Although torrents of rain had been falling and the night was pitch dark, all went well with the mail until nearing the Lugg Bridge, near Hereford, where the little river Lugg, rushing furiously in spate to join the Wye, had undermined the masonry. No sooner did the horses place their weight upon it than the arch gave way, and the coachman, Couldery the guard, and the one passenger, were precipitated into the torrent and swept away for more than a mile down stream. It was midnight when the accident happened, and until daybreak the three, at separate points, clung to rocks and branches, from which they were then rescued by search-parties. The coachman and guard recovered from the exposure, but the passenger died.

Charles Ward, that fine old coachman, who kept on the road in Cornwall for many years after coaching had ceased over the rest of England, tells amusingly of the happening that befell the cross-country Bath and Devonport Mail, in some year unspecified. It might have been a most serious accident, but fortunately ended happily. The coach was due to arrive at Devonport at eleven o’clock at night. On this particular occasion all the outside passengers, except a Mrs. Cox, an “immense woman,” who kept a fish-stall in Devonport Market, had been set down at Yealmpton, where the coachman and guard usually had their last drain. They went, as usual, into the inn, and very considerately sent out to Mrs. Cox a glass of “something warm,” it being a very cold night. The servant-girl who took out that cheering glass was not able to reach up to the roof, and so the ostler, who was holding the horses’ heads, very imprudently left them, to do the polite, when the animals, hearing some one getting on the coach, and thinking (for coach-horses did actually do something like it) that it was the coachman, started off, and trotted at their ordinary speed the whole seven miles to the door of the “King’s Arms” at Plymouth, where they were in the habit of stopping to discharge some of the coach-freight. On their way they had to cross the Laira Bridge and through the toll-bar, and did so, keeping clear of everything on the road in as workmanlike a manner as though the skilfullest of whips was directing their course. Mrs. Cox, however, was terrified. Afraid to scream lest she should startle the horses, she had to content herself with gesticulating and trying to attract the attention of the people met or passed on the road. When the horses drew up in an orderly fashion at the “King’s Arms,” and the ostlers came bustling out to attend to their duties, they were astonished to see no one but the affrighted Mrs. Cox on the outside, and two inside passengers, who had been in total ignorance of what was happening. The coachman and guard, in a very alarmed state, soon came up in a post-chaise. It took many quarterns of gin to steady the nerves of the proprietress of the fish-stall, and the incident became the chief landmark of her career.

We will conclude this chapter of accidents on this lighter and less sombre note, and tell how humour sometimes remained in the foreground even if the possibilities of tragedy lurked threatening in the rear. The tale used often to be told on the Exeter Road how, on one occasion, when Davis was driving the up “Quicksilver” Mail between Bagshot and Staines on a dark night, he ran into some obstruction, and the coach was upset into the adjoining field, fortunately a wet meadow. The “insides” were asleep at the time, and they naturally awoke in the wildest alarm. One, who did not grasp the situation, called out, “Coachman, coachman, where are we?” “By God, sir,” replied Davis, “I don’t know, for I was never here before in all my life!” Happily, nobody and nothing was hurt, and in twenty minutes the coach was away, making up for lost time.

CHAPTER V
A GREAT CARRYING FIRM: THE STORY OF PICKFORD AND CO.

To the incurious public, who are as familiar with the name of “Pickford’s” as with that of their favourite morning newspaper, and to whom the sight of one of Pickford’s vans is a mere commonplace of daily life, this great carrying firm is just a part of our modern commercial system. To suggest to that favourite abstraction—the “average man”—so commonly cited, that Pickford’s is a firm whose origin is to be traced back two hundred and fifty or three hundred years would be a rash thing. He would tell you that this is a firm of railway carriers, and that, as railways are not yet a hundred years old, Pickford’s certainly cannot be two centuries older.

Thus do later changes overlie and conceal earlier methods of business.

Our average citizen would be wrong in two things: in his premisses, that the firm is wholly one of railway carriers; and in his conclusions, that it came into existence with railways themselves. The origin of Pickford’s is, indeed, lost in the mists that gather round the social and commercial life of the early seventeenth century; for the beginnings of the business go back to that time when the original firm of packhorse carriers was established, to whose trade the Pickfords succeeded, by purchase or otherwise, about 1730. Traditions only survive of those long-absorbed carriers, whose packhorse trains originally plied on the hilly tracks between Derby and Manchester “about two hundred and fifty or three hundred years ago,” as we vaguely learn. No documentary or other evidence exists on which to found an account of them. What would we not give to be able to recover from the romantic past the story of those old-time carriers, contemporary with the famous Hobson himself, beyond comparison the most celebrated of all these old men of the road!

But all records have been destroyed. When the several changes were made that from time to time altered the constitution of the business, the papers and documents relating to past transactions were cast aside as waste-paper, and there was none among the people of those times who thought it worth while, for the interest and instruction of posterity, to set down what he knew of the current history of the concern. That this should have been the case is no matter for surprise. The past or the future interests many to whom the present is only something from which to escape, as commonplace and dull. That man who is not glad, when the business day is done, to leave for home and straightway dismiss all thoughts of his business from his mind is rare indeed; and still more rare he who finds interest, beyond mere money-getting, in the daily commerce by which he lives and prospers.

About 1770 Matthew Pickford, the representative, in the second or third generation, of that family in this olden firm, is found established in Manchester, a town then making rapid industrial progress, and affording great scope for the carrying trade, already, for some years past, conducted by waggons; but we do not obtain any details of his business until November 16th, 1776, when he issued the following advertisement, afterwards inserted in Prescott’s Manchester Journal for Saturday, January 4th, 1777:—