Less noticed by gossips on old coaching days than the coachmen were, their ending is more obscure, but it may be supposed that, like those occupants of the box-seat, many of them settled down as landlords of small inns in towns they had known when they travelled the road.
CHAPTER XIII
HOW THE COACHES WERE NAMED
“What’s in a name? Little enough, by the fact that people travel by the Thame coach, the Hitchin chaises, and the Crawley stage.”—Old Coaching Essay.
It was not until quite late in the coaching era that proprietors began generally to adopt the practice of naming their coaches. In early days there was little or no occasion to do so, for when there were only two or three coaches on the most frequented roads, no difficulty existed in distinguishing between them. One might be the old original stage; another, somewhat better built and more up-to-date, would be the “Machine”; another yet, fastest of all, the “Fly,” or the “Flying Machine.” The earliest named coach of which we have any record was the “Confatharrat” London and Norwich stage, mentioned in 1695. As we have already seen in these pages, this was an old-time way of spelling the word “Confederate,” and the coach was one probably owned and run by a syndicate, who shared the risks and the profits. Before competing coaches began to multiply and hustle one another in the struggle for public support, proprietors were content to announce “a coach,” or “a stage-coach,” to run, and took no trouble to characterise their vehicle in any more attractive fashion. But when an opposition took the road, the vehicles so curtly named became “commodious,” “easy,” “elegant,” and anything else you like in the commendatory kind. The next stage in this development was to appeal to the sentiment of old customers and to endeavour to retain their favour, not usually by increased speed, lower fares, or better accommodation, but by describing an old-established coach as “the original.” Passengers, who did not lay so much stress upon sentiment as upon personal comfort, were generally well-advised to book seats by the new opposition coaches rather than by the “originals,” which had the defect of being old-fashioned, and perhaps, in many cases, worn out. Surely in no other business was rivalry so bitter and unrelenting as in that of coaching, and the annals of the road afford occasion for a sigh or a smile as one reads the furious denunciations levelled by one coach-master against another in their old advertisements. This contention started in the very first years of the Brighton Road. In 1757 James Batchelor extended his old Lewes stage to Brighthelmstone (as Brighton then was known). He took two days to perform the journey. Five years later appeared a certain J. Tubb, allied in partnership with S. Brawne, with intent to drive Batchelor off the road. They advertised, in May 1762, a “Lewes and Brighthelmstone Flying Machine, hung on steel springs, very neat and commodious,” to do the journey in one day. This presumption aroused Batchelor, the old incumbent, to extraordinary energy, for, the very next week, he started a “new large Flying Chariot,” and—reduced his fares! This reduction of fares seems to have struck Mr. Tubb as an exceedingly mean and contemptible move, and he rushed into print with a very long and virulent advertisement in the Lewes Journal, desiring “Gentlemen, Ladies, and others” to “look narrowly into the Meanness and Design of the other Flying Machine to Lewes and Brighthelmstone in lowering his prices, whether ’tis thro’ conscience or an endeavour to suppress me. If the former is the case, think how you have been used for a great number of years, when he engrossed the whole to himself, and kept you two days upon the road, going fifty miles. If the latter, and he should be lucky enough to succeed in it, judge whether he won’t return to his old prices when you cannot help yourselves, and use you as formerly.”
To this Batchelor rejoined with an appeal “to the calm consideration of the Gentlemen, Ladies, and other Passengers, of what Degree soever.” This appeal was chiefly the time-honoured one, that his coach was the original, and therefore deserved support: “Our Family first set up the Stage Coach from London to Lewes, and have continued it for a long Series of Years, from Father to Son and other Branches of the Same Race. Even before the Turnpikes on the Lewes Road were erected, they drove their Stage, in the Summer Season, in one day, and have continued to do over since, and now in the Winter Season twice in the week.” The Lewes and Brighton Road seems, however, to have been long enough and broad enough for both Tubb and Batchelor, for they both continued until four years later, when Batchelor died, and his business was sold to Tubb, who took a partner, and himself in due course experienced the bitterness of a rival on the road, prepared with better machines, a speedier journey, and lower fares.
About this time, when hatreds and rivalries were seething in the south on this then comparatively unimportant road, the Shrewsbury and London road, on its several routes, by way of Birmingham and Coventry, or by Oxford and Banbury, was, as befitted so important a highway, the scene of a much keener and more protracted strife between opposing confederations of coach-proprietors, and in consequence coach nomenclature grew with the rapidity of melons under a glass frame. It should be noted here that coaching did not progress evenly all over the kingdom, but was more advanced on some roads than others. Thus, although the era of “Machines” and “Flying Machines” did not properly dawn until after 1750, yet on the Bath Road we already find a “Flying Machine” in 1667. Just as, nowadays, those people who happen to reside on a branch line of some great railway are commonly fobbed off with the secondhand rolling-stock and other offscourings of the main line, so the inhabitants along the lesser roads had to be content with a mere “stage-coach,” while the great trunk roads were thronged with “machines” and “post-coaches.”
In 1753 the Shrewsbury “Long Coach” and “Stage Coach” were started, and long continued; but from 1764 things changed swiftly. In that year the “Machine” began. The next spring it had become the “Flying Machine,” and in 1773 its success had raised up a “New Flying Machine,” soon re-christened the “New Fly.” To the challenge of this “New Fly,” fitted, according to its proprietors, “quite in the modern taste” and with steel springs, the owners of the “original London and Salop Machine” replied, not only with the boast of being pioneers in days of old, but (much more to the point) advertised that their conveyance also was in the modern taste and fitted with springs; and, moreover, pointed out that the Coventry route, taken by it to London, was shorter than that by Oxford, taken by the rival firm.
“Machine” seems to have been a favourite description for coaches at any time between 1754 and the beginning of the nineteenth century. If the term had any specific meaning at all, and was anything more than a vague, grandiose way of advertising an ordinary stage, it must originally have indicated a vehicle just in advance of the usual ruck. The Bath “Flying Machine” was probably of lighter build than the other coaches, and the Edinburgh “new genteel, two-end glass coach machine, on steel springs,” of 1754, was doubtless only a somewhat neater example of a stage-coach than many then in use on that route.
The next development was the “Diligence,” conveying only three passengers and going at the express rate necessary to cover the distance between Shrewsbury and London in one day. It went three times a week, and charged some four shillings less than the “Flying Machine.” Rivalries on this road had by this time quite outgrown custom. In 1776 there were three distinct coaches between Shrewsbury and London, but they could not all pay their expenses, and so were gradually taken off altogether, or ran less frequently. The “Diligence,” which more than any other had forced the pace, was itself discontinued.