Part 16

In memory of John Goodfellow, Driver of the Edinburgh Mail Coach, who perished on Errick Stane in a snowstorm on 1st February 1831, in kindly assisting his fellow-sufferer, the Guard, to carry forward the Mail-Bags.

The local _Courier_ newspaper of the time, with more truth than feeling, described the act of these devoted servants of the Post Office as “an exaggerated sense of duty.”

If you go far enough past the Devil’s Beef Tub and Tweedshaws, where the river Tweed rises, you come, along this old road to Edinburgh, to the “Crook” inn, where the poet Campbell had a curious experience. Taking a generous glass of toddy, he went to bed. Presently there came a knock at the door, and there entered the pretty maiden who had given him supper. “Please, sir, could ye tak’ a neebour into your bed?”

“With all my heart,” exclaimed the poet, starting up gaily.

“Thank you, sir; for the Moffat carrier’s come in, a’ wat, and there’s no’ a single other place.”

This was not what the poet expected. Up came the big reeking man, and exit the little woman.

XXXIV

The old Glasgow road, that goes up from Moffat past Meikleholmside, and so across Ericstane Muir, is everything a road should not be. It is steep, narrow, exposed, and rugged, and, except as an object-lesson in what our ancestors had to put up with, is a very undesirable route and one in which no one would wish to find himself. It has not even the merit of being picturesque.

The road that Telford made continues onward from Beattock in more suave fashion. It follows the glen of Evan Water for nine miles, and the three of them—road, river, and Caledonian Railway—go amicably side by side under the hills, to Beattock Summit and down to Elvanfoot, where the Elvanfoot Inn of other days now stands as a shooting-lodge.

Elvanfoot Bridge, that carries the road over the Evan (_i.e._ Avon) Water, looks down upon a pretty scene of rushing stream, boulders, and ferns, or “furruns,” as a Scotsman would enunciate the word.

[Sidenote: _A SMASH IN THE DARK_]

It was here, late on the tempestuous and rainy night of October 25th, 1808, that the most terrifying and dramatic accident of any that ever befell the mail coaches occurred. It is not without due thought and choice of words that we have called it dramatic, for the happening was precisely of that thrilling spectacular character cherished by theatrical managers whose public demands sensation.

The Evan Water was in flood this black and boisterous night, and, raving in its stony bed, tore furiously at the newly rebuilt bridge that spanned the torrent. Down through the wild obscurity from the heights above Douglas Mill came the mail from Glasgow for Carlisle, and no sooner did the horses place foot upon the bridge than it collapsed, as suddenly and completely as any stage property. It was near ten o’clock, the insides had composed themselves to that semblance of sleep which coach travellers could command, and the outsides had wrapped themselves up in their greatcoats, and had so fixed their minds upon more pleasant circumstances than riding in the rain on a cold October night, that they were practically oblivious of their surroundings, when they were suddenly plunged, with the coach, coachman, horses, and guard, into the foaming water underneath the broken arch. There were two outside passengers: one a City merchant named Lund, the other a Mr. Brand of Ecclefechan. Both were instantly killed. The four insides, a lady and three gentlemen, were more fortunate, and escaped with bruises and a fright. The horses suffered severely, the leaders being killed in falling, and one of the wheelers crushed to death, as it lay below, by falling stones from the crumbling arch. The coach and harness were utterly destroyed, and Alexander Cooper, the coachman, although found protected from being washed away by two huge boulders, only survived by a few weeks the injuries his spine had received. The guard, Thomas Kingham, was found with his head cut open, but soon recovered. He always considered his escape from being killed was due to his not having strapped himself into his seat on that fatal night, so that, instead of being involved with the coach, he was shot clear of it, into the water.

It was due to the presence of mind shown by the lady passenger that the down mail, at that moment due to pass this tragical spot, did not meet the fate that had already overtaken this unfortunate coach. She had found a temporary refuge on a friendly rock rising amidst the surging water, and crouching there, saw the lamps of the oncoming coach glaring through the mist and rain. Shrieking at the highest pitch of her voice, she fortunately attracted the attention of the coachman, who drew up on the very verge of destruction.

