtue lingered in that “perhaps,” for nothing more was heard of that wonderful device.

In 1812 the Post Office established a Birmingham Mail, and great was the local rejoicing on May 26th, when, attended by eight mail-guards in full uniform, adorned with blue ribbons, it paraded the streets. After two hours’ procession, when coachman and guards were feasted with wine, biscuits, and sandwiches, the Mail set out for London from the “Swan” Hotel, amid the ringing of St. Martin’s bells and the cheering of the assembled thousands.

Eight years later it was estimated that Birmingham owned eighty-four coaches. Forty of these were daily, and most plied on bye-roads.

BIRMINGHAM STAGE-COACH, In Two _Days_ and a half; begins _May_ the 24th, 1731.

SETS out from the _Swan-Inn_ in _Birmingham_, every _Monday_ at six a Clock in the Morning, through _Warwick_, _Banbury_ and _Alesbury_, to the _Red Lion Inn_ in _Aldersgate street_, _London_, every _Wednesday_ Morning: And returns from the said _Red Lion Inn_ every _Thursday_ Morning at five a Clock the same Way to the _Swan-Inn_ in _Birmingham_ every _Saturday_, at 21 Shillings each Passenger, and 18 Shillings from _Warwick_, who has liberty to carry 14 Pounds in Weight, and all above to _pay One Penny a Pound_.

Perform d (if God permit)

By Nicholas Rothwell.

_The_ Weekly Waggon _sets out every Tuesday from the Nagg’s-Head in Birmingham, to the_ Red Lion Inn _aforesaid, every Saturday, and returns from the said Inn every Monday, to the Nagg’s-Head in Birmingham every Thursday._

_Note. By the said_ Nicholas Rothwell _of_ Warwick, _all Persons may be furnished with a By Coach Chariot, Chaise or Hearse, with a Mourning Coach and able Horses, to any Part of Great Britain, at reasonable Rates And also Saddle Horses to be had._

* * * * *

From 1822 to 1826 Birmingham witnessed a great improvement in its coaches. Waddell owned the two most prominent yards in the town, but had many ardent competitors. In 1822 the “Tally-ho” was established, shortly to be followed by the hotly competing “Independent,” “Real,” and “Patent” Tally-hoes. Supposed to keep a pace of ten miles an hour, they no sooner left the town behind than they started racing, to the terror of the nervous and the delight of the sporting passengers. Annually, on the First of May, they were spurred to superhuman and super-equine exertions, and, we are told, covered the hundred and eight miles between Birmingham and London “under seven hours.” How much under is not stated, but as an even seven hours gives us fifteen miles an hour, including stops, the pace must have been furious. Harry Tresslove, the coachman of the “Independent Tally Ho,” always galloped the five-mile stage between Dunchurch and the “Black Dog,” Stretton-upon-Dunsmore, in eighteen minutes.

The existence of all stage-coaches being furiously competitive, they could not afford to be quiet and plain, like the Mails. “Once I remember,” says De Quincey, “being on the top of the Holyhead Mail between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham, some ‘Tally-ho’ or ‘Highflyer,’ all flaunting with green and gold, came up alongside of us. What a contrast with our royal simplicity of form and colour in this plebeian wretch! The single ornament on our dark ground of chocolate colour was the mighty shield of the Imperial arms, but emblazoned in proportion as modest as a signet-ring bears to a seal of office. Even this was displayed only on a single panel, whispering, rather than proclaiming, our relations to the mighty State; whilst the beast from Birmingham, our green-and-gold friend from false, fleeting, perjured Brummagem, had as much writing and painting on its sprawling flanks as would have puzzled a decipherer from the tombs of Luxor. For some time this Birmingham machine ran along by our side—a piece of familiarity that already of itself seemed to me sufficiently Jacobinical. But all at once a movement of the horses announced a desperate intention of leaving us behind. ‘Do you see _that_?’ I said to the coachman. ‘I see,’ was his short answer. He was wide awake, yet he waited longer than seemed prudent, for the horses of our audacious opponent had a disagreeable air of freshness and power. But his motive was loyal; his wish was that the Birmingham conceit should be full-blown before he froze it. When that seemed right he unloosed, or, to speak by a stronger word, he _sprang_ his unknown resources: he slipped our Royal horses like cheetahs, or hunting-leopards, after the affrighted game. How they could retain such a reserve of fiery power after the work they had accomplished seemed hard to explain. But on our side, besides the physical superiority, was a tower of moral strength, namely, the King’s Name. Passing them without an effort, as it seemed, we threw them into the rear with so lengthening an interval between us as proved in itself the bitterest mockery of their presumption; whilst our guard blew back a shattering blast of triumph that was really too painfully full of derision.”

