Part 4

In 1834, competition between coach proprietors on the chief routes grew so keen that a war of extermination broke out; the stronger men striving to crush the smaller by reducing fares below a paying level. On this road it became possible for a while to travel at half the former fares, and to journey the 186 miles to Manchester for 40_s._ inside, and 20_s._ out; but cheap travel was dearly bought in the accidents occasioned through this extravagant rivalry. In addition, were the usual and inevitable mischances of the highway. Thus the Manchester “Defiance” was upset in August 1835 at Brailsford, through the horses shying at a white gate, when a Mr. Holbrook was killed; and the “Peveril of the Peak” was overturned in September 1836, a passenger and the coachman being crushed to death.

Those coach proprietors with the longest purses would, of course, in time have crushed the smaller men in this war of cheap prices; and already, before the railway came to sweep big men and little into one common limbo, those with slender resources were feeling the pinch of daily expenses, and could sometimes hardly settle their turnpike accounts—especially heavy on this road.

The onerous burden of the tolls payable by stage-coaches can scarcely be realised, save by stating a specific example. The amount incurred on a single journey to Manchester was no less than £5 13_s._ 5_d._, and this was by no means exceptional. Of course, the coach did not stop to pay toll at every gate, the practice being to settle monthly. The burden seems a heavy one for coach proprietors, but was, like every other tax, levied in the end upon the consumer, being finally paid by the coach passengers in their fares, calculated on the basis of the coach proprietors’ expenses.

At last, in 1837, with the opening of the London and Birmingham Railway to Manchester, this petty warfare was stilled, and the business of the coach proprietors seemed to be ended. In 1836, when the railway had been opened as far as Birmingham, Chaplin and Benjamin Worthy Horne, two of the largest proprietors, had been induced to withdraw from the road, and to throw their interest on the side of the new methods; but Sherman refused to hear anything of the kind. He was the most courageous, not to say the most obstinate, of men; thoroughly British in the characteristics of doggedness and unwillingness to own himself beaten. He did not believe in railways, until the stern fact of his coaches running empty along the road convinced him, at a considerable loss; and when in 1837 temporary trouble arose between the public and the railway, and some were already regretting the old days, he dashed in and re-established his “Red Rover” coach, which lasted a year or more, losing money heavily when the Manchester people and the railway had composed their quarrel.

[Sidenote: _EDWARD SHERMAN_]

The character-sketch of Sherman, here begun, may here be fitly concluded. Without doubt a man of strong character, he had many peculiarities, among them a decided taste for extravagance in dress and jewellery, remarkable even at that time, when dress was very exuberant indeed. Instead of sporting a shirt front, his chest displayed an expanse of black satin, plentifully covered with diamond pins. One day a thief came behind him in the street, reached a hand over his shoulder, and made off with a valuable specimen. Sherman afterwards had them all attached to a chain.

His fighting temper, if it stood him in good stead among his fellow coach proprietors, certainly, as we have seen, involved him in heavy losses in quarrelling with railways, before he found them too strong for him. To lose money was to him an especial grief. The very sight of sovereigns was a solace to him, and he kept a hundred in a tankard, deposited in his safe at the “Bull and Mouth,” so that he might always have the pleasure of handling the gold.

He had—according to private information—a number of children “that he ought not to have had,” whatever that may mean. His last years were sad, for his relatives exploited his temper and some eccentricities he had developed, and procured his committal, as a lunatic, to Bethlem Hospital, where he died in 1866. There are those yet living who remember him there, and tell how he was put away with little legitimate excuse.

The “Bull and Mouth” was carried on by his executor, E. Sanderson, until 1869, when it was purchased by the late Quartermaine East, and re-named the “Queen’s Hotel.”

Nowadays, the most ruinously low coach fares of that competitive time before railways are made to look absurdly high by even the ordinary third-class railway fare, 15_s._ 5-1/2_d._, to Manchester: and excursions are frequently run at the price of a few shillings.

