In 1841 there was an innovation; and he writes to my father on 22 June:—“Moreton, they say, is all alive: there are three vehicles which they call Omnibusses. Wills goes from Exeter [through Moreton] to Plymouth, Waldron and Croot to Exeter and Newton.... All grades appear to go by this means, even the farmers go instead of horseback.”
My grandfather liked travelling in a leisurely way, “the time my own,” and had no patience with my father’s way of travelling about the world, “packing and unpacking, from steam carriage to steam vessel, all bustle and hurry,” as he puts it when writing him upon the subject on 19 August 1844. On going up the Rhine with him, he writes, 23 July 1855:—“Two days more on the journey would have avoided the unpleasant part of it.” But my father went his own way, and my mother kept to it after his decease. She went up the pyramids at Gizeh and Sakkarah, when she was sixty-three, and down a sulphur mine in Sicily, when she was sixty-six.
The foreign diligences were heavier and bigger than the English coaches, and did not travel so fast. On 9 October 1842 my father arrived at Boulogne by diligence from Paris, “having been only 21¾ hours on the journey—140 miles—whereas in 1839 I was 27 hours.” Going to Switzerland and Italy in September 1840, he went by steamer from London to Havre in 22 hours, and by diligence in 16 hours from Havre to Paris and 75 hours from Paris to Geneva. Then in 9 hours from Martigny to Brieg—“tolerably good travelling, altho’ for a coach that takes the mail the delays are shameful”—and in 11 hours across the Simplon from Brieg to Domodossola. This took me 10 hours in September 1899, which was the last time that I crossed the Alps by diligence. Since then I have been through the Simplon tunnel half-a-dozen times, going from Brieg to Domodossola in 50 minutes.
I crossed the Alps for the first time in August 1869, going by the Splügen. I was with my father, mother, brother and sister; and we engaged a Vetturino—a man who owned the carriage and horses that he drove. We came back by the St Gothard in a carriage with post-horses. In travelling with a Vetturino, one had to wait at various places, while his horses rested; but in posting one sometimes had to wait still longer for fresh horses. In September 1873 we came over the Arlberg in a carriage with post-horses—there is a railway-tunnel underneath it now—and one day we did only nineteen miles. When the postmaster was innkeeper as well, it was not his interest to speed the parting guest.
In driving across the Splügen, we started from Coire, and halted for the nights at Thusis, Chiavenna and Varenna. There was rail to Thusis, and on from Chiavenna, when I came that way again; and diligences went from Thusis to Chiavenna in about ten hours.
Posting across the St Gothard, we started from Como, stayed a night at Lugano and another at Airolo, and took the steamer at Fluelen for Lucerne. The tunnel had not been begun then. It was finished in 1882; and I came through it for the first time in October 1883, reaching Lucerne in about seven hours from Como.
Coming through by railway, one misses some of the excitements of the older style of travelling. When we went over in 1869, the diligence had been attacked by brigands the night before in the narrow gorge below Airolo. It was twilight when we reached the gorge; and suddenly we heard men galloping towards us. My sister made up her mind at once that they were brigands; but they turned out to be an escort coming down to see us through, and they rode on with us, their carbines in their hands.
We came from Basle to London in 1869 in six-and-twenty hours, and in 1913 I came in fourteen hours. There were neither dining-cars nor sleeping-cars in 1869, nor were there any corridor-carriages, but only the old style of carriage that jolted one abominably. Yet my father kept talking of the speed and comfort of the train, for he was thinking of the journey in the diligence. I got little sympathy from him, when I felt tired in a train; and I have little sympathy with people who complain of travelling now. In fact, I sometimes feel a little jealous of their seeing things so easily that I saw only with trouble and discomfort. They have railways and hotels all over Greece; and, when I went there first in 1880, there were no hotels except at Athens, and no railways except from Athens to Peiræus, a distance of about five miles.
But there was a pleasant way of travelling that is unknown to them. When I first went to Holland in 1872, we travelled along the canals in a Trekschuit, a light barge drawn by two or three horses, tandem, that went along the tow-path at a trot. The seats were put up high enough to clear the banks of the canal; and you saw the country comfortably, as you went gliding through. They have only motors now.
These barges were formerly in use in Belgium also; and I found these entries in one of the old diaries here:—“25 July 1833. Dunkirk. By barge to Bruges.... Changed barges at Furnes, the Belgian frontier.... Changed barges again at Nieuport.... 27 July 1833. Bruges. Embarked in a superb barge, called the Lion, and drawn by five horses. It had carried Napoleon.... Arrived at Ghent in the evening.”