March 22nd.—The Norwich Day Coach upset at Brentwood. The coachman, James Draing, who was also proprietor, was killed.
April 21st.—The Southampton and Exeter Mail upset in the New Forest, two miles from Stony Cross, by the horses, frightened at an overturned waggon, running the coach up a bank. Cherry, the coachman, met a dreadful death, his head being literally split in two. A subscription of £350 was raised for his widow and six children.
May 1st.—The “Red Rover,” Ironbridge and Wolverhampton coach, upset half a mile from Madeley. One passenger, name unknown, killed. He was described as “a very stout gentleman, apparently about sixty years of age, dressed in an invisible green coat and great-coat of the same colour.”
June 26th.—William Cooke, guard of the Worcester coach, fell off his seat and was killed.
September 16th.—The Ludlow and Bewdley “Red Rover” overturned by the breaking of the front axle. The coach was going slowly down-hill at the time, and the wheel had the slipper on. It was a heavily-loaded coach, and all the outsides were violently thrown. A Mr. Thomas, a native of Ludlow, fifty-seven years of age, retired from business, was so seriously injured that he died next day. At the inquest a deodand of £30 was placed on the coach.
ROAD VERSUS RAIL. After C. Cooper Henderson 1845.
From this time forward the records of coaching accidents grow fewer, and occur at longer intervals; but only because coaches themselves were being swiftly replaced by the railways, which had by now come largely into their kingdom. Railway accidents took their place, and the coaching artists began to paint, and the printsellers to publish, pictures like that of “Road versus Rail” engraved here, showing a very smart and well-appointed coach bowling safely along the road, while a railway accident in progress in the middle distance attracts the elegant and rather smug attention of coachman and passengers.
Every one now forgot the numerous casualties of the old order of things—save, indeed, the bereaved and the maimed, suffering from the happenings of pure mischance, or from the drunken or sporting folly of the coachmen.
But to the very last, in those outlying districts to which the rail came late, and where the coaches continued to ply regularly until the ’fifties, the tragical possibilities of the road were insistent, confounding the thorough-going sentimentalists to whom the old times were everything that was good, and the new, by consequence, altogether bad. Listen to the moving tale of the Cheltenham and Aberystwith down mail on a wild night “about” 1852, according to the vague recollection for dates of Moses James Nobbs.