VII

[Sidenote: _THE COACHMEN_]

We cannot well leave the subject of coaching without some fleeting reminiscences of the coachmen and guards who worked up and down the road. Not all of them have earned a measure of fame. They formed, indeed, a very considerable body of men, and there were some generations of them; beginning with the poor old red-nosed and many-caped Tobys who, wrapped up in many wrappings and swathed about the feet and legs with hay-and-straw bands, sat on the box like partly animated mummies; and ending with coachmen who were in many attributes considered gentlemen. A love of strong spirits was common to the earlier and later generations, but those of the earlier were merely “drivers,” if you please, and the later were “coachmen.” The old Tobys drove chiefly through the night, and in times when speed did not exist and skill was not essential: the rather flashy “swell” coachmen of a later era cut a dash in the daytime, with a cigar between their teeth, and had extraordinary skill with the reins. These were the two chief classes, subdivided again and again by individual peculiarities; and then there were the guards.

Coaching experts were never tired of sounding the praises or noting the peculiarities of the fine coachmen on this road. Bob Snow, of the “Telegraph,” was, according to “Nimrod,” who took his position as a coaching critic very seriously indeed, “all right—a pink in his way, and as well dressed for the road as a gentleman ought to be for Almack’s.” Great, too, was his admiration for Harry Douglas, another coachman on the “Telegraph.” He was “about the size of two ordinary men.” Not only could he gallop a coach without it swinging, but he could drink as much as would scald a porker. As Dibdin sang of Tom Bowling, “his virtues were so rare.” He was, moreover, “a great favourite with the Manchester gentlemen, and an artist of the first order. His right arm”—for taking it out of the horses in tender places with the whip—“was terrible. Jovial, singing many excellent songs,” he appears to have been a prominent figure.

But Joe Wall was the unapproachable, the unsurpassed, at whose magnificence the road gaped with astonishment. In the height of his fame he drove the “Telegraph” the thirty-seven miles between London and Hockliffe. He was “a tremendous swell,” keeping one or two hunters at that place, and thus occupying the hours he passed there, waiting to take his seat on the up coach. On one occasion he had a fall in the hunting field, preventing him taking the “Telegraph” up to town that night. Fortunately an able and experienced amateur hand was on the coach, and took his place. None other less accomplished could have been trusted with so fast a coach, going at night through the crowded approach to town.

[Sidenote: _WHIPS OF THE “TELEGRAPH”_]

Meecher, on the other hand, although a competent whip on the “Telegraph,” was a satirical and gloomy person: a kind of masculine Gummidge. He was a reduced gentleman, and as such found the world out of joint. In revenge, he “took it out of” the commercials travelling on the coach, and lost much by refusing to allow any one who was not also a gentleman to treat him. Exactly how he arrived at his estimate of gentility or the want of it does not appear.

His humour was certainly of the sardonic kind, as appears by a story told of him. “Pity those women have nothing to do,” exclaimed a passenger on the box-seat, eyeing a gossiping group in the road.

“I’ll give them something,” said the saturnine Meecher; and, pulling up to them, he asked in his gloomiest tones if any of them missed any of their children; “for,” said he, “I’ve just run over and killed one, down the road.” They all flew off, agonised, and Meecher grinned.

He came at last, in the general ruin of coaching, to drive a one-horse railway omnibus; but he never ceased to consider himself a gentleman.

Another whip on the same coach, Samuel Inns, who—if names go for anything—should certainly have become an innkeeper, became, instead, a farmer, and grew prosperous; and yet another, Tom Davies, was discovered, years afterwards, as a rural postman.

William Jervis, of the “Defiance,” was almost as “gentlemanly” as Meecher, and a good deal more impudent, He would hold forth to the box-seat passenger unfortunate enough to travel by his coach upon the happy days when he had been in service with the Marquis of Exeter—although, to be sure, he had been nothing more than a stable-boy at Burghley House—and would affect to deplore those days, “when he associated with gentlemen.” “And now, sir,” he would bitterly remark, “I’ve got to drive d—d cotton-spinners and calico-printers.” It mattered not at all that it was probably a calico-printer or a cotton-manufacturer who was sitting by him at that moment. Indeed, there was that in his nature which led him to seize the opportunity to hurt the feelings of worthy Manchester men. It naturally followed that the tips he received suffered in number and in value from this extraordinary bias towards quarrelling with his inoffensive passengers: and the balance was not redressed by the rare occasions on which he found a peer or a landed proprietor by his side.