[Sidenote: _MODESTY OUT OF PLACE_]

The first care of the guard belonging to the new arrival was to rescue this lady from her position. Hugh Campbell was not like the conventional heroes of the theatre, who make nothing of grasping the heroine round the waist, and, striking an attitude, so removing her to a place of safety with an air suggesting a whimsical combination of a Chesterfield and a bold bad bandit. No, he set about the task with a modest diffidence which somewhat exasperated the lady herself. Climbing down with the broken reins lashed together, so that those above could haul her up, he asked doubtfully, “Whaur will I grip her?”

“Grip me whaur ye like,” said she, “but grip me sicker”; and he accordingly tied her up securely and she was hoisted to the road above, without more ado.

The down mail returned to Moffat with a heavy and mournful load, including the dead and injured passengers of the up coach. The only uninjured horse was led behind.

For many years the bridge was not properly mended, funds being scarce on these roads; and the mail, slowing for it, lost five minutes on every journey. The part that fell may still be traced by the shorter lime stalactites hanging from the repaired arch. It is still known as “Broken Bridge,” in addition to “Milestone Brig,” from the milestone on it, marking the midway distance between Carlisle and Glasgow: “Carlisle 47-1/2 miles. Glasgow 47 miles.”

The Caledonian Railway, approaching this scene, crosses the Evan Water on a bridge which looks as though a Norman consulting architect had been raised from the dead to design. It passes in a shallow cutting over a scrubby moor, protected against being embedded in winter’s snows by a close palisade of timber on either side.

The road now, with Crawford in the distance, sharply bends, and crosses the infant Clyde at New Bridge.

Crawford, situated in a wide strath, or green vale, where several streams join the Clyde, is a scattered village whose white houses show pleasantly at great distances. It is a favourite place among the wealthier Glasgow folk who like rural holidays. The New Crawford Inn of coaching days, a substantial, mansion-like building, opened in 1822, on the completion of this portion of Telford’s new road, is still in business as the “Cranstoun Hotel.” The old road, from Elvanfoot, goes straighter than the new one to Abington, but with severe gradients; while the new continues its even way alongside the river, to Abington, where it bids good-bye to the Clyde altogether, until Bothwell is reached.

[Sidenote: _ABINGTON_]

Abington is a typical Scottish anglers’ resort: just a tiny place with an inn, a post-office, a few cottages, and a fine park or two; very neat, very still, and looking very expensive and exclusive. A gamekeeper, or an angler in waders, with rod and creel, are almost the only figures seen here, in the road.

Beyond Abington, the river and the rail alike turn aside and leave the road to solitude. Not even Telford’s road-engineering genius could abolish the ghastly pull-up over the bleak and beastly moor that stretches between this point and Douglas Mill. You deceptively descend to it, to Denighton Bridge, crossing a little stream that comes down the valley from Crawfordjohn, but then rise to an exposed lonely plateau, bleaker than Shap and without its interest. Down at Denighton Bridge, where the view ranges along the gloomy valley wherein the Covenanters skulked and the troopers of Montrose hunted them, the sheep graze and the lambkins frisk in spring. Even a wet and cold cyclist (who is not easily amused) must shriek with laughter at the antics of the lambs, which are a good deal funnier than those of any low comedian I have ever seen. No need to encore them either, for they continue all day, or at least until, exhausted with laughter, you depart, to face the muir above.

Heaven send the traveller who travels here by his own efforts has fine weather and a following wind, otherwise his progress is slow martyrdom along eight miles of shivery loneliness, and thrice welcome is the longed-for descent to Douglas Mill.

The Douglas Water runs in a deep and beautifully wooded valley at Douglas Mill, where the wayside Douglas Mill Inn stood in the coaching era, and where, behind an imposing gravelled sweep, the entrance to the beautiful park of the Earl of Home is seen. For five miles another stretch of old road goes to the right, across Broken Cross Muir, as far as Lesmahagow: the new road pursuing an eventful course, past the Newfield Inn.

