THE ROAD WAGGON: A TRYING CLIMB. After J. Pollard.
It is impossible to obtain more than a glimpse of the early carriers, and even the later stage-waggons were only occasionally advertised in the newspapers of the past. Thus, turning to Sussex, we only hear of “Thomas Smith, the Old Lewes Carrier,” in a reference to him after his death. How many years he had jogged along the green Surrey and Sussex lanes on his weekly journeys between Southwark and Lewes we know not. He died in 1746, and his widow carried on the business, according to her advertisement in the Lewes Journal:—
“THOMAS SMITH, the Old Lewes Carrier, being dead, the business is now continued by his widow, Mary Smith, who gets into the ‘George Inn,’ in the Borough, Southwark, every Wednesday in the afternoon, and sets out for Lewes every Thursday morning by eight o’clock, and brings Goods and Passengers to Lewes, Fletching, Chayley, Newick, and all places adjacent at reasonable rates. Performed (if God permit) by Mary Smith.”
No mention yet, it will be observed, of Brighton, that little fisher-village of Brighthelmstone which presently was to rival fashionable Bath. The waggon went no farther than Lewes; and the first public conveyance to Brighton appears to have been the “Brighthelmstone Stage” of May 1756, running as an extension of the “London and Lewes One-Day Stage.”
Speed was by no means sought upon these old waggon-journeys. Quite apart from their usual inability to go, under the most favourable circumstances, at more than about four miles an hour, they were exempt from passenger-duty, on all travellers carried, only when the rate of progression did not exceed that speed.
Thus, although the Brighton waggon owned by Tubb and Davis in 1770 had a rival conveyance put on the road in 1776 by Lashmar & Co., both continued at the old pace. Both went by way of East Grinstead and Lewes, and took three days to perform the fifty-eight miles, Lashmar’s waggon leaving the “King’s Head,” Southwark, every Tuesday at 3 a.m., and arriving at the “King’s Head,” Brighton, on Thursday afternoons. Goods and parcels were carried at the rates of 2s. 6d. and 3s. per cwt.
Malachy Postlethwayt’s Dictionary of Trade, a work published in 1751, gives some eloquent details on this subject of the carriage of goods. Comparing that year, when turnpikes had improved the roads, with the bad ways of thirty or forty years earlier, it is stated that where six horses could in former times scarcely draw 30 cwt. sixty miles, they could then draw 50 or 60 cwt. Carriage, too, was cheaper by 30 per cent. than before. In 1750 there were from twenty-five to thirty waggons sent weekly from Birmingham to London, carrying goods at from £3 to £4 a ton; thirty years earlier the cost had been £7 a ton. Between Portsmouth and London freights had fallen from £7 to £4 or £5; and between Exeter and London and other towns in the west of like distance from £12 to £8. Postlethwayt cited these figures with pride, but he argued that the heavy waggons wore out the roads, and that they did not pay sufficient toll. The manufacturers, he thought, got too much advantage out of these low freights, and although the public thereby could purchase goods more cheaply, they paid their savings all out again in the heavy repairs of the highway and the consequent extravagant highway rates rendered necessary. Railway rates, we may here remark, are a source of much bitter discussion to-day, but they are fifteen times less than the reduced rates of 1750.
Even in the last days of the road, when railways had already begun to stretch the length and breadth of the land, the waggons on the less important highways continued very much as they had been accustomed to do; but with the second decade of the nineteenth century a demand for the quicker conveyance of goods arose on those great roads that gave access from the important manufacturing towns to London, or from London to the chief seaports. With this demand, in the improved condition of those roads, it now became for the first time possible to comply. On less frequented routes—roads leading to agricultural districts and sleepy old towns and villages that produced nothing for distant markets and wanted little from them—the common stage waggon and the flying waggon lingered. The Kendal Flying Waggon of 1816, pictured by Rowlandson, halting at a wayside inn to take up or set down goods and passengers and to change horses, lasted well on into the railway age; but in places nearer to and in more direct communication with the commerce of great cities, the type was early supplemented by later contrivances.
THE STAGE-WAGGON, 1816. By Rowlandson.