How the coachmen found themselves so constantly and so plentifully in choice cigars of the most expensive kind must remain mysterious. Jervis—who, by the way, refused to be known as “Bill” and was always addressed as “Mr. William Jervis”—smoked the best Havanas as a rule, and could not endure inferior brands. One memorable day, a passenger beside him was puffing happily away at a cheap and nasty smoke—a real _Flor de_ _Cabbage_—when Jervis turned upon him, and, without further ado, snatched it from his mouth and threw it away.

“Can’t stand a bad cigar,” said Jervis, in not very adequate explanation: “take one of mine.”

The end of this bold and haughty fellow was sad. When railways superseded coaching, he hanged himself behind a stable-door of the “Swan with Two Necks.”

[Sidenote: _THE GUARDS_]

The guards were, to a man, of more consideration and urbanity. Their cue was a general heartiness to every one, from an ostler to a county magnate; but there was much scope for development in the character of a guard, for he came into intimate personal relations with the passengers in general, while the coachman had but one companion—the passenger beside him on the box-seat. Guards were entrusted, not only with parcels of all kinds, but with buying-commissions in town for rural customers; and acted frequently, as was sufficiently well known to the more shady characters of the countryside, as interested intermediaries between poachers and those poulterers in London who did not mind dealing in poached game.

Comparatively little has come down to us, save in general terms, of the guards who manned the coaches on this road; but Venables, one of those upon the “Manchester Telegraph,” stands out prominently. He was not, like so many of his brethren, a performer upon the key-bugle, but possessed a beautiful tenor voice which he lifted up in sentimental song along the roads on sunny days, greatly to the delight of passengers, and to his own profit. He had at least one dramatic experience, in being very nearly chloroformed and flung off the coach by three confederated thieves, who had by some means learned of an extremely valuable case of jewels that had been entrusted to him, which he had, for greater safety, deposited in a locked box under his seat. With the exception of the box-seat passenger, these enterprising would-be jewel thieves formed the only passengers on the roof, and they had reckoned on stifling the guard and heaving him over the side, in the darkness between Ashbourne and Leek, trusting to the noise made by the coach to drown the sound of any scuffle. What they would then have done, after securing the jewels, is only to be guessed at, for the behaviour of the conspirators had early attracted Venables’ suspicions, and no sooner had one whipped out his chloroform-pad than he felt himself struck full in the face with stunning force. The coachman’s attention was aroused, and the coach was on the point of being stopped when the three jumped off the roof and disappeared in the night.

Venables in later years became a guard on the London and Birmingham Railway.

[Sidenote: _JIM BYRNS_]

Skaife, himself a man of some musical abilities, and a good performer on the bass-viol, became landlord of the “Graham Arms,” Longtown. Jim Byrns, guard on the Glasgow mail between Preston and Carlisle, was in the next era station-master at Preston, and saw the trains go by on their way to Shap, whose bleak uplands he had travelled thousands of times. Standing up for miles together, and blowing his horn continually to prevent a collision on foggy nights; or wading through the drifts of a snowstorm and saddling one of the leaders to ride off to a farmhouse and rouse the farm-labourers to come and help with their shovels to dig out His Majesty’s mails, he had earned all he received, and a bit over. “Jim,” says one who knew him, “was the right man in the right place, a rare hand at the head of a fatigue-party with shovels, and a perfect master of the carpenter’s tools in case of a break-down.”