Lesmahagow, _i.e._ the Court, or Place, of Mahego, an early Gaelic saint, was once the site of an Abbey. It is now a small, but prosperous, town, looking very new and neat, in spite of the fact that it is situated on the edge of the Lanark coal-field. The traveller who pursues a dogged way along the road, and looks to neither right nor left, will know nothing of Lesmahagow, which lies slightly to the left hand; and I am sure he will not miss much. But, in the crossing of old and new roads here, at the bridging of the little river Nethan, and with the railway passing near by, a singular complexity of ways is produced.

[Sidenote: _THE LANARKSHIRE COALFIELD_]

From this point, on to the very outskirts of Glasgow, the great industrial districts of Lanark display their activities before the traveller in no uncertain manner. Passing Blackwood, the centre of the colliery district is reached at Larkhall, and miners, going to and from work, are the chief wayfarers. The coal of the Lanarkshire pits is of an inferior kind, and by no means well-suited for domestic use, burning dull, and apt to fly in explosive red-hot embers on to carpets and hearth-rugs. But it is not a gassy coal, and the miners are able to go to their work with naked lights. Hence the little oil-lamp which, strung to his cap, is the mark of every Lanark coal-getter.

Hamilton, the capital of all this district, is a very considerable town, and an odd mixture of ducal dignity and striving industrialism. It stands at the gates of the Duke of Hamilton’s great park, and jostles that dignified place in a way that would make the hermit Dukes of Bedford faint with horror. But the Dukes of Hamilton, who are Douglases, and of much more distinguished lineage than the Russells, do not seem greatly to suffer from this contact with the world: although, to be sure, the magnificent Alexander, tenth Duke, found the old streets of the town so close to his residence that the colliers and the weavers of the place could easily observe his domestic affairs. This was too much, not merely for a Duke: even so comparatively grovelling a thing as an ordinary squire would have refused to put up with it: and so the too-neighbourly street, and even the old Tolbooth, were purchased. The Tolbooth stands, even now, in the park, and the front walls of the otherwise demolished houses, with doors and windows filled up, form an odd boundary-wall.

[Sidenote: _THE MAGNIFICENT DUKE_]

The tenth Duke was magnificent indeed. He knew what was due to his strawberry-leaves, and, being a man of immense wealth, saw that he got his due accordingly. A great deal is possible to a man with eighteen titles and five residences, and millions of money to properly support them. He added expensively to the Palace in 1828 and not only beautified it and filled it with wonderful collections of art and literature, but expended £130,000 on a grand mausoleum, so that he might be adequately housed in death. He even imported the black marble sarcophagus of an ancient Egyptian monarch; who, however, appears to have been of shorter stature than the princely Duke Alexander, for the thing was a misfit, and when at length his Grace was gathered to his fathers, his body had to be doubled up, in a very derogatory way. The immense collections in Hamilton Palace were at length sold in 1882, by an extravagant and impecunious successor of Duke Alexander, and realised £400,000 at auction.

The park and the mausoleum may be seen at due seasons, and sometimes the miniature castle of Châtelherault, built in 1732, in imitation of the castle in France whence the Dukes of Hamilton take their French title of Dukes of Châtelherault.

Hamilton town is a cheery place, with colour and ornament in its new buildings: very different from the lowering streets of Glasgow, which we are now nearing. In its present prosperous condition, many old buildings are being removed, but the passer-by will note a quaint tablet over an old house in the chief street, with three moustached lions’ heads, the initials “A. S.” and the inscription:

The . airt . of . weaving . is . renouned . so . that . rich . nor . poor . without . it . cannot . go .

A very broad and well-kept stretch of road leads from Hamilton to the Clyde at Bothwell Bridge: the famous Brig where the battle so immediately disastrous to the Covenanters was fought, June 22nd, 1679. The bridge representing the one that spanned the river so long ago was built in 1826, and neither it nor the road resembles the old circumstances of the place in any but the remotest degree. The road across Bothwell Brig when the battle was fought was steep and but twelve feet wide. The Covenanters lost the day entirely through the internal dissensions among their own forces. Each officer wanted to be commandant, and while they were bitterly wrangling about this point, up came the Royalist forces under the Duke of Monmouth and “bloody Claverse,” otherwise Graham of Claverhouse, the “bonnie Dundee” of the famous ballad. The Covenanting army was well placed for defence, and the day might, in other circumstances, have gone in their favour, but as it was, they were defeated, with a slaughter of three hundred. Twelve hundred prisoners were taken. Of these, some were executed: many were shipped to the plantations in Barbadoes. Thus was avenged the initial Royalist defeat by the hands of the Covenanters at Drumclog, on the 1st of June.

