The last years of coaching were marked by a reduction in the duties on stage-carriages, long urged by the coaching interest, and introduced by the Act of August 24th, 1839. It was a grudging reduction, and came too late to be of much relief to an oppressed industry. Up to that date the mileage duty on passengers was on the graduated scale of 1d. a mile if licensed to carry four; 1½d. if licensed for six; 2d. for nine; 2½d. for twelve; 3d. for fifteen; and 3½d. for eighteen; whether running fully loaded or not. It was always open for proprietors to license for more or less, according to the season or their own requirements; but, on the other hand, if in view of a slack season they licensed for a small number and then on one of their journeys took up additional passengers, they were liable, on conviction, to a heavy penalty. In addition, there was a duty of 1d. a mile on the coach itself. The concession of 1839 reduced this impost to a halfpenny a mile, and provided a graduated passenger duty by which a coach licensed for not more than six persons paid 1d. a mile; up to ten, 1½d.; not more than thirteen, 2d.; not more than sixteen, 2½d., and so on to the impossible number of twenty-two, when the license would be 3½d.
According to a return made for 1838, the mileage duty paid on stage-coaches in England for that year was £166,625, showing a total mileage for those twelve months of 40,530,000. The Government thus apparently sacrificed £83,312 10s. in reducing the mileage duty by one-half; but the greatness of the sacrifice was more apparent than real, for already railways had begun and coaches were being discontinued on every hand, while a small railway passenger duty of one-eighth of a penny a mile made up for its smallness by the increase in travelling that railways brought.
Still later, the passenger duty on coaches was further reduced, and made 1½d. a mile on any number of passengers; while the annual stage-carriage license was reduced from £5 to £3 3s., and the licence for each coachman or guard from £1 5s. to 5s.
The harassed coach-proprietors, or those who still existed, were properly grateful for the reduction made, for it just turned the scale in many coaching accounts, and so kept on those public conveyances where otherwise they would have been commercially impossible. The railway magnates, who had by that time become a power in the land, could afford to influence the Government in favour of these concessions, for the coaches had already been driven off the direct routes, and were no longer formidable competitors of the locomotive. They had, indeed, become merely feeders to the victorious railways.
CHAPTER IX
THE EARLY COACHMEN
When stage-coachmen are mentioned, the mind at once flies to Mr. Tony Weller, a stout man with a red face and a hoarse voice proceeding from the depths of capacious shawls in which his throat is muffled. Such was the typical coachman at any time between the introduction of coaches and 1820, when a leaven of smartness and gentility began to be noticeable, and the time-honoured type to fade away.
Coachmen were generally fat for the same reason that postboys were thin: it was a necessity of their occupation. The postboys bumped their flesh away on horseback, but the coachman’s sedentary occupation, and still more a tremendous capacity for drinking induced by the open-air life, caused him to accumulate fat to an immoderate degree. The typical coachman is pictured in Hood’s ballad of John Day, who was
the biggest man,
Of all the coachman kind,
With back too broad to be conceived
By any narrow mind.
But while it would probably be safe to declare, without fear of contradiction, that there never was such a thing as a fat postboy, it would be the very height of rashness to say that a lean coachman was unknown. There were many such, but the traditional coachman was a bulky person, helped up to his seat by the combined efforts of the stable-helpers; and Dickens, in picturing Tony Weller, fell in with the public humour, although already the type was become somewhat out of date.