II
The history of coaching on the Hastings Road will never be fully written. There are too few materials for it. None of the great critics of coaching—men of the eminence of “Nimrod” or “Viator Junior”—ever wrote about the Hastings Road, for it was a road of many pair-horse coaches, and “pair-horse concerns” were considered beneath the notice of those lofty writers. Even the Royal Mail was a “pair-horse concern,” and was looked down upon accordingly.
It is as the road to Sevenoaks, to Tonbridge, and to the “Wells” that we first hear of this route in the coaching way; and, as ever, we hear first of the carriers and their waggons. Goods were conveyed on wheels long before travellers, and the heavy, cumbrous wains, drawn by eight or ten horses, and rarely going three miles an hour, carried heavy merchandise and the poorest kind of wayfarers quite a century before the horsemen, riding singly or with their ladies on a pillion behind them, took to what was at first considered the “effeminate” practice of riding in coaches.
Thus the early glimpses of the road reveal Nathaniel Field, carrier, plying in 1681 between Tonbridge and the “Queen’s Head” Inn, Southwark, once a week, together with another carrier, unnamed, a competitor in the business. In the same year “Richard Cockett’s Waggon” came twice weekly to the “Spur,” Southwark, from “Sunnock, in Kent”; and from “Brumly in Kent” came thrice a week “Widow Ingerham’s Waggon,” to the “King’s Arms in Barnaby Street, Southwark,” together with “William and Daniel Woolf’s Waggon,” on the same days.
There is sufficient evidence in the diary of Samuel Jeake, junior, of Rye, that there was no coach further than Tonbridge, or Tunbridge Wells, in 1682; for he tells us that, journeying from Rye to London on May 22nd of that year, “I rode with my wife and mother-in-law for diversion, and came thither on the 23rd; had hot and dry weather.” Returning on June 23rd, they went “from London in the stage-coach to Tonbridge; and on the 24th, Saturday, came to Rye at night.”
On January 23rd, 1686, he went to London by himself. Starting from Rye at 8.30 a.m., he rode the twenty-three miles to Lamberhurst by 2 p.m. Refreshing there for an hour, he resumed his journey, in company with others, for the security afforded by numbers, and between Woodgate and Tonbridge, in the moonlight, the tracks being very bad and uneven, he and another became separated from the party, and immediately lost themselves. It was freezing hard. He alighted and led his horse, until at last, coming to a pretty good track, he remounted, and by the grace of God and at a very late hour came into Tonbridge.
Whether this adventure was due partly to the good cheer of the “Chequers” at Lamberhurst, or wholly to the uncertainty of the track, it would be rash to say. But it is all very vivid to me: the brushwood alleys, the rimy branches of the shrouded woods, the clear, cold radiance of the frosty moon, the iron-hard ruts, and the breath arising like steam from Mr. Samuel Jeake and his horse; but most real to me his joy when he saw at last, at the foot of Somerhill, the lights of Tonbridge town.
Next morning he left Tonbridge for London, and—being by himself—rode horseback all the way, performing the journey of thirty miles in ten hours.
The stage-coach of 1682, in which the worthy Samuel Jeake brought his wife and mother-in-law, went no further than Tunbridge Wells. It was probably, even at that date, no new thing, for the “happy springs of Tunbridge” had long been known, and had for some years been gaining popularity among real or fancied invalids. We may well suppose it to have been started somewhere about 1650.