“Again, in coming from Bath by a night coach, I was so saturated with wet and shivering with cold that I got out at Reading, rushed to the ‘Bear,’ and slept there the night.”

Such was the best travelling that money could buy in the days before England was—according to the coachmen—made a gridiron by the railways.

CHAPTER VII
SNOW AND FLOODS

Severe weather, in the shape of frosts, thunderstorms, or hurricanes, was powerless to stop the coach-service, but exceptionally heavy snowfalls occasionally did succeed in doing so for very brief intervals; and floods, although they never were or could be so general as to wholly suspend coaching, often brought individual coaches to grief.

In the severe winter of 1798–9, when snow fell heavily and continuously at the end of January and during the first week of February, several mails, missing on February 1st, were still to seek on April 27th, and St. Martin’s-le-Grand mourned them as wholly lost. By May Day, however, they did succeed in running again!

Very few details survive of that exceptional season, or of that other, in 1806, when Nevill, a guard on the Bristol Mail, was frozen to death; but the records of the great snowstorm that began on the Christmas night of 1836 are very full.

Christmas Day, 1836, fell on a Sunday, and it is worth notice, as a singular coincidence in this country of only occasional heavy snowfalls, that the Christmas night of 1886, also a Sunday night, exactly half a century later, was marked by that well-remembered snowstorm which disorganised the railway service quite as effectually as that of 1836 did the coaches, and broke down and destroyed nearly every telegraph-post and wire in the land.

The famous snowstorm of 1836 affected all parts of the country, and only on two mail routes were communications kept open. Fourteen mail-coaches were abandoned on the various roads, and for periods ranging from two to ten days the travels of others ceased. The snowstorm itself continued for nearly a week. The two routes remaining unconquered during this extraordinary time were those to Portsmouth and Poole, but precisely why or how they were thus distinguished is not made clear. There is no doubt that the coachmen and guards on the Portsmouth and Poole Mails were strenuous men, but that quality was common to many of those engaged upon the mails. Nor can we find any favouring circumstance of physical geography to account for this unusual good fortune. On the contrary, those roads are in places exceptionally bleak and exposed to high winds; and the strong wind that on this occasion bared the heights and buried the hollows twenty and thirty feet deep in snow-wreaths was an especial feature of the visitation. Fortunately for all upon the roads—for those who laboured along them, and for those who were brought to a standstill in the drifts—the cold was not remarkably severe.

But never before, within living recollection, had the London mails been stopped for a whole night within a few miles from London, and never before had the intercourse between the South Coast and the Metropolis been interrupted for two whole days. On Chatham Lines the snow lay from thirty to forty feet deep, and everywhere, except on the hilltops, it was higher than the roofs of the coaches. Nay, according to a contemporary newspaper account, “The snow has drifted to such an extent between Leicester and Northampton as to occasion considerable difficulty and danger. In some parts of the road passages have been cut where the snow had drifted to the depth of thirty, forty, and in some places fifty feet.”