VIII

No traveller along this road, not excepting even kings and queens, statesmen, and other great historical figures, has left so striking and interesting an account of travelling along it as the narratives of two pedestrian journeys between London and Manchester, written by Samuel Bamford. These accounts are supremely interesting in themselves, because they were written by one of the people, and because they put on record, as no other chronicler has done, or could have done, the England of 1807 and 1819, as seen by an intelligent and thinking working-man on tramp. It is an England removed not only by the space of a century from our England, but a crowded century such as never before was seen.

But if we would thoroughly understand Bamford’s intensely interesting narratives, which I do not scruple to reprint here at length, we must learn what manner of man he was who wrote them.

[Sidenote: _SAMUEL BAMFORD_]

Samuel Bamford was born in 1788, at Middleton, near Manchester, and was a weaver and a descendant of weavers. He was by temperament something more; was, indeed, blest, or curst, with the literary taint in its extreme form; was, in short, a poet. At the time when Bamford was growing up, and an eager recipient of ideas, England—and especially the operatives’, the artisans’, and the agricultural labourers’ England—was not the free country it is now. The working-classes had no votes, practically no education, and only too often, as the result of troubles caused by incessant foreign warfare, insufficient food. The country seethed with discontent—not a passing discontent, but a long, wretched era of sullen ill-will that outlasted Bamford’s own active period, and culminated in the Chartist agitation of 1839. Bamford, of course, was not fully informed. His writings teem with pictures of the wrongs of Lancashire operatives, while from his descriptions of rural England it might almost be supposed that the agricultural labourer of that time lived an ideal existence; which of course was by no means the case. He only knew at first hand the case of the weavers and the cotton-spinners, which was desperate enough; for that was the era when machinery began to supplant the hand-loom, and manufacturers were growing rich while many of the workers starved in the combined circumstances of dear food and lack of employment. For himself, as a youth, he seems to have been light-hearted enough, and it was the sufferings, the wrongs, and the disabilities of others, rather than of himself, that eventually led him to become a political agitator. He could, however, scarce help being a rebel, for he came of those who had been convinced Jacobites, and had, later, become Methodists; and was himself, as we have seen, an idealist and something of a homespun poet.

His career was that of not a few intelligent working men of his time. He was a “peaceful” agitator at a period when even the arguments of the peaceful were met by Governments with the more stern, and in their own way unanswerable, arguments of force. To-day, when agitators spout violence, and advocate reform by explosive bomb, and are regarded with indifference by the authorities, they come at last to Cabinet rank in governments; but in Bamford’s day a mere assemblage was considered by the authorities a dangerous thing, and was generally dispersed. Bamford himself was arrested, with others, in 1817, on suspicion of high treason, and sent up by coach, in chains, to London, to be examined before the Privy Council. He escaped that time; but, two years later, was arrested in connection with the famous Reform meeting in St. Peter’s Field, Manchester, August 16th, 1819, which resulted in the tragedy of “Peterloo.”

“This time,” he was assured, “you will certainly be hanged,” but the proceedings resulted in a year’s imprisonment at Lincoln, where he was regarded as an amiable poetic visionary, and greatly indulged and liked. As he grew older, his opinions mellowed, and by the time of the Chartist agitation he had to all intents and purposes ceased to be a Radical, and was decidedly Whiggish. The trend of events since then has so altered the outlook that Bamford would probably be now considered a Tory.

In 1852 the Government offered him a post at Somerset House: a position he accepted for a while, and then resigned with disgust, as being a sheer waste of time. It was not an exalted post, the duties consisting of arranging and cataloguing a vast number of dusty and useless papers connected with forgotten inland revenue affairs: papers that only a Government department would save from the waste-paper dealer. Clearly Bamford was born before his age. Were it all to do now, he would be standing, the head of his Department, in the House of Commons. It is really—this coming into a world not yet ripe for you—a tragedy, if you do but consider it; but there are compensations. He might have been born a century earlier, when, for such as he, life would have ended in a veritable tragedy of flesh and blood. Happy, perhaps, after all, in being born into the midmost era, he died at last, in his eighty-fourth year, in 1872.