The “Emerald” was a fast night coach between London and Birmingham, “driven,” says Colonel Corbet, in his book, _An Old Coachman’s Chatter_, “by Harry Lee, whose complexion was of a very peculiar colour, almost resembling that of a bullock’s liver—the fruit of strong potations of ‘early purl’ or ‘dog’s nose,’ taken after the exertions of the night and before going to bed.”

The last coach put on the road between London and Birmingham, we are told, on the same authority, was in 1837. It was a very fast day mail, started to run to Birmingham and then on to Crewe, where it transferred mails and passengers to the railway for Liverpool. It was horsed by Sherman, and timed at twelve miles an hour.

Early or late in the coaching era robbery flourished. In the opening years the coaches, as already abundantly noted, were held up by the conventional figure of the highwayman; but, as civilisation advanced, methods changed, and, instead of bestriding a high-mettled steed at the cross-roads, there to await the coach, the thief, in concert with a chosen band, booked seats, and during a long journey cut open the boot from the inside of the vehicle, and having safely extracted the bank parcels and other valuables, made off from the next stopping-place with ease and complete safety. The advantages of this method were so obvious that coaching history teems with examples of such robberies. Very often, however, the booty was in notes, and difficult to turn to any account. Hauls such as that described in _Aris’s Birmingham Gazette_ of February 17th, 1823, were rare. It mentioned: “A parcel containing 600 sovereigns, directed to Messrs. Attwood and Spooner, was stolen last week from one of the London coaches, on its way to Birmingham.” The bankers never saw the colour of their money again.

IV

Birmingham, says De Quincey, was, under the old dynasty of stage-coaches and post-chaises, the centre of our travelling system. He did not like Birmingham. How many they are who do not! But, look you, he gives his reasons, and acknowledges that circumstances, and not Birmingham wholly, were the cause of _his_ dislike. “Noisy, gloomy and dirty” he calls the town. “Gloomy,” because, having passed through it a hundred times, those occasions were always and invariably (less once), days and nights of rain. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred; what a monstrous proportion! And even so, the hundredth was just one fleeting glimpse of sunshine, as the Mail whirled him through; so that he—with a parting sarcasm—had not time to see whether that sunshine was, in fact, real, or whether it might not possibly be some gilt Brummagen counterfeit; “For you know,” says he, “men of Birmingham, that you _can_ counterfeit—such is your cleverness—all things in Heaven and earth, from Jove’s thunderbolts down to a tailor’s bodkin.”

De Quincey put up, as most travellers of his time were used to do, at the famous “Hen and Chickens”; the enormous “Hen and Chickens.” “Never did I sleep there, but I had reason to complain that the discreet hen did not gather her vagrant flock to roost at less variable hours. Till two or three, I was kept waking by those who were retiring; and about three commenced the morning functions of the porter, or of ‘boots,’ or of ‘under-boots,’ who began their rounds for collecting the several freights for the Highflyer, or the Tally-ho, or the Bang-up, to all points of the compass, and too often (as must happen in such immense establishments) blundered into my room with that appalling, ‘Now, sir, the horses are coming out.’ So that rarely, indeed, have I happened to _sleep_ in Birmingham.”

The old Hen in High Street, ceased very many years ago to lay golden eggs, and her Chickens were dispersed, to be gathered under a new roof in 1798. The first notice of the original “Hen and Chickens” appeared in an advertisement of December 14th, 1741. In 1770, a certain “Widow Thomas” kept it, and in 1784 one Richard Lloyd. When he died, his widow carried on the business until the expiration of the lease in 1798. This lady, Mrs. Sarah Lloyd, was one of those enterprising and business-like women who—like Mrs. Ann Nelson and Mrs. Mountain—left so great a mark upon that age. She was not content to renew her lease of the old house, for which she had hitherto paid £100 a year rent; but, with a keen appreciation of Birmingham improvements, purchased a plot of land in the newly formed New Street, and, some time before the lease of the old house expired, began to build a much larger and imposing structure, “from the designs of James Wyatt, Esq.” It was one of the first houses in Birmingham to be built of stone, instead of brick. To this she removed in 1798, and named it “Lloyd’s Hotel and Hen and Chickens Inn.”

Mrs. Sarah Lloyd, who to many of her more irreverent guests typified the old Hen, sold her business and leased the inn five years later, April 16th, 1804, to William Waddell, of the “Castle,” High Street. He was the son of a London oil merchant, and years before had married Miss Ibberson, daughter of the proprietor of the “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn.

It was during Waddell’s reign that the “Hen and Chickens” saw its greatest prosperity. His rule extended from 1804 until 1836, ending only with his death in that year; and not only covered the best years of the coaching era, but almost saw its close. His was the greatest figure in Birmingham’s coaching business. In 1830 he had purchased the freehold of the “Hen and Chickens” and about the same time bought the “Swan,” and with his son Thomas carried on a general coaching business and contracting for the Mails.

