II
THE COACHES
If we had wished, in the first year of the reign of Queen Victoria, to proceed to Dover with the utmost expedition and despatch consistent with coach-travelling, we should have booked seats in Mr. Benjamin Worthy Horne’s “Foreign Mail,” which left the General Post-Office in Saint Martin’s-le-Grand every Tuesday and Friday nights, calling a few minutes later at the “Cross Keys,” Wood Street, and finally arriving at Dover in time for the packets at 8.15 the following morning; thus beating by half an hour the time of any other coach then running on this road.
If, on the other hand, we objected to night travel, we should have had to sacrifice that half-hour, and go by either the “Express,” which, starting from the “Golden Cross,” Charing Cross, at 10 a.m. every morning, did the journey in nine hours; or else by the “Union” coach, which, travelling at an equal speed, left the “White Bear,” Piccadilly, at 9 a.m. Not that these were the only choice. Coaches in plenty left town for Dover; the “Eagle,” the “Phœnix,” Worthington’s Safety Coaches, the “Telegraph,” the “Defiance,” the “Royal Mail,” and the “Union Night Coach,” starting from all parts of London. The famous “Tally-ho Coach,” too, between London and Canterbury, left town every afternoon, and did the fifty-four miles in the twinkling of an eye—that is to say (with greater particularity and less vague figure of speech) in five hours and a half; while Stanbury and Rutley’s fly-vans and wagons conveyed goods and passengers who could not afford the fares of the swifter coaches between the “George,” Aldermanbury, and Dover at the rate of six miles an hour.
Besides these methods of conveyance, numerous coaches, vans, omnibuses and carriers’-carts plied between the Borough and Chatham, Rochester and Strood; or served the villages between London and Gravesend. Indeed, at this period, we find the crack coaches, the long-distance mails, starting from London city, leaving to the historic inns of Southwark only the goods-wagons, the short-stages, and the carriers’-carts. In 1837, also, you could vary the order of your going to Dover by taking boat from London to Gravesend, Whitstable, or Herne Bay, and at any of those places waiting for the coach. The voyage to Herne Bay took six hours, and the coach journey from thence to Dover occupied another four, the whole costing but ten shillings; which, considering that you could get horribly sea-sick in the six hours between London and Herne Bay, and had four hours of jolting in which to recover, was decidedly cheap, and not to be matched nowadays.
The traveller of this time would probably select the “Express” from the “Golden Cross,” because this was a convenient and central starting-point from which that excellent coach started at an hour when the day was well-aired. The coachman of that time was the ultimate product of the coaching age, and we who travel by train do not see anything like him. He owed something to heredity, for in those days son succeeded to father in all kinds of trades and professions much more frequently than now; for the rest of his somewhat alarming appearance he was indebted partly to the rigours of the weather and partly to the rum-and-milk for which he called at every tavern where the coach stopped—and at a good many where it had no business to stop at all. As a result of these several causes, he generally had cheeks like pulpit cushions, puffy, and of an apoplectic hue, and a plum-coloured nose with red spots on it; he was, in fact, what Shakespeare would call a “purple-hued malt-worm.” He shaved scrupulously. A rugged beaver hat with a curly brim and a coat of many capes would have identified him as a coachman, even if the evidence of his face had failed, and his talk, which consisted of “Gee-hups,” biting repartees administered to passing Jehus, and contemptuous references to the railways, which were just beginning to be spoken of, was solely professional.
Some of these latter-day coaches went direct from the West End, over Westminster Bridge, and so to the Old Kent Road, but others had to call at various inns on the way to the City, and so came over London Bridge in the approved fashion.