Cobbett, surly though his nature was, could not withhold admiration when noticing these latter-day coaches. “Next to a fox-hunt,” he says, “the finest sight in England is a stage-coach just ready to start. A great sheep- or cattle-fair is a beautiful sight; but in a stage-coach you see more of what man is capable of performing. The vehicle itself; the harness, all so complete and so neatly arranged, so strong, and clean, and good; the beautiful horses, impatient to be off; the inside full, and the outside covered, in every part, with men, women, and children, boxes, bags, bundles; the coachman, taking his reins in one hand and his whip in the other, gives a signal with his foot, and away they go, at the rate of seven miles an hour—the population and the property of a hamlet. One of these coaches coming in, after a long journey, is a sight not less interesting. The horses are now all sweat and foam, the reek from their bodies ascending like a cloud. The whole equipage is covered, perhaps, with dust and dirt. But still, on it comes, as steady as the hand of the clock. As a proof of the perfection to which this mode of travelling has been brought, there is one coach which goes between Exeter and London, whose proprietors agree to forfeit eightpence for every minute the coach is behind its time at any of its stages; and this coach, I believe, travels eight miles an hour, and that, too, upon a very hilly, and at some seasons a very deep, road.”
LATE FOR THE MAIL. After C. Cooper Henderson, 1848.
Yes, but had Cobbett written in still later years, he would have found the “Quicksilver” attaining, between the stages, a speed of nearly 12 miles an hour, and an average speed, including stops, of 11 miles, while a quite ordinary performance with the Shrewsbury “Wonder” was 158 miles in 14 hours 45 minutes, including stops on the way totalling 80 minutes. This gives a net average speed of a little over 11½ miles an hour. The Manchester “Telegraph” and other flyers made equally good performances. The “Tantivy,” one of the most famous of coaches, did not equal these feats.
The “Tantivy,” London and Birmingham coach, was started in 1832. It left the “Blossoms” inn, Lawrence Lane, at 7 a.m., and was in Birmingham by 7 p.m. The distance, by the route followed, through Maidenhead, Henley, Oxford, Woodstock, Shipston-on-Stour, and Stratford-on-Avon, was 125 miles, and, deducting one hour for changing and refreshing, the speed was only slightly over 11 miles an hour. This coach derived its name from the old word “Tantivy”—an imitative sound as old as the seventeenth century, and often used in the literature of that time, supposed to reproduce the note of the huntsman’s horn, and conjuring up ideas of speed. For Cracknell, the most famous of the coachmen of the “Tantivy,” who once drove the 125 miles at one sitting, and generally drove it between London and Oxford, the “Tantivy Trot,” quoted elsewhere in these pages, was written. Harry Salisbury drove between Oxford and Birmingham. Among its other coachmen was Jerry Howse. Costar and Waddell, of Oxford, horsed the “Tantivy” between Woodstock and London, and Gardner, of Stratford-on-Avon, part-horsed it onwards, not wholly to the satisfaction of Salisbury, who used to declare that the team out of his yard was worth about £25 the lot, and that they had once belonged to Shakespeare.
Competition in speed led naturally to rivalry in the building, upholstering, and general appointments of the coaches. Sherman’s Manchester “Estafette” was a splendid turn-out, holding its own against many rivals in the last years of the coaching age. Inside was a time-table elegantly engraved on ivory, showing all towns, distances and intermediate times, illuminated at night by a reflector lamp. It was at this time seriously proposed to light the coaches with gas, with the double object of securing better lighting and effecting a saving on the very heavy bills for oil consumed on the night coaches. The idea was generally abandoned when it was found that the gas tanks would be very heavy and that they would take up all the room in one of the boots, generally reserved for luggage. Coachmen and guards, too, professed anxiety lest they, sitting directly over the fore and hind boots, should be blown up. But, before the project was finally abandoned, it was fully proved that it was practicable, and in January 1827 the Glasgow and Paisley coaches were lit with gas, much to the amazement of the country folk. “Guid Lord, Sandy,” said an old woman to her husband, “they’ve laid gas-pipes all the way frae Glasgae Cross to Paisley!” But they had done nothing of the sort; the gas was carried, as already indicated, in a reservoir stowed away in the front boot.
Competition having already raged around the question of speed, and having introduced unwonted luxuries in travelling, turned next to the more deadly form of rate-cutting. In 1834 the coach-proprietors on three great routes were engaged in this game of Beggar-my-neighbour. In that year the fares to Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester fell to less than half their former price, and it was possible to travel to Birmingham for 20s. inside and 10s. out, or to Liverpool or Manchester for 40s. inside or 20s. out. They had little chance of being raised again, for, by the time the weaker men had been crushed out of existence, the railways were threatening the whole industry of coaching.
But reducing the fares by one-half was not always the last word in these bitter contests. There was a period on the Brighton Road when one might have been carried those 52 miles in 6 hours for 5s., with a free lunch and wine at the end of the journey and your money returned if the coach did not keep its time. The “Golden Age,” indeed!
At this period, when the long-distance coaching business was so severely cut up, those proprietors who served the districts surrounding London did exceedingly well. Coaching annals are almost silent on the subject of these suburban coaches, for, being drawn by only two horses, they were regarded by the four-in-hand artists with contempt. It has thus, in the absence of available information, often puzzled inquiring minds in the present generation to understand how the heavy passenger traffic was conducted between London and the outlying towns and villages within a radius of twenty miles. Those districts were served by these “short stages,” as they were called—coaches drawn by two horses, and making two or more journeys each way daily. There was an incredibly large number of these useful vehicles, which were in relation to the mails and fast long-distance coaches what the suburban trains are to the expresses in our own day. The ordinary coach-proprietors had rarely anything to do with these conveyances, which came to and set out from a number of obscure inns and coach-offices in all parts of the City and the West End.
One of these short stages is mentioned in David Copperfield, where David’s page-boy, stealing Dora’s watch and selling it, purchases a second-hand flute and expends the balance of his ill-gotten gains in incessantly travelling up and down the road between London and Uxbridge. Evidently a lover of the road, this larcenous page-boy. Most boys in buttons (and certainly the typical page-boy of the typical farce) would have expended the plunder in pastry or tobacco. This particular specimen, the diligent Dickens-reader will remember, was taken to Bow Street on the completion of his fifteenth journey, when four shillings and sixpence and the second-hand flute—which he couldn’t play—were found upon him. If we were contemplating an examination-paper on David Copperfield, with special reference to prices and social life early in the nineteenth century, we might put the following poser:—“State the average price obtainable on the average lady’s gold watch, and, deducting the purchase price of a second-hand flute, deduce from the resulting sum, and from the facts of the boy having made the journey fifteen times and still being in possession of four-and-sixpence, the cost of a single outside journey between London and Uxbridge.”