In 1819 thirty coaches left the “Hen and Chickens” yard daily; by 1838 the ultimate year, the number was thirty-two. But by far the greatest number started from the “Swan,” for in 1838 no fewer than sixty-one coaches hailed from thence.

On Waddell’s decease the freeholds of both the houses were sold, and bought in by members of the family; that of the “Hen and Chickens” realising £14,500, and the “Swan,” £6,520. The beds alone of the “Hen and Chickens” were then stated to bring in £800 per annum. The “Hen and Chickens” was then leased by Devis, of the “Coach and Horses,” Worcester Street, at a rent of £600. He shortly afterwards sublet it for £700 to Mrs. Room, a widowed innkeeper, who remarried and gave it up in 1843, after a term of seven years, when Devis resumed.

These appear to have been ill years for the famous old house. Coaching and posting business had decayed, and the commercial growth of Birmingham did not make amends for the loss of the good business done with the nobility and gentry who resorted here in the old days of the road, but now travelled through by train. Devis, accordingly disappears, and the Waddell family, finding difficulties in getting a tenant, put in a manager, Joseph Shore by name. A tenant was at length found in Frank Smith, who had long been a druggist in New Street, but was now ready to try his fortune as hotel-keeper. His rule extended from 1849 to 1867, and was then changed for that of Oldfield, who reigned until 1878, when the old fittings of the hotel were sold and its career brought to a close. The end of the building, was, however, not yet, and the “Hen and Chickens” continued in a modified form, until 1895. Lately it has been pulled down, and a tall, showy “Hen and Chickens Hotel and Restaurant,” in a Victorian Renaissance style and liver-coloured terra-cotta erected on the site; a complete change from the old house, once looked upon as an ornament to New Street, but become at last, owing to the rebuilding carried on all around, altogether out of date and, by contrast, heavy and gloomy. Its severe architecture had been frilled and furbelowed at different times—a portico built out over the pavement in 1830, and a stone attic storey added in more recent years, with a saucy turret at one end—but, however comfortable within, the exterior suggested a bank or some sort of public institution, rather than the warmth and good cheer of an hostelry, and so it was swept away.

“The Fowls” as Young Birmingham delighted to call the “Hen and Chickens,” housed of course many notable persons, but not those of the most exclusive kind. The “Royal,” where no coaches came, was in those days the first house. In later days, however, somewhere about 1874, the “Hen and Chickens” lodged the Grand Duke of Hesse, and never ceased to boast the fact. Absurdly much was made of him. He walked on special carpets, dined off plate that had graced no plebeian board, and came and went between rows of servants frozen at a reverential angle of forty-five degrees. The management even went to the length of placing likenesses of his wife on his dressing-table, to make it seem more home-like. Excellent creatures! How touching a belief they cherished in the prevalence of the domestic virtues, even in the august circumstances of a Grand Duke!

V

Although the “Hen and Chickens” had so early been removed to New Street, Bull Ring and High Street continued to be the chief coaching thoroughfares. There stood the “Swan,” the “Dog” afterwards known as the “Nelson,” the “Castle,” “Albion,” and “St. George’s Tavern.” In Bull Street was the “Saracen’s Head.”

But the most exclusive and aristocratic of all was the “Royal,” afterwards known as the “Old Royal.” This was the house mentioned in the “Pickwick Papers,” where the waiter, having at last got an order for something, “imperceptibly melted away.” It stood in Temple Row, and long arrogated to itself, before ever the title of “Royal” came into use, the name of “The Hotel.” Other hotels there were, but this proud house professed ignorance of them. It was originally built, with its Assembly Rooms, in 1772, and set forth, as a special attraction to its patrons, the statement that no coaches ever approached to disturb the holy quiet of Temple Row.

It was about 1825 that something of this seclusion was sloughed off, and the business transferred to the old Portugal House in New Street, where, with two additional wings, it blossomed forth as the “New Royal.” Its old supremacy now began to be challenged by the newly established “Stork,” in Old Square, then a quiet and dignified retreat, very different from the same place to-day, with its flashing shops, electric lights, and tramways; nothing now old about it, excepting its name. The “Stork,” of course, suffered something at the hands and pens of witlings, just as did the “Pelican” at Speenhamland, on the Bath Road! and to make humorous reference to its “long bill” was the custom, whether the charges were high or moderate.

