MRS. BUNDLE IN A RAGE; OR, TOO LATE FOR THE STAGE.
After Rowlandson, 1809.
The period now under consideration was in other ways a very great and progressive one. In this space of twenty-five years were included the two most significant advances in the whole history of the road—the introduction about 1805 of springs under the driving-box, and the shortening of the stages. Without either of them, the acceleration that resulted in the Golden Age of coaching, beginning in 1825, would have been impossible.
The placing of springs under the driving-box was due to the suggestion of John Warde, earliest of the coaching amateurs, who had been taught the art of driving a stage-coach by Jack Bailey, a famed coachman on the old “Prince of Wales,” between London and Birmingham. He had found the jolting received directly from the axle an intolerable infliction on a long drive, and urged coach-proprietors to provide springs. Said “Mr. Wilkins of the ‘Balloon’”—a character in Nimrod’s Life of a Sportsman—“they do say they are going to put the boxes of all stage-coaches on springs, but Heaven knows when that will be—not in my time, I fear. Our people say it won’t do; we shall go to sleep on them. No danger of a man doing that now, even if he should be a bit overtaken with drink.” Under these circumstances there was, as Mr. Wilkins went on to show, “a great deal of hart in sitting on a coach-box,” as well as driving four horses. “Your body must go with the swing of the box, and let your lines (loins, he meant) be as lissom as you can. It would kill a man in a week to drive as far as I do, if he did not do as I say.”
When it became clear to coach-proprietors that a coachman could drive a longer distance when his body was not racked so intolerably, they provided springs, and risked the remote chance of coachmen going to sleep on the box.
Another reform, humane to the horses and directly productive of increased speed and efficiency on the road, was the introduction of shorter stages. From those almost incredible times when a coach went from end to end of a long trip and returned with the same team, to those when the stages were twenty miles long constituted, no doubt, a great advance; but that was by this time no longer sufficient. The mail stages, as we have seen, rarely at the earliest times exceeded ten miles, and were often much less. The mails also travelled at night, a thing the stage-coaches did not in the old times dare attempt. In the early days of Pennant, and other chroniclers contemporary with him, the coaches inned every evening. None dared travel when the sun had set and darkness brooded over the land, for there were not only the highwaymen to be feared—and they still continued to increase—but the badness of the roads had constituted a danger even more dreaded. Now, however, roads—thanks to Post Office insistence—were greatly improved; and if the mails could go through the darkness, why not also the stages? Coincident with these things, great minds perceived that by changing horses every ten miles or so, and coachmen at intervals, a coach might, in the first place, be made to go much faster, and secondly, might put into twenty-four hours of continuous running what had formerly been the work of three days. It is obviously easy to go over a hundred miles in the twenty-four hours even if you only go five miles in every hour. These great truths once perceived and acted upon, the coaching world was revolutionised.
THE SHEFFIELD COACH, ABOUT 1827. From a contemporary painting.
No longer did coaching announcements propose to perform journeys in so many hours if the roads were good. They boldly promised that they would complete their course by a certain time, and altogether disregarded contingencies. By this time the “God-permits” had also become things of the past, and no proprietor was so old-fashioned as to announce that his coach would set out or arrive, “God permitting,” as aforetime had been the cautious or pious proviso. They now “started” instead of “setting out,” and arrived, as an irreverent wag observed, “God willing, or not.”
In fine, the world was made to go according to time-tables, and much faster than of old. Coaches actually, as an ordinary everyday thing, went at a quicker pace than an able-bodied man could walk, and it was no longer possible for a weary traveller when offered a lift, to decline with the bonâ-fide excuse that he was in a hurry; and so, continuing afoot, to arrive before the coach. Fielding shows us Parson Adams outwalking the coach, about 1745; but in this era the passengers just too late for the stage could by no means hope to catch it up. Why, it commonly went at eight miles an hour, and often nine! Thus we see Rowlandson’s anxious travellers, unable to attract the attention of the coach in front of them and equally unable to overtake it, left lamenting.
This, too, was the age of increased competition, when a continuous smartening-up alone kept some of the old-stagers going. Thus, in 1805, when three coaches left London every day for Sheffield, the quickest took over thirty hours. In 1821 it left the “Angel,” Angel Street, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, at 3.30 p.m., and arrived at Sheffield at 8 the next evening,—163¼ miles in 28½ hours, or at the rate of 5¾ miles an hour, including stops. In 1824 it started an hour later and arrived at the same hour as before; and in 1827 was expedited by another half-hour. That was very poor travelling, and it is not surprising that after 1827 it is heard of no more. More strenuous rivals usurped the route.