On September 11th, 1829, a month later than the watery adventures at Banff, the Birmingham and Liverpool Mail had an unfortunate experience at Smallwood Bridge, near Church Lawton, a point where the road is crossed by an affluent of the River Weaver. Unknown to those on the mail, the flooded stream had burst the arch of the bridge, and when the coach came to the spot, along a road almost axle-deep in water, it fell into the hole and was violently overturned. Of the three inside passengers, only one escaped. He was an agile young man, who broke the window and so extricated himself. The horses were drowned, but the coachman was fortunate enough to be washed against a tree-stump as the river hurried him along at six miles an hour. The force of this happy meeting nearly stunned him, but he held on, and eventually found his way ashore. The guard was saved in a similar manner. Accidents almost forming parallels with this were of frequent occurrence, and a seasoned traveller exclaimed: “Give me a collision, a broken axle and an overturn, a runaway team, a drunken coachman, snowstorms, howling tempests; but Heaven preserve us from floods!”
MAIL-COACH IN A FLOOD. After J. Pollard.
CHAPTER VIII
THE GOLDEN AGE, 1824–1848
It was “golden” chiefly from the sportsman’s point of view, and in the opinions of those who found a keen delight in the perfection of coach-building and harness-making, in the smartness of the beautiful horses, and in the speed attained. From the sordid view-point of the profit-and-loss account, although this was the age in which Chaplin and a few others made their great fortunes, it was a time when the high speed and other refinements of travelling made the path of the coach-proprietor a thorny and uneasy one, often barren of aught but honour. “You are ‘in it,’ I see,” said a proprietor who himself had been severely bitten in this way, and had left the business, to a coachman who, like many of his fellows, had long cherished an ambition to become a coach-master, and had just acquired a share: “you are ‘in it.’ Take care how you get out of it.” One of the prominent men in it—Cooper, who ran a good line of coaches on the Bath Road—found himself at last in the Bankruptcy Court, and many smaller men appeared in the same place. The greatest increase of cost was in the item of horses. In earlier times the stock had lasted for years, despite the long stages and harder pulling; but in this period of good roads and short stages, when, all things being equal, a team should have lasted longer, the great coach-proprietors found it necessary to renew their stock every three years. Chaplin’s method of doing this was to replace one-third of his horses every year.
It is not to be supposed that the horses thus disposed of were always broken down or worn out by their three years of strenuous exertion in the fast coaches. They had only lost those agile qualities necessary for that use, and, finding purchasers among farmers and country tradesmen who had no occasion to gallop at eleven miles an hour, lived very comfortably, grew sleek and fat, and must often, from roadside paddocks, have beheld their successors slaving away in the fast coaches; finding much satisfaction in their own altered circumstances. Coachmen at this time usually drove between thirty and forty miles out, and then took the up coach back, perhaps more than half a day later. With such an arrangement the horses had the same driver, and it was generally found that they worked much better in such cases. The coachman’s responsibility for their condition was also undivided, and the proprietor was easily able to weed out from his coachmen those who lingered at the changes and made up the lost time on the road, to the distress of their teams. It was Chaplin who made it known, by all the vigorous language at his command, that any one of his coachmen found in the possession of one of those instruments of torture, resembling a cat-o’-nine-tails, for punishing horses, and known as a “short Tommy” would be instantly dismissed. Chaplin’s direct influence and interests may be said to have described a radius of from forty to fifty miles from London, and within that circle the “short Tommy” was therefore but seldom seen. One historic occasion there was, however, when such an object did most dramatically present itself before Chaplin, who chanced to be at a wayside inn when one of his coaches pulled up to change. On the roof was a warder with two convicts. As the coachman, with much deliberation, lowered himself from his box to the ground, the “short Tommy” he had been sitting on fell in front of the windows, and as it lay there attracted the eagle eye of that great coach-proprietor, who, sternly bent upon executing justice upon the offender, strode forth. The coachman, dismayed, saw his employer and the forbidden instrument at once, in one comprehensive, understanding gaze; but he was a resourceful man, and handed it to the warder, telling him, with a portentous wink and a warning jerk of the head, that he had dropped something. That worthy, entering into the spirit of the deception, accepted the pretended cat-o’-nine-tails, and the coachman breathed freely again.
The days of ten- or eleven mile- stages, just at this time faded away, gave a horse one stretch of so many miles a day; but in the fast coaches of the newer age they ran, as we have seen, out and home, six or seven miles each way. It was to the very last a disputed point whether it was better for a horse to do his ten or eleven miles and have done with it for the day, or to do his two shifts of six or seven. Many coachmen who could not depend upon their horsekeepers objected to two sweats a day; but this division of work was a decided advantage to the horses, if well tended, and in such cases they had the advantage of sleeping at home every night. The number of horses kept for one of the fast coaches of this Augustan age would have astonished the pioneers of coaching; one horse for every mile travelled was the establishment kept up. Slow coaches could do with fewer.
The average price paid for a coach-horse at this period was £30, but some were acquired for a mere trifle, owing to their being vicious or unmanageable in private hands. The private owner’s dilemma was the coach-proprietor’s opportunity. It mattered little to him what defects of temper a horse possessed so long as he was sound in wind and limb. For the rest, a little discipline, harnessed with three others, all subject to the rule of those very able disciplinarians, the coachmen, quickly sufficed to bring such an animal to reason. There were thus some very queer animals drawing the coaches in these last years.