These regulations were notoriously broken with impunity every day in the year. Passengers sat on the luggage if they felt so inclined; coachmen got drunk, drove furiously, or allowed the deadly amateur to drive; luggage was stacked to alpine heights; guards discharged their blunderbusses everywhere from sheer wantonness or on joyful occasions; passengers were carried to excess; and, indeed, every provision of every Act was flagrantly violated, generally of malice aforethought, but not seldom from very ignorance and the sheer inability of coach-proprietors and the others concerned to keep themselves fully informed on all points. The waggoners especially found it difficult, with the best will in the world, to keep the law; and even the pikemen at the turnpike gates, who were the sworn enemies of all the users of the roads, but who were bound to comply with certain regulations, often heedlessly omitted the formulæ as by law established, and became liable to penalties.
This lengthy and confusing series of Acts brought into existence that contemptible parasite, the Professional Informer. By those provisions, which awarded sometimes the whole penalty, and in other cases the half or two-thirds, or merely one-third, at the discretion of the magistrates, to those persons who would discover these infringements of the law to the authorities, the Sneak became an institution, wholly supported by the involuntary contributions of the coaching world. Informers swarmed on every road, and their operations were conducted with a legal astuteness and business acumen that would have made the fortunes of these gentry if they had directed their talents into more reputable channels. For although Parliament had created the Informer, it is not to be thought that he was liked by any class. He was held to be a necessary evil, as from fear of him offenders might be made to mend their ways, and so the roads be preserved. The end, it was thought, justified the means employed. No one knew the Acts of Parliament through and through, inside out and up and down, as this detested class. Informers sometimes worked singly; at others they constituted themselves into firms, with offices and tame attorneys, and staffs of travelling spies, whose travelling expenses were well repaid, with a handsome profit besides, by the materials for informations which they had obtained on the roads. Indeed, it was stated that on certain routes the waggoners paid annual sums to the informers, as a kind of quit-rent against prosecutions; for, as an informer in a confidential moment was heard to declare, the Acts were so many and so conflicting that it was impossible to travel without a breach of the law.
The greatest of all informers was Byers, who combined the occupation with that of a small shopkeeper in the outskirts of London. The acts of Byers may be traced through many old files of newspapers, and even then you shall not discover his Christian name; for in those records it is generally “Byers again!” or “Byers appeared before So-and-so charging What’s-his-name.” Thus do we speak of the great in war, in science, in literature; for custom tells only of a Wellington, a Newton, or a Thackeray. We know their titles and Christian names, but suppress them to gain a grand and monumental simplicity. To reduce the argument to a logical conclusion, Byers was a greater than these, for we do not even know his baptismal cognomen. He is a classic now, for Barham accorded him the honour of an allusion and an explanatory note in one of the Ingoldsby Legends—the “Lay of St. Nicholas,” where we read:—
The Accusing Byers “flew up to Heaven’s Chancery,”
Blushing like scarlet with shame and concern.
The note describes him as “The Prince of Peripatetic Informers, and terror of Stage Coachmen, when such things were. Alack! alack! the Railroads have ruined his ‘vested interest.’” Time has so dimmed the meaning of both the reference and the explanation that modern commentators are generally puzzled by both. What he was we have stated; what became of him when railways ruined coaching and his business at once, we do not know. Some few details of his career have survived. He originally seems to have been in the employ of one Johnson, an informer, in 1824, when he obtained convictions against coachmen at Dover and Canterbury, and on the Brighton Road; but by the summer of the next year he had gone into the business for himself, and presently became the Napoleon of the profession. 1825 was a busy year with him. In August he summoned a coach-proprietor named Selby for that “on the 28th day of July he did suffer and permit a stage-coach belonging to him, and drawn by two horses only, to carry more than the usual number of passengers on the roof.” Moreover, he was summoned again for not having his name painted on the door of the coach. After much cross-swearing and discussion, the Brighton bench fined the coach-proprietor £5 and 16s. costs.
In Bath, in the November of the same year, Byers laid so many as thirty-four informations. The penalties to which the unfortunate coach-proprietors and others were liable in this prodigious batch were estimated at £500, but the newspaper reports of that time do not tell us the total of the fines actually inflicted, so we are unable to form any idea of the profits realised by the enterprising Byers in this Western raid. The petty and tyrannical nature of the prosecutions may be gathered from one instance before the Bathforum (for such was the style and title of the local bench) magistrates. A farmer was summoned for not having his Christian name and surname painted on the right or off-side of his waggon, and mulcted in 10s. and costs, while another for the same mistake in the position was fined 5s. and costs; the magistrates, in addition, holding that the strict letter of the law required not only the name of the owner and that of the town, but the street as well.
A great sheaf of informations was laid by him at Brighton in July 1827. William Blunden, proprietor of a stage-van, was summoned—not for carrying more passengers than he should, but for not having painted on his conveyance the number of passengers his licence entitled him to carry. A £5 fine was the result, of which Byers was awarded 50s. and costs. In another of his cases on this occasion the informer did not come off victorious. It was not his master-mind that had prepared the cases, but that of one of his hirelings, Aaron Rolland, and there was a fatal flaw in this particular one. It was a summons against Snow, the Brighton proprietor, for carrying passengers in excess; but, unfortunately for the prosecution, the coach was not plying for hire on that occasion, and Byers suffered defeat.
In this same year Byers was arrested and imprisoned for debt, but he was soon out again and prosecuting with redoubled energy. In November William Cripps, of the firm of Cripps & Wilkins, coach-proprietors, appeared at his instance before the Brighton magistrates, charged with permitting a name other than that of the licensees to be painted on his coach. The name was that of the afterwards celebrated Henry Stevenson, of the “Age.” It was placed there with an idea of securing patronage for the coach, and it was contended in court, that forty names might so be painted on the panel of the coach, if the proprietors liked. But the bench held otherwise, and imposed two mitigated penalties of 50s. each with costs, it being the first offence.
In August 1830, Byers procured three fines of £10 each and costs in an overloading case against Francis Vickers. In this affair the methods of himself and his spies were disclosed, for it appeared that the spy was watching the coaches from the upstairs window of a public-house. But already, for some time past, one of Byers’ men had set up for himself as a coachman’s lawyer, and, coming from the opposition camp, of course brought with him a great deal of special knowledge. From this time Byers’ business waned. The early steam-carriages of 1826 had foreshadowed the end of the coaching age, and when railways came the informers’ business was ruined. True, they might still make a trifle out of the surviving waggons, and it was possible, now and again, to catch a pikeman not giving a ticket when toll was paid, or not having his own name painted on his toll-board as collector when he had succeeded some other pikeman; but the penalties for these offences were, like the offences themselves, trivial. In short, informing ceased to pay its travelling expenses.
Among the many enactments for the protection of the public was one forbidding all four horses galloping at the same time. Mail-contractors, however, finding that they could not maintain the speed necessary to fulfil their contracts without galloping, generally secured a certain number of exceptionally fast trotters, for which they paid high prices, in order to have one in every team. Such an one was pretty widely known down the road as “the Parliamentary horse.” Proprietors of fast day-coaches, however, infringed this provision of the Act every day, as indeed every Act was continually infringed.