PICKFORD AND CO.’S ROYAL FLY-VAN, ABOUT 1820.
From a contemporary painting.
Meanwhile his anticipations were justified by the course of events, Railways did but alter the methods of the carrying trade. They not only did not destroy it, but, in the altered shape it took, increased it fifty-fold. No fewer than twenty-one district managers became necessary to the conduct of the business, which at length gave employment to between three and four thousand people.
The central figure of this successful reorganisation became, like William Chaplin, a power in the railway world. He was for some years Chairman of the South-Eastern Railway, and in that capacity strongly urged the purchase of Folkestone Harbour, an undertaking then in the market. His co-directors did not at the time agree with the proposal, but eventually came round to his way of thinking, and brought up the subject again. Meanwhile he had privately purchased the harbour. The high sense of duty that characterised him led to his considering that, as Chairman of the Railway Company, and as therefore trustee of the interests of the projectors, he could not retain the property, and he accordingly transferred it at the price he had given. He was at the same time a director of the Great Northern Railway of France, but was in 1848, in consequence of a severe illness, obliged to resign some of these activities, together with the detailed management of Pickford’s, which he then left in the hands of his three sons, but never gave up control of the business. He had in the meantime purchased an estate at Woodside Park, Whetstone, where he resided. He died there, March 24th, 1872, in his eighty-seventh year.
The portrait of him, as he was in the full vigour of his manhood, hangs amid the old-time relics still cherished in the Gresham Street offices—among the muskets and the blunderbusses carried by the guards of his fly-vans in the old days of the road.
CHAPTER VI
ROBBERY AND ADVENTURE
The whole art and mystery of coach-robbing began to be studied at a very early date. In the London Gazette during 1684 we find the following extremely explicit advertisement:—
“A GENTLEMAN (passing with others in the Northampton Stage Coach on Wednesday the 14th instant, by Harding Common about two miles from Market-street) was set upon by four Theeves, plain in habit but well-horsed, and there (amongst other things) robbed of a Watch; the description of it thus, The Maker’s Name was engraven on the Back plate in French, Gulimus Petit à Londres; it was of a large round Figure, flat, Gold Enamelled without, with variety of Flowers of different colours, and within a Landskip, and by a fall the Enamel was a little cracked; It had also a black Seale-Skin plain Case lined with Green Velvet. If any will produce it, and give notice to Mr. Samuel Gibs, Sadler near the George Inn Northampton, or to Mr. Cross in Wood Street, London, he shall have a Guinea reward.”
It is to be feared that the gentleman who thus mourned his watch never regained it.
From this time forward, until well into the nineteenth century, highwaymen and the highway-robbery of postboys, stage-coaches, post-chaises, and all sorts and conditions of wayfarers became commonplaces of travel. Dick Turpin’s name has acquired an undue prominence, on account of Harrison Ainsworth elevating him upon a pedestal, as the hero of a romance, but his was really neither a prominent nor an heroic figure. Innumerable other practitioners surpassed him. Claude Du Vall, who robbed and danced on Hounslow Heath; Abershaw, the terror of the Surrey Commons; Captain Hind, soldier and gentleman, warring with authority; Boulter, whose depredations were conducted all over the kingdom; the “Golden Farmer” on the Exeter Road, outside Bagshot: all these and very many more were infinitely superior to Turpin, and, as they phrased it, “spoke to” the coaches with great success during their brief but crowded career. Nowadays, we hear much of overcrowded professions; but those of the Army, the Church, and the Law are by no means so crowded as were the ranks of the liberal profession of highway robbery in the brave nights of crape mask and horse-pistols at the cross-roads on the blasted heaths which then encompassed the Metropolis; lonesome places of dreadful possibilities, which could not have been more conveniently placed for the purpose of these night-hawks had they been expressly designed for them.