The stage and mail coachmen were no exotics, but, like every one else, the product of their country and their times; and as those times changed, so did they. The evolution of the smart coachmen of the ’thirties can be followed, step by step, until progress, in the shape of railways, extinguished the species. The original floggers of six horses, who could only get along by dint of severely punishing those unhappy animals throughout the day, were not really coachmen in the later sense. They understood little of the art of coaching, and were merely drivers. From early morn to sundown they lashed the same horses along the rutted ways, with intervals for mending the harness—generally, according to the testimony of the time, the “rotten harness”; but those would have been wonderfully strong traces that could long have withstood the strain they were subjected to, and so they were probably not always so decayed as contemporary accounts would have us believe. Under these circumstances, and the generally hard and rough life they led, it is not to be wondered at that coachmen were originally a rough and brutal class of men. They cannot be paralleled nowadays, and the difference between them and the later ornaments of the box can only be understood by comparing a modern van-driver with the coachman of an aristocratic carriage—and then we should be doing injustice to the van-man.
“MY DEAR, YOU’RE A PLUMPER”; COACHMAN AND BARMAID.
After Rowlandson.
As coaching progressed and twenty-mile stages replaced the day-long toil of the horses, not only did the six-horse give place to four-horse teams, but coachmen improved. There was need for such improvement, and all the science and resource of which they were capable were put to the proof. Mud, stones, ruts, sandy places to plough through, steep hills to lash his horses up to, and dangerous descents to hold them in, were the commonplaces of the coachman’s career up to the dawning of the nineteenth century. The coaches, too, were heavy and clumsy, and harness now really was rotten, and had every now and again to be mended while the passengers waited with what patience they could command. Happily, time was not “of the essence of the contract,” as the lawyers say, and half a day late was no matter at that period. But all these difficulties made the coachman of those times an expert in many things. He was not of that later kind, finicking in manner and dandies upon the box, but a great, weather-beaten, bluff and gruff creature, mummified in wraps; an expert in getting the last ounce out of his cattle, and ready with his whip, not always because he was brutal by nature, but because he had to thrash the wretched animals to get his coach along at all. The coachmen of those days wore their whips out frequently, and a usual detail of their equipment was the dozen or more of whipcord points in the button-hole, ready to be spliced on—an operation they could perform with ease and efficiency with their teeth while driving. When even the double-thonged whip failed to rouse the poor brutes to super-equine exertions, the “apprentice”—a kind of cat o’ nine tails—was brought into use, and the wheelers thrashed with it. This engine of torture was in later years known familiarly as the “short Tommy,” and was kept in reserve on many provincial coaches. Among those familiar with coaching in its last years, some have asserted the use of this instrument up to the time when coaches themselves disappeared, and others deny it. Both were right and both wrong: on some roads it was on occasion brought forth, while on others it was unknown.
There were no smart coachmen before the introduction of mail-coaches. Before coaches carried the mails and the drivers became, in a sense, officials and persons of importance, wreathed around with a vague atmosphere of authority, your average driver took no sort of pride in himself. Nor, supposing the existence of one who fared the roads in smart attire, could he for long have kept so gay and debonair an appearance. The meagreness and uncertainty of his livelihood forbade it, and if those factors had been eliminated, there still remained the unutterable badness of the roads to discourage him, together with the longer spells of driving that these earlier men knew, which wearied them and rendered them careless of details. Thus the stage-drivers of the era that preceded the classic age of the road wore clumsy hay-bands round their legs to protect them from the cold, and, together with their many layers of clothing, their top-boots encrusted with the mud of a month’s journeys, and their general air of untidiness, were figures of fun, in sharp contrast with their brethren of a later day, who were certain of their employment, of their liberal and frequent tips, of good roads exceedingly well kept, and of their coaches and cattle being maintained in the pink of condition by a small army of stable-hands and helpers. The poor old fellows of a bygone age wore perhaps nothing but fold upon fold of “comforters” round their necks, while their linen did not bear inspection. The flower of the coaching age, on the other hand—the coachmen of the first quarter of the nineteenth century—wore the gayest and the neatest neckties as a finish to a neat and striking professional costume. They were artists alike in the management of their horses and in the folding of a tie. Never a journey but they had a posy in their buttonhole, and never an occasion when they were not spotlessly clean, in linen, top-boots, and costume generally. It was an unmistakable costume, and one familiar to us nowadays in its revival by modern coaching enthusiasts. Box-cloth coats, fearfully and wonderfully stitched in five or six rows, and decorated with buttons of an enormous size, together with white beaver hats, were the most outstanding items of this marvellous costume.
A reminiscent traveller, writing in 1831, lets some light into dark places. He said he was old enough to remember a certain West-country coach, which he took to be representative of others at that period. It always took ten, and sometimes twelve hours to do fifty-seven miles. “Now,” he said, marvelling at the progress of the age, “it takes only six hours.” Joe Emmens, the driver of this slow coach, was famous for never at any time turning away a would-be passenger, no matter how crowded his conveyance, which was often observed to be carrying seventeen out and nine in, with parcels and hampers tied to and suspended from all kinds of hazardous places. This did not, we sorrowfully acknowledge, argue zeal for his employers’ interests, but only an inordinate appetite for those “short fares” which by ancient use and wont the coachman pocketed. The custom was as old as that of “tipping.”
Tipping the coachman, a practice already mentioned, was early introduced. It originated, there can scarce be any reasonable doubt, with the very first stage-coach journey, and flourished exceedingly to the very last, when the guard as well came in for his share. The custom was originally known as “capping,” from the coachman coming with hat or cap in hand for these contributions: a humble and beggarly method to which the later artists of the coachbox were wholly strangers. The later generation, it is true, removed their hats as a matter of courtesy when they “left you here,” but their fee was no longer chucked negligently into that headgear, as of old, but discreetly inserted into an extended palm, and received as of right.
The earliest stages of tipping showed the practice in a very logical and commonsense light, for although the later coachmen could be very surly and disobliging if they were not “remembered,” they had not a tithe of those opportunities of being actively offensive which the older race of drivers enjoyed. The later generations of coachmen were more directly responsible. They worked to a time-table, on good roads, with fine cattle and perfect coaches; the older men stopped when and where they liked, and altogether had the comfort or discomfort of their passengers very largely in their hands. Thus they were to be conciliated and kept in good humour by a reasonable expectancy of vails. We first hear of tipping in 1665, in The Committee, Sir Robert Howard’s comedy, where the vulgar committeeman’s wife gives Toby, the coachman, something less than he expected. “By my whip,” he says aside, “’tis a groat of more than ordinary thinness. Plague on this new gentry,” he adds, with a sneer, “how liberal they are!”
“Tipping” grew and flourished extravagantly in after ages. The wealthy and the free-handed set the standard then, as they do now in these otherwise altered times, with the result that those who could not afford the outlay in which the richer indulged were generally insulted or neglected.
It was not often that the coachmen were so outspoken as the hero of the following tale. “What do you expect?” asked a passenger new to the road of him when collecting the customary tips at the end of his stage. That ornament of the box was blunt and frank: “Gents generally gives me a shilling; fools with more money than brains gives me half a crown,” he said. What, in that case, could the passenger do but proclaim himself, in the amount of his gratuity, a “gent” with a superfluity of brains over cash, even though the coachman-philosopher was a loser to the extent of one-and-sixpence?