One at least of the mail-coaches still survives. This is a London and York mail, built by Waude, of the Old Kent Road, in 1830, and now a relic of the days of yore treasured by Messrs. Holland & Holland, of Oxford Street. Since being run off the road as a mail, it has had a curiously varied history. In 1875 and the following season, when the coaching revival was in full vigour, it appeared on the Dorking Road, and so won the affections of Captain “Billy” Cooper, whose hobby that route then was, that he had an exact copy built. In the summer of 1877 it was running between Stratford-on-Avon and Leamington. In 1879 Mr. Charles A. R. Hoare, the banker, had it at Tunbridge Wells, and also ordered a copy. Since then the old mail-coach has been in retirement, emerging now and again as the “Old Times” coach, to emphasise the trophies of improvement and progress in the Lord Mayor’s Shows of 1896, 1899 and 1901, in the wake of electric and petrol motor-cars, driven and occupied by coachmen and passengers dressed to resemble our ancestors of a hundred years ago.
MAIL-COACH BUILT BY WAUDE, 1830.
Now in possession of Messrs. Holland & Holland.
The coach is substantially and in general lines as built in 1830. The wheels have been renewed, the hind boot has a door inserted at the back, and the interior has been relined; but otherwise it is the coach that ran when William IV. was king. It is a characteristic Waude coach, low-hung, and built with straight sides, instead of the bowed-out type common to the products of Vidler’s factory. It wears, in consequence, a more elegant appearance than most coaches of that time; but it must be confessed that what it gained in the eyes of passers-by it must have lost in the estimation of the insides, for the interior is not a little cramped by those straight sides. The guard’s seat on the “dickey”—or what in earlier times was more generally known as the “backgammon-board”—remains, but his sheepskin or tiger-skin covering, to protect his legs from the cold, is gone. The trapdoor into the hind boot can be seen. Through this the mails were thrust, and the guard sat throughout the journey with his feet on it. Immediately in front of him were the spare bars, while above, in the still-remaining case, reposed the indispensable blunderbuss. The original lamps, in their reversible cases, remain. There were four of them—one on either fore quarter, and one on either side of the fore boot, while a smaller one hung from beneath the footboard, just above the wheelers. The guard had a small hand-lamp of his own to aid him in sorting his small parcels. The door-panels have apparently been repainted since the old days, for, although they still keep the maroon colour characteristic of the mail-coaches, the Royal arms are gone, and in their stead appears the script monogram, in gold, “V.R.”
CHAPTER II
DOWN THE ROAD IN DAYS OF YORE
I.—A Journey from Newcastle-on-Tyne to London in 1772
In 1773, the Reverend James Murray, Minister of the High Bridge Meeting House at Newcastle, published a little book which he was pleased to call The Travels of the Imagination; or, a True Journey from Newcastle to London, purporting to be an account of an actual trip taken in 1772. I do not know how his congregation received this performance, but the inspiration of it was very evidently drawn from Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, then in the heyday of its success and singularly provocative of imitations—all of them extraordinarily thin and poor. Sentimental travellers, without a scintilla of the wit that jewelled Sterne’s pages, gushed and reflected in a variety of travels, and became a public nuisance. Surely no one then read their mawkish products, any more than they do now.
Murray’s book was, then, obviously, to any one who now dips into it, as trite and jejune as the rest of them; but it has now, unlike its fellows, an interesting aspect, for the reason that he gives details of road-travelling life which, once commonplace enough, afford to ourselves not a little entertainment. Equally entertaining, too, and full of unconscious humour, are those would-be eloquent rhapsodies of his which could only then have rendered him an unmitigated bore. It should be noted here that although his picture of road-life is in general reliable enough, we must by no means take him at his word when he says he journeyed all the way from Newcastle to London. We cannot believe in a traveller making that claim who devotes many pages to the first fifteen miles between Newcastle and Durham, and yet between Durham and Grantham, a distance of a hundred and fifty miles, not only finds nothing of interest, but fails to tell us whether he went by the Boroughbridge or the York route, and mentions nothing of the coach halting for the night between the beginning of the journey at Newcastle, and the first specified night’s halt at Grantham, a hundred and sixty-five miles away. Those were the times when the coaches inned every night, and not until the “Wonder” London and Shrewsbury Coach was started, in 1825, did any coach ever succeed in doing much more than a hundred miles a day. So much in adverse criticism. But while a very casual glance is sufficient to expose his pretensions of having made the entire journey in this manner, it is equally evident that he knew portions of the road, and that he was conversant with the manners and customs that then obtained along it—as no one then could help being. The fare between Newcastle and London, the lengthy halts on the way, and the manner in which the passengers often passed the long evenings at the towns where they rested for the night—witnessing any theatrical performance that offered—are extremely interesting, as also is the curious sidelight thrown upon the fact that actors—technically, in the eyes of the law, “rogues and vagabonds”—were then actually so regarded. How poorly considered the theatrical profession then was, is, of course, well known; but it is curious thus to come upon a reference to the fact that London theatres then had long summer vacations, in which the actors and actresses must starve if they could not manage to pick up a meagre livelihood by barnstorming in the country; as here we see them doing.
So much by way of preface. Now let us see what our author has to say.
To begin with, he, like many another before and since, found it disagreeable to be wakened in the morning. When a person is enjoying sweet repose in his bed, to be suddenly awakened by the rude, blustering voice of a vociferous ostler was distinctly annoying. More annoying still, however, to lose the coach; and so there was no help for it, provided the stage was to be caught. The morning was very fine when the passengers, thus untimely roused, entered the coach. Nature smiled around them, who only yawned in her face in return. Pity, thought our author, that they were not to ride on horseback: they could then enjoy the pleasures of the morning, snuff the perfumes of the fields, hear the music of the grove and the concert of the wood.