It was not until 1903 that the tall obelisk now standing the north side of the bridge was erected, to commemorate the Covenanters who fought and fell “in defence of civil and religious liberty, for Christ’s Crown and Covenant.”

[Sidenote: _BOTHWELL_]

The red ruins of the ancient castle of Bothwell stand in the neighbouring park belonging to the Earl of Home. The little town of Bothwell, with its finely rebuilt church, fringes the road: in the churchyard a highly decorative monument of terra-cotta and mosaics to the memory of Joanna Baillie, the poet, with quotations in praise of the scenery around Bothwell. The scenery is still (what is left of it) fine, but since the day when Joanna Baillie wandered in Bothwell’s braes, and corresponded with Sir Walter Scott, the suburbs of Glasgow have swept over the scene; and henceforward the way to Glasgow is not rural.

Yet although Glasgow is, in its population, the “second city of the Empire,” coming next after London, it is by no means the centre of so great a number of smaller townships as Manchester, and by consequence the approach, along crowded streets to the centre of the city, is not so lengthy. Bothwell, at the very furthest, is the limit, and is nine miles from the Exchange at Glasgow. Laurel Bank and the suburb of Uddingston follow, and to this fringe in these days the electric tramways extend. To these marches of the city succeed Broomhouse and some busy outlying collieries of the Lanarkshire coal-fields, Mount Vernon railway station, and Tolcross. It was at the approach to Tolcross, soon after the mail-coach to London had been established, that a desperate attempt to wreck and rob the mail was made. The road at that time passed through a small fir wood, where a strong rope was stretched across the highway and securely fastened at either end to tree-trunks, at the height of the places usually occupied by coachman and guard; but, as it happened, a slow-moving hay-waggon came along first, instead of the more quickly moving van, and the waggoner got rather a surprise.

XXXV

[Sidenote: _GLASGOW CROSS_]

At Tolcross, the traveller has at last arrived at Glasgow, and enters there, into the wealthy city, by the meanest of back-doors. Tolcross and its lengthy continuation, Gallowgate, are one long-drawn slum, and so conduct shamelessly to the very heart of things: the junction of Trongate, Saltmarket, and High Street, where stands the old centre of the city in coaching days, Glasgow Cross.

Here Glasgow is at its busiest, and the hurrying crowds look as though they had little time for sentiment. Yet the Glasgow people have, of course, an interest in Sir Walter Scott, and some there are who can point out to the stranger the house, once an inn, in King Street, turning out of Trongate, which Scott once frequented. It was perhaps the original of the “Luckie Flyter’s Hostelry” in _Rob Roy_. The pilgrim will be bidden look at the iron ring to which Sir Walter, in common with many another traveller, secured his horse.

But there is little enough of this sort of thing: railways old and railways new; railways above and railways below, and electric tramcars on the surface, are the chief things in evidence.

Here you see the Cross station of the underground railway, cheek by jowl with the old equestrian statue of William the Third, that tells you, without more ado, of Glasgow’s old Whiggish complexion of politics: the tall steeple of the old Tolbooth, and straddling the sidewalk, the tower of the Tron Church. The Tron itself (it was a public weighing-machine) went very long ago, together with the pleasant custom of nailing to it the ears of those tradesfolk who gave short weight.

Between this point and Candleriggs were found the principal coach offices. From Walker’s coach-office at the “Tontine,” the mail-coach for London started at about 1 a.m., called at the Post Office in Glassford Street for the bags, left there at 1.15, pulled up again at the “Tontine” for the way-bill, and then was off in earnest, its five lamps glaring through the darkness. Its first considerable pull-up was at Beattock Inn, where breakfast before a blazing fire, off Finnan haddock, chops, ham and eggs, baps and buttered toast made amends to the passengers for much. Such, until the beginning of 1848, were the initial circumstances of the long journey to London.