So much for a broad view of his career, which, had he followed an early impulse, would have been very different. In his nineteenth year he took to seafaring, shipping aboard the _Æneas_, a coasting brig plying between South Shields and London. Soon growing tired of the life, he determined to give it up, and with seven shillings in his pockets, deserted his ship in the London Docks. That was in 1807, when likely looking sailormen were always in danger of being snapped up by the press gang. His plan of walking the 185 miles home to Manchester was therefore, with so little money, and at such risks, highly adventurous. He hung about in an eating-house in Ratcliffe Highway until dusk, and then set out upon the long journey.

IX

[Sidenote: _BAMFORD’s WALK TO MANCHESTER_]

“I thence,” he says, “went into the city, to St. Paul’s, inquiring my way into Aldersgate Street, and when there I ventured to accost a respectable-looking person and requested him to be so kind as to direct me towards Islington, which, of course, he did, and I passed through that suburb without stopping or being questioned. An officer, in naval uniform, whom I met, certainly took more notice of me than was quite to my liking, but he passed on and did not speak. I next inquired the way to Highgate, knowing that if I got there I should be on the direct great northern road, and at Highgate, whilst stopping at a public-house, I ascertained that the next place on my route would be Whetstone, and the next after that Barnet. I accordingly walked through Whetstone and through Barnet without stopping. I now considered myself fairly launched on my journey. I had been fortunate in getting clear of the vicinity of the shipping and of the city without being questioned, and was now ten miles from St. Paul’s. I once more breathed the sweet country air; the smell of mown meadows sometimes came across my path. I had seven shillings in my pocket, and though as yet uncertain of my success, I was full of hope and delighted with the present enjoyment of freedom. I had not gone far, however, before I became somewhat embarrassed, the night was getting far advanced, the country less populous, and I was uncertain both as to the name of my next stage and the course I should keep. I had not gone far, however, before I met a man to whom I put the necessary questions, and who told me to keep on the broad highway, to the left, and that the next town of any note which I should arrive at would be St. Albans. I thanked the man for his information, when he said, ‘stop; I know what you are, and what you are about.’

“‘Do you?’ said I, rather surprised, but in a good-humoured manner.

“‘Indeed I do,’ replied the man; ‘you are a sailor, and are running away from your ship.’

“‘You might be a wizard,’ I said, ‘for what you say is perfect truth.’

“‘Well, now,’ said he, ‘as you have been as candid as I was frank, I’ll tell you something which may be of use to you.’

“I thanked him.

[Sidenote: _DANGERS OF THE ROAD_]

“‘At St. Albans,’ he continued, ‘a party of marines are stationed, who press every sailor that appears in the town. They even press them off the coaches, or other vehicles, if they get a sight of them. Through St. Albans, however, you must go, and you will be pressed if you appear in the streets; you must, therefore, get through the town without being seen, if possible. Fortunately it may be done. In a short time you will overtake a waggon, which carries goods on this main road. You must get to ride inside of it, get stowed amongst the packages, and never show your face until you are clearly on the other side of the town.’

“I thanked him most gratefully for his information, and begged that he would not mention to any one having seen such a person as myself on the road. He desired that I would make myself easy on that score, and so with expressions of thankfulness on my part, and of kindly wishes on his, we separated.

“It was now about midnight; all was still and silent on the road. I was about eight miles from St. Albans, and by the time I had shortened the distance by three I overtook the waggon, the tail of which being full of soldiers’ wives and their children, I could not get in there; the driver, however, offered me a snug place in the hay-sheet—a large and strong horse-hair cloth which fastened in front of the vehicle, and presented a resting-place as comfortable as a hammock, and quite large enough to conceal me. I, therefore, got into my hiding-place, and was almost instantly fast asleep. I must have ridden about four miles, though to me it seemed but a few minutes since I got in, when the driver awoke me and asked which road I was going when I got through the town?

“‘Why, the main road, to be sure,’ I said.

“‘Yes, but which main road?’ asked the man.

“‘The main road down into the north; into Lancashire,’ I said. ‘There is no other, is there?’