“By different means men strive for fame,
And seek to gain a sporting name.
Some like to ride a steeple-chase;
Others at Melton go the pace,
Where honour chief on him awaits
Who best takes brooks, and rails, and gates,
Or tops the lofty ‘bullfinch’ best,
Where man and horse may build a nest;
Who crams at everything his steed—
And clears it too—and keeps the lead.
Some on the ‘Turf’ their pleasure take,
Where knowing ‘Legs’ oft bite ‘the Cake’;
Others the ‘Road’ prefer; and drest
Like ‘reg’lar’ coachmen in their best,
Handle the ribbons and the whip,
And answer ‘All right!’ with ‘yah hip!’
At steady pace off go the tits,
Elate the Sporting Dragsman sits;
No peer nor plebeian in the land
With greater skill drives four-in-hand.”
SIR ST. VINCENT COTTON.
Cotton, known to the plebeian professionals of the Brighton Road as “the Baronet,” and to his familiars as “Vinny,” was so hard hit by his disastrous gambling that he owned and drove the Brighton “Age” for a living. Let us do him the justice to add that he did not attempt to disguise the fact, and that he took his misfortunes bravely, like a sportsman. Reduced, as a consequence of his own folly, from an income of £5000 a year to nothing, “I drive for a livelihood,” he said to a friend: “Jones, Worcester, and Stevenson have their liveried servants behind, who pack the baggage and take all short fares and pocket all the fees. That’s all very well for them. I do all myself, and the more civil I am (particularly to the old ladies) the larger fees I get.” He, indeed, made £300 a year out of this coach, and got his sport for nothing.
The “Jones” of whom he spoke was Charles Tyrwhitt Jones, of whom, being just an amateur with no eccentricities, we know little. Of Harry Stevenson, one of the most distinguished and accomplished among amateurs of the road, we know a good deal, although even of his short life full particulars have never been secured. He made his first appearance on the Brighton Road in August 1827, as part-proprietor of the “Coronet,” and even then his name seems to have been one to conjure with, for it was for painting it on a coach of which he was not one of the licensees that Cripps was fined in November of that year. Stevenson was then but little more than twenty-three years of age. He had gone from Eton to Cambridge, and during his exceptionally short career was always known by the fraternity of the road as “the Cambridge graduate.” Although so little is known of him, sufficient has come down to us to place him on a higher pedestal than that of the majority of the gentlemen amateurs. He was not only a supreme artist with the ribbons, “whose passion for the bench,” as “Nimrod” says, “exceeded all other worldly ambitions,” but he was also a supremely good fellow, in a broader and better significance of that misused term than generally implied. That he was one of the spendthrifts who had run through their money before taking to the road as a professional would appear to be a baseless statement, invented perhaps to account for that higher form of sportsmanship which entirely transcended that of the general ruck of “sportsmen,” by inducing him to drive his coach, as an ordinary professional would, day by day, instead of when fine weather and the inclination of the moment served. A good professional he made, for he did by no means forget his birth and education when on the box, and was singularly refined and courteous. His second, and famous, coach was the “Age,” put on the Brighton Road in 1828. This celebrated coach eclipsed all the others of that time, from the mere point of view of elegance and comfort. On a road like that to Brighton there was not, of course, the chance to rival such flyers as the Devonport “Quicksilver” and other long-distance cracks; but in every circumstance of its equipment it was pre-eminent. It was not for nothing that Stevenson loved the road. His ambition was to be first on it, and he succeeded. The “Age” was built and finished, horsed and found in every way without regard to cost. In a time when brass-mounted harness was your only wear, his was silver-plated. The horse-cloths, too, exhibited this unusual elegance, for they were edged with deep silver lace and gold thread, and embroidered in each corner with a royal crown and a sprig of laurel in coloured silks and silver. These cloths were, many years afterwards, presented to the Brighton Museum by Mr. Thomas Ward Capps, a later proprietor of the “Age,” and they are still to be seen there.
This was not by any means the sum of Stevenson’s improvements. The usual guard he replaced by a liveried servant, whom he caused to attend upon the passengers, when the coach changed horses, with silver sandwich-box and offers of sherry of a kind that appealed even to the jaded palates of connoisseurs. Stevenson was as excellent a whip as he was a good-hearted gentleman. “I am not aware,” wrote “Viator Junior,” “if, to quote a vulgar saying, he was ‘born with a silver spoon in his mouth,’ but I certainly think he must have been brought into the world with a whip and reins in his hand, for in point of ease and elegance of execution as a light coachman he beats nineteen out of twenty of the regular working dragsmen into fits, and as an amateur is only to be approached by two or three of the chosen few.”
Of course, coaching on these luxurious terms resulted in a staggering loss, and could not long have continued, but even those short possibilities were ended by the early death of Stevenson. The cause of the attack of brain-fever that ended his career early in 1830 is imperfectly known, and is merely said to have been “an accident.” The last scene was pathetic beyond the ordinary. Exhausted at the end of delirium, the bandages that had held his arms were removed, when, feebly raising himself up in bed and assuming as well as he was able his old habitual attitude upon the box, he exclaimed, as if with the reins in his hand, and to his favourite servant, who usually stood at his leaders’ heads, “Let them go, George; I’ve got ’em!” and so sank down, dying, upon his pillow, in the happy delusion of being once more upon the road.
Mr. Harry Foker and others of the “young Oxonians” or “young Cantabs” with more taste for driving four-in-hand than knowledge of that very difficult art, were frequent aspirants for the ribbons, and as they were generally flush of money and free with it, they often tasted the delights of tooling a coach along the highway. Professional coachmen on the Oxford and Cambridge roads reaped a bounteous crop of half-guineas by resigning the reins into these hands, but equally plentiful was the harvest of bruises and shocks gathered by the passengers as a result of their reckless or unskilled driving. These chartered libertines of the road are mentioned with horror by travellers in the first half of the nineteenth century, who have pictured for us four horses galloping at the incredible speed of twenty miles an hour, and the coaches rocking violently, while the “outsides” hold on like firemen, behind some uncertificated young cub from Oxford or Cambridge, or, anticipating the final cataclysm, drop off behind or dive into the hedges.
THE CONSEQUENCE OF BEING DROVE BY A GENTLEMAN. After H. Alken.