It was also the guard’s duty to report any horses unfit for service, and any defective harness, and to see that the coaches were in proper condition. He was urged to look to the lamps, to behave with civility to the passengers, and to sound his horn on several occasions and in certain contingencies duly specified.
Besides these ordinary official duties there were the extraordinary ones, in the case of a breakdown or in the event of a snowstorm. The guard had his tool-box and an assortment of spare parts at hand, so that he could help the coachman in effecting roadside repairs to harness or the coach itself; and when, from snowstorm or any other cause, the coach could be driven no farther, it was the guard’s duty to impress one of the mail horses and ride to the next stage, or to secure post-chaises or saddle-horses, and personally convey the mail-bags. No matter what became of the passengers, his first care was for His Majesty’s mails.
Coachmen, although not the servants of the Post Office, were fined heavily for being late, and for stopping at unauthorised places, and the guards were fined as well for allowing them to do so. To one guard, who had been severely reprimanded for not keeping time, and excused himself by saying he could not get the passengers away from their dinner, Hasker said, “Stick to your time-bill, and never mind what passengers say respecting waiting over-time. Is it not the fault of the landlord to keep them so long? Some day, when you have waited a considerable time (suppose five or eight minutes longer than is allowed by the bill) drive away and leave them behind. Only, take care you have witness that you called them out two or three times. Then let them get forward how they can.”
Beyond his weekly half-guinea, an annual suit of clothes, and a superannuation allowance of seven shillings a week, a mail-guard had no official prospects. It is true he might rise to become a travelling inspector of mails, when he would receive up to £100 a year, with 15s. a day travelling expenses. But inspectorships were naturally few, and in any case it is not conceivable that a guard on a “good mail” would ever have exchanged places with an inspector, who certainly drew the higher salary but acquired no tips.
It has already been shown that guards did very well indeed on the mainroad mails, and could very well have afforded to take the situation without any salary at all, or even, like waiters at modern restaurants, to pay for the privilege of receiving fees and tips. The salary was, in fact, merely a nominal retaining-fee, to give the Department a hold upon them. But there were a number of cross-country mails that were not nearly so profitable as those that ran direct from London, and it is to be feared that their guards did not always do so particularly well. Nor even did those on the great mail-coaches keep their handsome incomes at the last. Railways impoverished many a mail before they were finally withdrawn, and it was then that the guards agitated for higher salaries. Their perquisites had reached the vanishing-point, and at last the Post Office agreed to a new scale of pay. From 1842 the guards were to receive from £70 to £120 a year, according to length of service, but at the same time were forbidden to receive gratuities. This looks like a concession made by some malevolent humorist, for already most of the mails had been withdrawn.
But mail-guards were, as a class, more fortunate than their brethren of the stage-coaches when railways ran them off the road. It is true that they keenly felt the loss of the great popularity they had enjoyed, and more keenly still did they miss the very handsome incomes they in many instances had made; but as officials directly employed by the Post Office, it was incumbent upon that Department to find them employ or to pension them. No such assured future could, or did, cheer the lot of the coachmen of the mails, or the coachmen or the guards of the stages.
The mail-guards in many instances were drafted to the great railway stations, where they assisted in despatching the mails by railway. Most prominent among all whose career was thus diverted was Moses James Nobbs, who died in 1897, half a century after the road as an institution came to an end.
The career of this old servant of the Post Office is, from a variety of circumstances, exceptionally interesting. He was born on May 12th, 1817, at Angel Street, Norwich, and was the son of a coachbuilder. Entering the Post Office service on June 27th, 1836, as guard of the London and Stroud Mail, he was shortly transferred to the Peterborough and Hull Mail, and then to the Portsmouth and Bristol. In 1837 he was on the new Exeter Mail, just started, on the accession of Queen Victoria, to go through Salisbury and Yeovil—-170 miles in 18¼ hours, doing the journey to Exeter in two minutes’ less time than the famous “Quicksilver” mail, which with this year varied its route and, avoiding Salisbury and Yeovil, went by the slightly shorter route through Amesbury and Wincanton. Nobbs went the whole distance, resting the following day. The following year found him as guard on the Cheltenham and Aberystwith Mail, on which he remained until 1854—sixteen years of nightly exposure on a route one hundred miles long, through the difficult and mountainous districts of mid-Wales. One of his winter experiences may be given as a sample.
MOSES JAMES NOBBS, THE LAST OF THE MAIL-GUARDS