Unlike commercial dinners, “shop” was not taboo round this hospitable mahogany, but formed the staple of the conversation. Indeed, these worthies could talk little else, and with the exception of sometimes shrewd and humorous sidelights on the towns and villages they passed on their daily drives, and criticisms of the local magnates whose parks and mansions they pointed out to the passengers on the way, were silent on all subjects save wheels, horses, and harness.

The etiquette of this room was strict. The oldest coachman presided—never a guard, for they always ranked as juniors—and at the proper moment gave the loyal toast of the King or Queen. An exception to this rule of seniority was when Mrs. Nelson’s second son, Robert, who drove her Exeter “Defiance,” was present, as occasionally he was. Following the practice of the House of Commons, whose members are never, within the House, referred to by their own names, but always as the representatives of their several constituencies, Mrs. Nelson’s coachmen and guards here assembled were addressed as “Manchester,” “Oxford,” “Ipswich,” “Devonport,” and so forth.

When Mrs. Nelson retired from the active management of the business, her eldest son, John, became the moving spirit. It was in his time that railways came in and coaching went out, but he was equal to the occasion, and started a very successful line of omnibuses, the “Wellington,” plying between Stratford, Whitechapel, the Bank, Oxford Street, Royal Oak, and Westbourne Grove. He died, a very wealthy man, in June, 1868, aged seventy-four.

Thomas Fagg, of the “Bell and Crown,” Holborn—an inn better known to later generations of Londoners as “Ridler’s Hotel”—was a small proprietor, but he had in addition a very lucrative business as a coach-maker at Hartley Row, near Basingstoke. The “Louth” and “Lynn” mails, however, were partly his, and Cary’s Itinerary for 1821 gives a list of twenty-six stage-coaches going from his door to all parts of the country. As “Ridler’s” the house was a very select “family hotel,” but in this it only carried on the traditions of Fagg’s time, when he had some most distinguished guests. Standing midway between the West End and the City, the “Bell and Crown” thus possessed certain advantages, and received much patronage both from commercial magnates and Society people. Among his patrons he numbered the “Iron Duke,” for whom he had an almost religious reverence, and indeed proposed to change the name of his house to the “Wellington,” in honour of him; only reconsidering the project when the Duke told him—as he commonly did the many extravagant hero-worshippers whose attentions were a daily nuisance—not to be “a d——d fool.” Fagg, however, was no fool, but a very shrewd person indeed. A coachman, applying to him for a place on one of his coaches, was put through a strict examination as to his qualifications, when it appeared that he was (according to his own account) not only a first-rate and steady “artist,” but had never capsized a coach in the whole course of his career—“he didn’t know what a hupset meant.”

“Oh! go away,” retorted the justly incensed Fagg; “you are no man for me. My coaches are always upsetting, and with your want of experience, how the devil should you know how to get one on her legs again?”

Mrs. Mountain also had her own coach-factory. She was no less energetic than that very lively and masterful person, Mrs. Ann Nelson, but in a smaller way of business. Sarah Ann Mountain’s house was that “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill, immortalised by Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby. She had succeeded to the business in 1818, on the death of her husband, and instead of giving up, decided to carry on, aided by Peter, her son. Thirty coaches left her inn daily, among them the first of the Birmingham “Tally-Ho’s,” a fast day coach, established in 1823, and historically interesting as the prime cause of the furious racing that characterised the St. Albans and Coventry route to Birmingham from this date until 1838. Mrs. Mountain’s coach-factory was at the rear of her premises on Snow Hill. There she built the conveyances used by herself and partners, charging them at the rather high rate of 3½d. a mile for their use.

A number of smaller proprietors accounted, between them, for many other coaches. Robert Gray, once established at the “Belle Sauvage,” left that place in 1807 and settled at the “Bolt-in-Tun,” a house still standing in Fleet Street, and now known as the “Bolt-in-Tun” London and North-Western Railway Receiving Office. He sent out twenty-five coaches daily, almost exclusively down the southern and western roads, among them the Portsmouth and the Hastings mails, the latter a pair-horse concern.

William Gilbert, of the “Blossoms” inn, Laurence Lane, Cheapside, had also a pair-horse mail—the “Brighton”—the “Tantivy,” Birmingham coach, and a fast night coach to Manchester, the “Peveril of the Peak.” Seventeen other coaches left his yard.

Joseph Hearn, proprietor of the “King’s Arms,” Snow Hill, was monarch among the slow-coaches, of which he had twenty-two. Among them were the Bicester “Regulator,” the Boston “Perseverance,” and the Leicester and Market Harborough “Convenience”—names that do not spell speed. Even his Aylesbury “Despatch” was a slow affair, reaching that town in six hours, at the rate of six and a half miles an hour.

Many great coach-proprietors were established in the chief provincial towns. Bretherton, of Liverpool, described by Chaplin as “an exceedingly opulent man,” Wetherald, at Manchester, Teather, of Carlisle, Waddell, at Birmingham, are names that stand forth prominently. The cross-country rivalry between these men was quite as bitter as that which raged among the Londoners, and, although with the lapse of time the exact explanation of the following extraordinary epitaph on a coach-proprietor of Bolton, Lancashire, cannot be given, it is doubtless to be found in one of these business feuds:—