It carried six inside, but no outsides.
But let us be just to the coach-proprietors whose fate it was to work the Exeter Road at that time. In that very year a correspondent wrote to the Gentleman’s Magazine pointing out the dreadful character of that road. “After the first forty-seven miles from London,” he said, “you never set eye on a turnpike.” There were turnpikes, and, by consequence, well-kept roads, on the way to Bath, and he declared that every one who knew anything at all about road-travelling went to Exeter by way of Bath. As for the country along the Exeter Road, it was reputed to be picturesque, but the state of the road forbade any one making its acquaintance. “Dorchester is to us a terra incognita, and the map-makers might, if they pleased, fill the vacuities of Devon and Cornwall with forests, sands, elephants, savages, or what they please.”
Meanwhile, manufacturing England was coming into existence, and the growing necessities of trade had brought about an increase of coaches in other directions. Thus Birmingham, whose first direct communication with London has already been shown in existence in 1679, and again in 1731, had set up a “Flying Coach” in 1742, followed in 1758 by an “Improved Birmingham Coach,” with the legend “Friction Annihilated” prominent on the axle-boxes. This the Annual Register declared to be “perhaps the most useful invention in mechanics this age has produced.” Much virtue lingered in that “perhaps,” for nothing more was heard of that wonderful device.
It was not until 1754 that Manchester and London were in direct communication. The desire of the provinces to get into touch with the metropolis has always been greater than that of London to commune with the country towns, and thus we see that it was an association of Manchester men who set up the “Flying Coach,” just as the citizens of Oxford and the good folks of Shrewsbury’s desire to travel to London established conveyances for that purpose, and just as that early railway, the London and Birmingham, was projected and financed at Birmingham, and should, strictly speaking, have been inversely named. But hear what the Manchester men of 1754 said:—
“However incredible it may appear, this coach will actually (barring accidents) arrive in London in four days and a half after leaving Manchester.” The distance, it may be remarked, was 182 miles.
The ancient rivalry of Manchester and Liverpool was roused by this, and four years later the Liverpool “Flying Machine” was established, to travel the 206½ miles between Liverpool and London in three days. The fare, at £2 2s., thus represents about 2½d. a mile. This was followed by the Leeds “Flying Coach” of 1760, advertised to do the 190 miles in three days, by Barnsley, Wakefield, and Sheffield, but actually taking four.
Another great centre of coaching activity at this was Shrewsbury. Those who know that grand old town, seated majestically on its encircling Severn, that girdles the ancient blood-red walls with a flow as yellow as that of the Tiber, will have observed an ancient metropolitan air, an atmosphere of olden self-sufficiency, subtly characterising the place. It is complete in itself: within the double ceinture of river and hoary defensive walls it comprises something typical of each separate estate of the realm. The monarch and the governing idea are represented within that compass by the Castle and by the Council House, and all around are still to be seen the town houses of the old nobility and county families, neighboured by prosperous shops and smaller residences. Shrewsbury, like York and Edinburgh, is in fact an ancient seat of government, delegated directly from the Crown, once as vitally viceregal as the Viceroyalty of India is now and much more so than that of Ireland for long years past has been. Shrewsbury remained the capital of the Marches of Wales until 1689, and the history of the Council that thence ruled the border-lands is still singularly fresh. Nor did it lose its importance even with the abolition of that body; for, more than elsewhere, the town, until the railways came—suddenly breaking up the old order and centralising everything in London—was a centre of social life for wide surrounding districts. The titled and gentle families of Shropshire, Herefordshire and North Wales who had resorted to the old Court of the Marches continued to adorn Shrewsbury, which had its own fashionable season and its own self-contained interests. The whole social movement of those surrounding districts was centred here, and at a time when the great manufacturing future of England had not dawned, creating vastly populated cities and towns, Shrewsbury was not rivalled as a coaching centre even by Bath. A Shrewsbury coach was in existence in 1681, but the roads between the Salopian capital and London proved too bad, and it did not last long, nor was it succeeded by any other coach until the spring of 1753. Stage-waggons were on the road in the interval between 1737 and that date, but they did not fit the requirements of the gentlefolk, who, when they did not ride horseback or drive in their own chariots to London, posted across country to Ivetsey Bank, where they caught the Chester and London stage.
With 1753 the continuous coaching history of Shrewsbury begins, in the starting of the “Birmingham and Shrewsbury Long Coach,” which journeyed to London in four days, by the efforts of six horses. The distance was 152 miles, the fare 18s. The “Long Coach” was a type of vehicle intermediate between the “Caravan” of 1750[C] and the “Machine,” established in April 1764. It was a cheap method of conveyance, one remove above the common stage-waggons. It set out once a week, and seems to have been so immediately successful that a rival and somewhat higher-class vehicle was put on the road as soon as the coachmakers could build it. It was in the June of that same year that the rival—“Fowler’s Shrewsbury Stage-coach” was the name of it—began to ply to and from London in three and a half days; fare, one guinea inside, outside half a guinea. Thus they continued to run for thirteen years, without the intrusion of a third competitor. We are not told how these outsides were carried. Probably they were obliged to cling to the sloping roof, on which the athletic and adventurous found a fearful joy with every roll and lurch, while those who were neither agile nor imbued with the spirit of adventure grew grey with apprehension. Indeed, it was probably the freak of some wild spirit—perhaps a sailor or a drunken soldier—in seating himself on the roof that first gave coach-proprietors the idea that roofs might be used to carry outsides as well as to shelter the august occupants of the interior. We may be allowed to imagine the arrival of the coach that first carried these freakish persons on that dangerous eminence, and to picture the joy of the proprietor, who thereupon determined that, as these pioneers for the fun of it had arrived safely, there must be a commercial value in places on the roof. The thing was done. Three outsides sat on the front part, with their feet on the back of the driving-box, while one had a place on the box-seat with the driver, and room was left for three more on the hind, and most inconvenient, part of the roof, where, like Noah’s dove, they found no rest for the soles of their feet, and had the greatest difficulty in maintaining their position.
[C] P. 119.
If the “outsides” on Fowler’s Shrewsbury stage of 1753 were not carried on the roof, they must have been carried in “the basket”; but as stage-coaches provided with this species of accommodation were generally stated in their advertisements to have “a conveniency behind,” and the advertisement of this makes no such claim, we are free to assume that the roof was their portion. The “basket” was, however, already a well-established affair. It was a great wickerwork structure, hung on the back of the coach between the hind wheels by stout leather straps, and rested on the axletree. Originally intended to convey the luggage, it was found capable of holding passengers, who suffered much in it in order to ride cheaply. In the racy, descriptive language of the time, this “conveniency” was known much more aptly as the “rumble-tumble.” In this “rumble-tumble,” then, the second-class passengers sat, up to their knees in straw. The more straw the better the travelling, for although the body of the coach had by this time been eased with springs, the basket was not provided with any such luxury, and anything in the nature of padding would have been welcome. Already, in 1747, Hogarth had pictured an inn yard with a coach preparing to start, and had shown a basket fully occupied, and two outsides above.