The coaching inns of Glasgow were distributed in the Gallowgate, the Cross, and Argyle Street. Chief among these was the “Saracen’s Head,” a large building, for its era, with a frontage of one hundred feet to Gallowgate. Greatly admired at the time of its being built, in 1754, it was, according to modern ideas, a singularly grim and hard-featured frontage of stone that greeted travellers who halted here, at what was then by far the foremost hostelry in the city of Glasgow.

[Sidenote: _THE “SARACEN’S HEAD”_]

It stood hard by where the East Port in the Gallowgate marked the ancient limits of the city in that direction, and owed its origin to the expansion of Glasgow following upon the more settled times that ensued after the suppression of “the Forty-five.” The Glasgow magistrates caused the old Gallowgate Port to be removed in 1749, and, in their zeal for extending the city, spared nothing; demolishing the neighbouring fourteenth-century Archbishop’s Palace, and desecrating the chapel and kirkyard of St. Mungo without the walls. In 1754 they advertised their readiness to sell the old kirkyard for feuing, and offered especial inducements to any speculative person who would undertake the establishment of an hotel, then felt to be greatly needed in Glasgow; where, up to that period, only inns of a doubtful character, and of an insanitary condition that admitted of no doubts whatever, existed. The speculator was duly forthcoming, in the person of Robert Tennent, landlord at the time of the “White Hart” inn, in the Gallowgate, who on November 24th, 1754, purchased the land of the kirkyard, on the understanding that he built an hotel according to plans to be agreed upon. As an extra inducement, the vendors threw into the bargain the stones of the demolished Archbishop’s Palace, and from them the “Saracen’s Head” was accordingly built.

Tennent immediately began to build, and reared his hotel on the site of the kirkyard; grubbing up and destroying without scruple the gravestones of the old burgesses of two hundred years earlier. By December 1755 he had completed the building and removed from the “White Hart”: advertising in the _Edinburgh Courant_ of December 18th that his new house was a “convenient and handsome new inn,” built by himself at the request of the magistrates of Glasgow. He took the opportunity of acquainting “all Ladies and Gentlemen” that he had “36 Fire Rooms now fit to receive lodgers. The Bed-chambers are all separate, none of them entering through another, and are so contrived that there is no need of going out of Doors to get to them. The Beds are all very good, clean, and free from Bugs”—which obviously was not commonly the case, or there would have been no need for him to lay stress upon the fact.

Notwithstanding the peculiar advantages of his house—its independence of Keating or his predecessors, and the convenience of guests not being obliged to walk out of doors to reach their bed-rooms—Tennent’s speculation was a failure, and on February 3rd, 1757, he died, heavily in debt. His creditors, at a loss what to do with the house, let it to his widow at a rent of £50 a year. When she died, in 1768, it was sold to James Graham, of the “Black Bull,” who carried it on, with much success, until his death in 1777. But although he was so successful with the “Saracen’s Head,” he was unfortunate in other directions and died bankrupt. He was succeeded by his widow, who in 1791 married one Buchanan, who seems to have been rather a wild person, and indeed himself went bankrupt in 1791, dying two years later.

In 1792 the “Saracen’s Head” was purchased by William Miller; who, later, converted it into shops and tenements.

The sign of the house was an enormous half-length picture of a turbaned Saracen, with goggling eyes, represented as fiercely drawing his scimitar, and habited in a claret-coloured gown, decorated with a red sash.

This house was exceptionally famous as a literary landmark. In October 1773, Johnson and Boswell stayed two nights, on their return from the Hebrides; the poet Gray is thought to have met the brothers Foulis, the famous Glasgow printers, and to have concluded arrangements here for their edition of his poems, including the famous _Elegy_; Dorothy Wordsworth, in her “Journal,” under August 22nd, 1803, tells how pleased she and her brother were at last to leave the weary coach and find themselves in “the quiet little back parlour” of the “Saracen’s Head.”