“I had the most disagreeable journey I ever experienced the night after I left you, owing to the new improved patent coach, a vehicle loaded with iron trappings and the greatest complication of unmechanical contrivances jumbled together, that I have ever witnessed. The coach swings sideways, with a sickly sway, without any vertical spring; the point of suspense bearing upon an arch called a spring, though it is nothing of the sort. The severity of the jolting occasioned me such disorder that I was obliged to stop at Axminster and go to bed very ill. However, I was able to proceed next day in a post-chaise. The landlady in the ‘London Inn’ at Exeter assured me that the passengers who arrived every night were in general so ill that they were obliged to go supperless to bed; and unless they go back to the old-fashioned coach, hung a little lower, the mail-coaches will lose all their custom.”
Some debated points respecting the early mails are cleared up in a series of replies by Palmer to questions put by the French Post Office in 1791, respecting the English mail-coach system. “What,” asks M. de Richebourg, “is a Mail-coach?” and among other details we learn that “it is constructed to carry four Inside Passengers only, and One Outside Passenger, who rides with the Coachman.” Here we perceive the beginning of the outsides.
Then the question is asked: “When there are no Travellers on the Mail-coaches, do they put-to the same number of Horses as when there are?” To this the answer was: “They are all drove with four Horses, sometimes, in Snow and very bad weather, with Six;—never less than four, whether they have Passengers or not.” This disposes of the statements made that the early mails were two-horsed.
CHAPTER VII
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 1800–1824
The period at which this chapter begins is that when outside passengers were first enabled to ride on the roofs of coaches without incurring the imminent hazard of being thrown off whenever their vigilance and their anxious grip were relaxed. It was about 1800 that fore and hind boots, framed to the body of the coach, became general, thus affording foothold to the outsides. Mail-coaches were not the cause of this change, for they originally carried no passengers on the roof.
We cannot fix the exact date of this improvement, and may suppose that, in common with every other innovation, it was gradual, and only introduced when new coaches became necessary on the various routes. The immediate result was to democratise coach-travelling. Exclusive insides, who once with disgust observed the occasional soldier or sailor dangling his legs in the windows, now were obliged to put up with a set of cheap travellers who, if they did no longer so dangle their common legs, being provided with seats and footholds, were always to be found on the roof, laughing and talking loudly, enjoying themselves in the elementary and vociferous way only possible to low persons, and disturbing the genteel reflections of the insides. Let us pity the sorrows of those superior travellers, unwillingly conscious of those stamping, noisy, low-down creatures on the roof!
The revulsion of those sensitive persons led to the establishment of a superior class of coach, carrying insides only; and accordingly, we find the original improvement of seats on the roof bringing far-reaching consequences in its train. While democratising coaches, it at the same time necessitated another class, and thus directly brought about a numerical increase. The exclusive were thus enabled to keep their exclusiveness by going in such conveyances as that announced in the advertising columns of the high-class papers:—
For Portsmouth.
A New Carriage on Springs,
called
THE LAND FRIGATE,Sets out from the Bell Savage, Ludgate Hill, to the Red Lyon at Portsmouth, every Tuesday and Saturday, at 6 a.m. Fare, 15s. each Passenger. Ladies and Gentlemen are requested to Observe that the Frigate is elegantly sashed all round, and in order to preserve the gentility and respectability of the vehicle, no outside passengers are carried.
