CHAPTER X
THE LATER COACHMEN
The smart coachmen came into existence with short stages and the fast day-coaches, about 1824. They did not burst suddenly upon an astonished world—were not, like those insect-wonders, chrysalids in the morning and butterflies in the afternoon—but developed by insensible degrees. The first incentive to this improvement was, doubtless, that acquaintance with the moneyed sporting world which began when the country gentlemen ceased to travel horseback and took to going by coach, and thence, from passive passengers, developed an interest in driving; sitting beside the coachman and learning from him something of what those worthies now, for the first time in their lives, began dimly to perceive was an art, and not merely an ordinary wage-earning occupation. When Jack Bailey, of the old “Prince of Wales,” who taught old John Warde, the first of the amateurs, how to drive, tutored him, he wrought a greater revolution than he knew. Acquaintance with, and tutorship of, the growing ranks of the amateurs brought a strange alteration in themselves. They taught the young sprigs of nobility coaching, and their pupils unconsciously initiated them in new manners of thought, speech and dress. The two classes strangely reacted on one another, for while the coachmen learned to discard top-boots and took to trousers, the amateurs thought it a fine thing to file their front teeth, so that they could splice whip-points and spit like the professionals, to wear the heavy “double Benjamins,” clumsy and many-caped, that were necessary for the coachmen, and to be, in fact, as thoroughly “down the road” in dress, manner and talk as though they were professionals themselves. Each exaggerated the most remarkable features of the other, so that the coachmen became caricature gentlemen, and the gentlemen the most wonderful travesties of the coachmen.
An admiring critic of coaching in its last decade enlarged with great satisfaction upon the complete dissimilarity between the modern “artists” and the “workmen” of old time. Their change of character and appearance had kept pace with the improvements in the different points of their profession. No longer did one see the dram-drinking, gin-consuming, jolly-looking rotundities of yore. Instead of those honest, wet old souls, the “ribbons” were handled by pinks of perfection, turned out at all points like gentlemen, and in character also like gentlemen, tasting nothing but their glass of sherry from end to end of a journey.
The Old “Prince of Wales” Birmingham Coach. After H. Alken.
But side by side with these improvements upon the old order came what were known to our grandfathers as the “flash men,” who, at the extremity of ill-assumed gentility, were probably more objectionable than the rough-and-ready old fellows of an earlier generation. The flash coachman flourished very rankly indeed at Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, and other great commercial centres. He always dressed in the extreme of fashion, and perhaps a little in advance of it. His silken stock was swathed higher up his neck, his gold (or gilded) scarf-pin was bigger, his waistcoat had a more alarming pattern, his hat was more curly in the brim than others, and in his conversation and manners he dotted the “i’s” and crossed the “t’s” of his betters. He was, in fact, an unconscious caricature of those among the upper classes who took an interest in the road, and was a very loud, insufferable and offensive person, who, it was said, “had a missus at both ends,” smoked a dozen real Havanahs in a hundred miles, and hardly thanked you for half a crown. Such men imposed upon many of the good commercial folks of those trading towns who were foolish enough and inexperienced enough to take cigar-smoking for superiority and overdressed insolence for the hallmark of gentility; and these fellows became, in consequence, the curse of the roads. Borrow has, in his Romany Rye, a very vigorous chapter on their kind, but errs in so far as he seems to consider that they, and they only, formed the “stage-coachmen of England.”
“The stage-coachmen of England, at the time of which I am speaking, considered themselves mighty fine gentry; nay, I verily believe, the most important personages of the realm, and their entertaining this high opinion of themselves can hardly be wondered at: they were low fellows, but masters at driving; driving was in fashion, and sprigs of nobility used to dress as coachmen, and imitate the slang and behaviour of the coachmen, from whom occasionally they would take lessons in driving, as they sat beside them on the box, which post of honour any sprig of nobility who happened to take a place on a coach claimed as his unquestionable right; and these sprigs would smoke cigars and drink sherry with the coachmen in bar-rooms and on the road; and when bidding them farewell would give them a guinea or a half-guinea, and shake them by the hand, so that these fellows, being low fellows, very naturally thought no small liquor of themselves, but would talk familiarly of their friends Lords So-and-so, the Honourable Misters So-and-so, and Sir Harry and Sir Charles, and be wonderfully saucy to any one who was not a lord or something of the kind; and this high opinion of themselves received daily augmentation from the servile homage paid them by the generality of the untitled male passengers, especially those on the forepart of the coach, who used to contend for the honour of sitting on the box with the coachman when no sprig was nigh to put in his claim. Oh! what servile homage these craven creatures did pay these same coach fellows, more especially this or t’other act of brutality practised upon the weak and unoffending—upon some poor friendless woman travelling with but little money, and perhaps a brace of hungry children with her, or upon some thin and half-starved man travelling on the hind part of the coach from London to Liverpool, with only eighteen-pence in his pocket to defray his expenses on the road; for as the insolence of these knights was vast, so was their rapacity enormous; they had been so long accustomed to have crowns and half-crowns rained upon them by their admirers and flatterers that they would look at a shilling, for which many an honest labourer was happy to toil for ten hours under a broiling sun, with the utmost contempt; would blow upon it derisively, or fillip it into the air before they pocketed it; but when nothing was given them, as would occasionally happen—for how could they receive from those who had nothing? and nobody was bound to give them anything, as they had certain wages from their employers—then what a scene would ensue! Truly, the brutality and rapacious insolence of English coachmen had reached a climax; it was time that these fellows should be disenchanted, and the time—thank Heaven!—was not far distant. Let the craven dastards who used to curry favour with them, and applaud their brutality, lament their loss now that they and their vehicles have disappeared from the roads.”
Here the Borrovian fury overreaches itself, and fails to convince the reader of that brutality of a whole class he would fain have you believe in. Were the later coachmen, indeed, moulded in so unvarying a form? Assuredly not, for character still survived in the individual before the railway age dawned, and nowhere was more marked than on the box-seat. The sole person convicted of brutality in that attack is Borrow himself, consigning all the objects of his dislike to misery and want.
Such men might have been found; but we have only to mention old Thomas Cross, the dreamy, poetical, shiftless, other-worldly coachman of the “Lynn Union,” the Wards, and John Thorogood, on the Norwich Road, to see that the road was not handed over entirely to ruffians of the kind Borrow draws. But in all coachmen reigned an autocratic spirit, born of their mastery over four horses. In some this was expressed by contemptuous replies when passengers unqualified for the task endeavoured to talk about coaching and horsey matters; in others it was manifested by a faraway and unapproachable meditation or contemplation—or perhaps even vacuity of mind—like that of some Indian fakir dwelling upon the perfections of Buddha; beside which many a box-seat passenger felt a mere worm.