But the days of the old hotels, exclusive or otherwise, were in sight when the railway came. Another sort replaced them, and, although the kind in its turn has gone out of favour, examples may yet be found. Who does not know the typical hotel of, say, the Fifties and the Sixties, that abominably draughty type of building, all cold would-be magnificence and interminable flights of stairs, with lofty rooms, apparently built for a Titanic race fifteen feet in height, and, by consequence, never warm, and never with an air of being fully furnished. That such as these should ever have replaced the cosy old houses can only be explained on the score of fashion, for there are illogical and senseless fashions in architecture, as in everything else.

The railway era commenced in Birmingham with the opening of the Grand Junction and the London and Birmingham Railways in 1837 and 1838. The early railway engines and carriages, and, indeed, everything connected with those days of the rail, are curious nowadays, and not the least amusing are the comments then made on travelling by steam. “A railway conveyance,” said one, writing in favour of the coaches, “is a locomotive prison, and, the novelty of it having subsided, we shall seldom hear of a gentleman condescending to assume this hasty mode of transit.” That was a very bad shot at prophecy, but it was followed by a perfect howler in the way of error. “It has already been proved,” says this person, “that railways are not calculated to carry heavy goods.”

An early London and Birmingham train was an odd spectacle; the engine with immensely tall funnel, and a huge domed fire-box; the carriages modelled on the lines of stage-coaches, and their panels painted with high-sounding names. Luggage was carried on the roof, and the first guards rode outside with it, until the cinders and red-hot coals from the engine half blinded them and destroyed their uniform, when they quitted that absurd position and travelled inside. Early railway journeys were penitential for travellers, for, instead of rolling smoothly over wooden sleepers, the granite slabs to which the fish-bellied rails of that time were riveted, produced a continual jarring and a deafening rattle. Fares too, with less than a quarter of the accommodation now provided, were almost double what they are now, and the breaking-down of engines, and all manner of awkward accidents, disposed many to think a revival of coaches probable.

VI

The way out of Birmingham is dismal and unpromising, by way of Livery Street and Great Hampton Street. At the end of that thoroughfare—formerly known as Hangman’s Lane—Birmingham is left behind; but some seventeen miles of continuous streets, ill-paved and hilly, and infested with tramways, yet lie before the pilgrim.

Livery Street, so-called (at a hazard) because its granite setts jolt so unmercifully the cyclist who is rash enough to ride along it, gives an outlook on to close-packed, mean, and frowsy little courts and thoroughfares with grotesquely commonplace or absurd names—among them “Mary Ann Street.” Here and along Great Hampton Street, where the smuts from Snow Hill Station and those from adjacent factories now fall thickest, the Birmingham of little more than a century ago ended, and gave place to the open heath of Soho, enclosed only in 1793. “At the second milestone,” says an old Birmingham guide-book, “on the left, when you have passed through the turnpike, is Soho Factory, a magnificent pile of buildings”; but that great workshop of Boulton and Watt has long since disappeared and the turnpike itself forgot; while Soho Heath is covered, far and near, with streets of a terribly monotonous kind—as like one another as the peas in a pea-pod. The only landmarks and bright spots are public-houses. Not inns for travellers, but gin-palaces for boozers, where plate-glass, gas-lamps the size of balloons, and florid architecture give the inhabitants of these wilds their only idea of style and distinction, and that a mistaken one. All else is dull and grey. Such are Hockley and Soho, and such is Handsworth.

Between those two last Warwickshire is left behind, and Staffordshire entered—“Staffordshire ful of Queenys,” as an old writer has it. What he meant by that, no commentator appears yet to have explained, but it sounds complimentary.

The “elegant village” of Handsworth, as it is called by the author of that old guide-book already quoted, was built over the great surrounding commons, enclosed in 1798. That extraordinary person seems to look upon this enclosing and filching of public property as virtuous and altogether praiseworthy, and talks with unctuous satisfaction of “at least 150 respectable houses erected on land which lay formerly entirely waste. Plots of land”—he continues, with greasy delight—“have been sold from £200 to £1,000 an acre.”

He tells the same tale of the waste lands of West Bromwich, enclosed in 1801, and realising similar sums. These long thoroughfares, therefore, are nearly all built upon stolen property, and the rents of the houses should by right go into municipal or imperial coffers, instead of private pockets.

West Bromwich, the greater part of whose site was a rabbit-warren so late as 1800, is a continuation of this weary street. Here, perhaps, it was that Mr. Bull, “an eminent tea merchant,” while journeying on horseback from Wolverhampton to London in October, 1742, was overtaken by “a single Man on Horseback, whom he took for a Gentleman. After they had rode three or four miles,” the account continues, “the highwayman then ordered him to deliver, which Mr. Bull took to be in Jest; but he told him that he was in Earnest, and accordingly robb’d him of about four Guineas and his Watch, and afterwards rode with him three miles, till they came near a Town, when the Highwayman rode off.”