The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: London to York

by Charles G. Harper

III

It were vain, nowadays, to seek any of the old starting-points from London. The late Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson asked in 1896, “Are ‘The Bull and Mouth,’ ‘The Spread Eagle,’ The Swan with Two Necks,’ and ‘The Green Man and Still,’ yet in existence?” With some little research he would have discovered that—with the sole exception of the last-named—they are not. The “Bull and Mouth” in later years became the “Queen’s Hotel,” and was demolished only when the site was required for an extension of the General Post Office in 1887. At the same time as the “Queen’s” disappeared, the street at the side of it, called from the old inn “Bull and Mouth Street,” was stopped up. In this street was the entrance to the famous old coaching-stables which were in the last years of their existence used as a railway receiving-office for goods. On their being pulled down, the grotesque plaster sign, representing a giant face with yawning mouth in which stood a bull, was removed to the Guildhall Museum, where it may still be seen, together with the yet larger and more elaborate sign which decorated the frontage of the “Queen’s.” This also included a mouth and a bull, set amidst a frame of plaster fruits and flowers, with the inscription:—

“Milo the Cretonian,
An ox slew with his fist,
And ate it up at one meal,
Ye gods! what a glorious twist.”

The origin, however, of the curious sign had nothing to do with this hungry person. Precisely what was that origin is never likely to be known; for although the legend that it derived from the capture of “Boulogne Mouth”—i.e. Boulogne Harbour—in the reign of Henry the Eighth is in general acceptation, it has been shrewdly suspected that this was a tale wickedly invented by George Steevens, a literary practical joker, who palmed off many similar stories upon unsuspecting antiquaries at the end of last century. A perhaps more likely story is that the sign was originally the “Bowl and Mouth.”

Under Sherman’s rule the “Bull and Mouth” became a mighty resort of coaches to and from all parts, but more especially the north, and his underground stables formed one of the sights of London.

Edward Sherman was a man of many parts, and had a varied career. Originally a stockbroker, he followed Willans at the “Bull and Mouth” in 1823, and rebuilt it as the “Queen’s” in 1830, continuing the stables under the old name, and eventually reconstructing them. The money for these enterprises came from three old and wealthy ladies whom he married in succession. If the stranger, unversed in the build and colour of coaches, could not pick out the somewhat old-fashioned, bright-yellow vehicles as Sherman’s, he was helped in identifying them by the pictorial sign of the inn painted on the panels—rather a startling one, by the way, to the rustics. Sherman, however, had not the prescience of Chaplin or of Horne, who clearly foresaw the success of railways, and he kept his coaches on the roads for some time after they were opened to their destinations. He was sufficiently ill-advised not to come to terms with the railway companies, and actually attempted, with the “Red Rover,” to run the Manchester trains off. Of course this could not last very long, and Sherman withdrew after having lost seven thousand pounds in a gallant, but futile, competition with steam.

In its prime the “Bull and Mouth” sent forth the Edinburgh and Aberdeen Royal Mail by York; the Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen coach by Ferry-bridge to Newcastle, where the Glasgow passengers changed; the Glasgow and Carlisle Royal Mail; the Newcastle “Wellington”; Shrewsbury and Holyhead “Union” and “Oxonian”; Birmingham “Old Post Coach” and “Aurora”; Leeds Royal Mail and “Express”; and Leicester “Union Post Coach.”

The site of the “Swan with Two Necks” is now occupied by the London and North-Western and South-Western Joint Goods Depot, in Gresham Street. Modern sculptured keystones may be seen over the entrances, bearing the effigy of a double-headed swan. This sign, like that of the “Bull and Mouth,” is a corruption of a widely different term; originally, indeed, the “Swan with Two Nicks,” from the particular “nicks” with which the bills of the swans belonging to the Vintners’ Company on the Thames were marked. The City Companies each had their swans on the river, and even nowadays they are maintained on the upper reaches. The young cygnets were marked at the annual festival of “swan-upping,” at which the City magnates used hugely to enjoy themselves. The old and the new “nicks” of the Vintners’ Company are pictured here.

Lad Lane was until recent years the name by which this part of Gresham Street was known, while the inn itself was generally called by the coaching fraternity the “Wonderful Bird.”

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.

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.

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.

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!”