The fare was, as a matter of fact, half a crown. There were no fewer than seven short stages between London and Uxbridge daily, each making two journeys. What of those London inns whence they started? Where are they now? Echo does not answer “where?” as she is commonly said to do, because it is not in the nature of echoes to repeat the first word of a sentence. No; echo merely reverberates “now?” with a questioning inflection.
The “Goose and Gridiron,” whose proper name was originally the “Swan and Harp,” in St. Paul’s Churchyard, was one of these starting-points. From the same inn went the Richmond and many other suburban stages. That old inn was demolished about 1888. The “Boar and Castle and Oxford Hotel,” No. 6, Oxford Street, was another house of call for the Uxbridge stages. It vanished long ago, and those who seek it will only find on its site the Oxford Music Hall and Restaurant—bearing a different number, for the street was renumbered in 1881. The “Boar and Castle” was a large, plain, stucco-fronted house, with its name writ large across the front in raised letters.
As for the “Old Bell,” another of these starting-points of the Uxbridge coaches, it was pulled down in 1897. It stood on the site of Gamage’s, in Holborn, opposite Fetter Lane. Of another Uxbridge house, the “Bull,” a few doors away, the sign, the figure of a ferocious black bull, very properly chained and fastened by a secure girth, still exists on the frontage, but “Black Bull Chambers,” a set of grimy modern “model” dwellings, now occupy the coach-yard. The “Bell and Crown,” afterwards “Ridler’s,” next Furnival’s Inn, has been swept away to help make room for an extension of the Prudential Assurance Offices, and the “New Inn,” 52, Old Bailey, has given place to warehouses and the premises of a firm of wholesale newsagents. Away westward, the Uxbridge and other short stages called at the “Green Man and Still,” at the corner of Argyll Street, Oxford Circus, and at the “Gloucester Warehouse,” near Park Lane. The last-named was rebuilt forty years ago, but the “Green Man and Still” was only demolished in February 1901.
THE SHORT STAGE. After J. Pollard.
The time taken over the eighteen miles between the City and Uxbridge was three hours. To Richmond in 1821, when short stages ran frequently from five different inns, the time was an hour and a half. As many as fourteen coaches ran to that town in 1838, most of them making six journeys a day. Shillibeer and his omnibuses, introduced in 1829, had by that time rendered the exclusive short-stages old-fashioned, and they were gradually replaced by the more commodious and popular vehicles, whose occupants were in turn looked down upon by the short-stage passengers, just as they had been despised by the four-horse coaches.
CHAPTER IX
COACH-PROPRIETORS
None among the servants of the public earned their living more hardly, or took greater risks in the ordinary way of business, than the coach proprietors. It was a business in which the few—the very few—became rich, and the majority lived a strenuous life, with empty pockets at the end of it. It was very truly said of them, as a class, that they lived hard, worked hard, swore hard, and died hard. To this was sometimes added that they held hard, by which you are to understand that what money they did succeed in getting they grasped tightly. This last was, however, by no means a characteristic of the majority, who very often dissipated what they had made by successful ventures on one road by disastrous competition on another. There was never a more speculative business than that of a coach-proprietor, and never one so cursed with insane competition. Why embittered rivalries of this kind should have been more common on the road than in any other line is only to be explained by the hypothesis that a certain element of sporting emulation entered into it; and a kind of foolish pride that impelled a man to put and keep a line of coaches on a road to “nurse” a rival, not always with the hope of earning a profit for himself, but with the idea of cutting up another man’s ground.
The most outstanding figure among coach-proprietors was that of William Chaplin. He towered above all his contemporaries in the magnitude of his business, and was, when railways came to destroy it, first among those few who saw the folly of opposing steam, and were both acute enough and sufficiently fortunate to reap an additional advantage from the new order of things, instead of being ruined by it, as many less fortunate and less far-seeing men were.