The report of this committee, recommending an increased pension or a grant, was not adopted; but in 1801 Palmer himself entered Parliament and fought his own battles. He printed and circulated among the members and in other circles a statement of his case, and in the course of eight years expended no less a sum than £13,000 in appeals for justice—in vain, and it was left for his eldest son, Colonel Charles Palmer, who succeeded him in the representation of Bath in 1808, to at last fight the question to a victorious issue. In 1813 he secured for his father an award of £50,000, and the continuance during his life of the commission on Post Office receipts originally agreed upon.
In the meantime, Palmer had been variously honoured. Gainsborough, his neighbour at Royal Circus, Bath, painted his portrait; Glasgow merchants, members of the Chamber of Commerce in that city, had as early as 1789 presented him with a silver loving-cup, “as an acknowledgment of the benefits resulting from his plan to the trade and commerce of this kingdom”; and in 1797 three “mail-coach halfpennies” were struck by some now unknown admirer. They bear on the obverse a mail-coach, and on the reverse an inscription to him “as a token of gratitude for benefits received” from his system. A third tribute was the painting by George Robertson, engraved by James Fittler, and inscribed, curiously, to him as Comptroller-General, in 1803, eleven years after he had ceased to hold that position. He also received the freedom of eighteen cities and towns in recognition of his public services, was Mayor of Bath in 1796 and 1801, and represented that city in the four Parliaments of 1801, 1802, 1806, and 1807. He died at Brighton in 1818, in his seventy-sixth year. His body was conveyed to Bath and laid in the Abbey Church; but no monument marks the spot, and it is only recently that his residence at Royal Circus, and his birthplace in his native city, have been identified to the wayfarer by inscribed tablets.
JOHN PALMER IN HIS 75TH YEAR. From an etching by the Hon. Martha Jervis.
The very earliest mail-coaches were ill made, and were continually breaking down. Although the coaches themselves were supplied by the contractors, and the Post Office was not concerned in their cost, it was very closely interested in their efficiency; and so, early in 1787, Palmer had already represented to the contractors that the mails must be conveyed by more reliable coaches.
“The Comptroller-General,” he wrote to one contractor, “has to complain not only of the quality of the horses employed on the Bristol Mail, but as well of their harness and the accoutrements in use, whose defects have several times delayed the Bath and Bristol and London letters, and have even led to the conveyance being overset, to the imminent peril of the passengers. Instructions have been issued by the Comptroller for new sets of harness to be supplied to the several coaches in use on this road, for which accounts will be sent you by the harness-makers. Mr. Palmer has also under consideration, for the contractors’ use, a new-invented coach.”
This was a truly imperial way of remedying gross dereliction on the contractors’ part, but it had its effect in this and other instances, for it may be presumed that the harness-makers thus officially selected to replace the contractors’ ancient assortments of worm-eaten leather and cord were not the cheapest in the trade, and that those contractors very soon awoke to the fact that it would be more economical in future to provide new harness of their own free will, and from their own harness-makers, than under compulsion.
In respect of the type of coaches, as well as of their equipment in minor details, Palmer sternly resolved to impose thorough efficiency. As he was very well assured that their defects arose from the cheese-paring policy of the contractors themselves, he decided that the Post Office must have a voice in the selection of the coaches, and, having discovered what he considered a suitable build, made it a condition of the service that it should be used. This officially-approved new type was a “patent coach” by one Besant. The contractors had no choice in the matter. Palmer, the autocrat, had seen that Besant’s coaches were good, and willed it that they should use none others, and so to that fortunate patentee they were obliged to resort. He entered into partnership with Vidler, a practical coachbuilder; and thus at Millbank, Westminster, was established that mail-coach manufactory which for forty years supplied the mail-coaches to the mail-contractors. Besant and Vidler’s terms were twopence-halfpenny a double mile. For this price the coaches were hired out to the contractors and kept in repair. The practice was for Vidler’s men to take over the mail-coaches after they had entered the General Post Office in the morning, on the completion of their up journeys, and to drive them to Millbank, where they were cleaned and greased, and delivered to the various contractors’ coach-yards in the afternoon.
On December 2nd, 1791, Besant died. He was, we are told, “an honest, worthy man, and the mechanical world sustains a great loss by his death. His ingenuity was in various instances sanctioned by the Society of Arts, many of whose premiums were awarded to him.”
However that may have been, and although to Palmer the patent coach of Besant may have seemed altogether admirable, there were many who condemned it and its patent springs. It is apparently one of this type that is pictured by Dalgety in his print of St. George’s Circus, dated 1797. It is curious and interesting, as showing a transition between the old type of coach and a style yet to come. The fore boot is of the old detached type, but the wickerwork basket behind is discarded, and a hind boot may be observed, framed to the body. The coach is hung very high, and suspended at the back from iron or steel arms of the pump-handle kind. This seems to be the type criticised so severely by Matthew Boulton, himself an engineer, in 1798, when, describing a mail-coach trip from London to Exeter, he roundly condemned the patent springs:—