Even more than the passengers, coach-proprietors dreaded amateur coachmen, and very properly dismissed those professionals whom they caught allowing the reins out of their charge. They had cause for this dread, for not only was the act of allowing amateurs to drive itself an illegal one, entailing penalties, but it often resulted in accidents, bringing in their train very heavy compensation claims. Juries invariably satisfied themselves as to whether a professional or an amateur was driving at the time when an accident occurred, and assessed damages accordingly.
Sir St. Vincent Cotton was the cause of a serious accident that happened to the “Star of Cambridge.” Springing the horses over a favourable stretch of galloping-ground, he went at such a reckless pace that Jo Walton, the professional coachman, seized hold of the reins. In doing so the coach was overturned, and the passengers severely injured. A jockey named Calloway had his leg broken, and, with others, brought an action for damages. The affair cost Robert Nelson and his partners nearly two thousand pounds.
A good amateur coachman was, as a general rule, like an accomplished violinist, only to be produced by long training. Caught young and properly schooled, he might become an elegant as well as a thorough whip; but the late-comer rarely attained both grace and complete mastery. “He who would master this most fascinating science of coachmanship,” says Dashwood, in the New Sporting Magazine, “must begin early, under good tuition. He must work constantly on all kinds of coaches, and, thereby accustoming himself to every description of team to be met with, no matter how difficult or unpleasant, will ere long acquire a practical knowledge on that all-important point, the art of putting horses well together.” He then proceeds to sigh for one hour of “old Bill Williams,” of the “Oxford Defiance,” who, as a schoolmaster of gentlemen-aspirants to coaching honours was, in his time, unequalled. He was supposed to have turned out more efficient coachmen than all the rest of his brethren put together. “Never by any chance—confound him!—would he allow an error or ungraceful act to escape unnoticed, and I have often got off his box so annoyed at his merciless reproofs and lectures that I vowed no power on earth should make me touch another rein for him. The first morning, in particular, that I was with him I shall never forget. In spite of all my remonstrances, nothing would satisfy him but I must take the reins from the door of the very office, at the ‘Belle Sauvage,’ he himself getting up behind, in order, as he said, not to ‘fluster the young ‘un.’ By great good luck we got pretty well into the street, and, without anything worth telling, for some way past Temple Bar; but, as my evil star would have it, the narrow part of the Strand was uncommonly full, and having rather an awkward team, and being moreover in a pretty particular stew, we had more than one squeak at sundry posts, drays, etc., etc. Still, not a word was uttered by the artist, though by this time he had scrambled in front, till, after a devil of a mistake in turning into the Hay-market, he touched my arm very civilly, with a ‘Pull up, if you please, sir, by that empty coal-cart.’ I did so—at least, as well as I could—and found, to my utter horror, that it was for the purpose of his requesting the grinning blackamoors that belonged to it to lend him some six or seven of their sacks, to take the drag home; ‘for,’ said he, ‘I am sure the gentleman won’t take it up to the Gloucester Coffee House a coach.’”
CHAPTER XII
END OF THE COACHING AGE
“This is the patent age of inventions.”—Byron.
In 1789, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, of Shrewsbury, in writing his poem, the Loves of the Plants, penned a most remarkably accurate prophecy, comparable with Mother Shipton’s earlier “carriages without horses shall go.” He wrote:—
Soon shall thy arm, unconquered steam, afar
Drag the slow barge, or urge the rapid car;
Or on wide waving wings expanded bear
The flying chariot through the realms of air.
Fair crews, triumphant, smiling from above,
Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move;
Or warrior bands alarm the gaping crowd,
And armies shrink beneath the rushing cloud.
The first part of this prophecy was fulfilled in the period between 1823 and 1833, when steam-carriages—the motor-cars of that age—had a brief popularity.
Before railways successfully assailed the coaches, horsed vehicles had faced the inventions of a number of ingenious persons who wrestled with that problem of steam traction on common roads which had attracted Murdock in 1781. Trevithick took it up in 1800, and others followed; but it was not until 1823 that the subject began greatly to interest engineers. At that period, however, Hancock, Ogle, Church, Gurney, Summers, Squire, Maceroni, Hills and Scott-Russell plunged into that troubled sea of invention. Chief among these, from the standpoint of results achieved, were Mr. (afterwards Sir) Goldsworthy Gurney, Walter Hancock, and Colonel Maceroni. Gurney as early as 1827 had patented and tried a steam-carriage on the road. The boiler, it was explained for the benefit of nervous people, was perfectly safe. Even if it were to burst, being “constructed on philosophical principles,” no one could be hurt. On July 28th, 1829, he ran one of his inventions on the Bath Road. This was what he termed a “steam-tractor,” used as an engine to draw an ordinary barouche. Unfortunately for Gurney, he and his party reached Melksham on the annual fair-day, and a hostile crowd of rustics not only surrounded the steam-carriage, shouting “Down with machinery!” but stoned the engine, the carriage, and Gurney and his friends, with such effect that the machinery was disabled and several of the party very seriously injured.