Meanwhile, “Post Coaches” and “Light Post Coaches” were at the head of the coaching hierarchy. Introduced long before mail-coaches came into being, they were then the most expensive and exclusive, as they were also the speediest, of public conveyances, and ranked next after the post-chaises. They were expensive chiefly because they provided only limited accommodation; originally only three or four inside, and one or two out, with no luggage, except small trunks or parcels. The term “Post” had no reference to the Post Office, but was intended to give at once an idea of speed and an approach to that absolute privacy only obtained by specially hiring a post-horse or a post-chaise. Indeed, the earliest Post Coaches not a little resembled a post-chaise hired by a party of friends for the journey. In securing a seat by post-coach, the traveller, in view of the limited accommodation, mathematically reduced his chances of meeting and journeying with vulgar and objectionable characters; while the higher fare tended to produce the same effect by eliminating all but those who were rich enough to afford the cost, and were therefore, by an easily understood process of reasoning, likely to be cleanly and well-mannered. How highly objectionable the company in a stage-coach might and could be we have the testimony of many travellers to tell, from Dean Swift to John Wesley and Macready, the actor. Their trials and experiences are mostly recorded elsewhere in these pages; but two examples may take their place here to illustrate the reason why Post Coaches flourished so greatly.
Let us, then, hear Wesley:—
“I went,” he says, “to Norwich (from London) in the stage-coach with two very disagreeable companions, called a gentleman and gentlewoman, but equally ignorant, insolent, lewd, and profane.
“July 21st, 1779.—(From Coventry) I took coach for London. I was nobly attended: behind the coach were ten convicted felons, loudly blaspheming and rattling their chains; by my side sat a man with a loaded blunderbuss, and another upon the roof.”
The felons, “behind the coach,” would ride in the basket, which was without springs. Their chains would necessarily rattle, and considering the discomfort of ten manacled men, jammed together, without seats, and jolted over bad roads, it is not surprising they “blasphemed.”
Macready travelled in 1811 by the Liverpool stage, from Birmingham to London. He says:—
“I got into the coach; its odours were many, various, and unpleasantly mingled, and the passengers, a half-drunken sailor and an old woman, did not impress me with the prospect of a very pleasant journey. The pace at which the vehicle proceeded made me doubt whether it would ever reach London, and its creakings and joltings seemed to augur a certain overturn.” This objectionable conveyance took five hours to accomplish the eighteen miles between Birmingham and Coventry, and only reached London at five o’clock the next evening.
But there is no subject upon which it is more rash to generalise than that of coaching history. One road might be thirty or forty years in advance of another, and Diligences and Post Coaches mean things very different in one part of the country from conveyances similarly named, but of different construction and capacity, running in other districts. In 1782, for example, there was a self-styled “Post Coach” running between London, Maidenhead, and Marlow, which certainly did not fully answer the description given above; although, from the evidence of the very curious old painting, it still retained a certain elegance, in spite of carrying outsides, and owning that vulgar appendage, a “basket,” behind. This Post Coach, which in the contemporary painting bears its name, starting-point, and place of destination plainly to be seen, is first heard of in 1773, running daily from the “King’s Head,” Old Change, at noon. What the fare was to Marlow we have not been able to discover, but to Maidenhead, distant from the City 31 miles, it was 5s.
“Accommodation” coaches abounded all over the country from about 1800. They were generally slow coaches, with ample room, travelling along the roads in leisurely fashion, and stopping anywhere and everywhere, to pick up passengers and luggage. The nearest parallel to them nowadays is the slow, stopping, long-distance train, which halts at every little wayside station and sees the express flash by at sixty miles an hour.
Thus far we have recorded chiefly the titles by which types of coaches were known. We now come to coaches individually named. Early among these is the “Rockingham,” London and Leeds stage, established in 1781, and continued until the railway came to Leeds, in 1841. Rockingham was, indeed, a name to conjure with in Yorkshire, and there were at least two other coaches with that name running on branch roads from Leeds. The “True Blue” was the name of the old Leeds, Malton and Scarborough coach, originating in the same year as the “Rockingham,” and lasting three years longer. Three others ran between Leeds and Wakefield, Knaresborough and Selby, and Leeds and Bradford. “True Britons,” too, were plentiful in the broad-acred county of Yorkshire, where politics and patriotism kept parties at fever heat and divided even travellers into parties to such an extent that an ardent supporter of the “Buffs” would almost rather walk or post than journey by a “Blue” coach; while a True Blue Tory innkeeper would deny accommodation to a Buff Whig (supposing in the first instance that the Whig had so far forgotten what was due to his faction as to seek shelter there) and think nothing of the custom lost.