CHAPTER XIII
WHAT BECAME OF THE COACHMEN
“Steam, James Watt, and George Stephenson have a great deal to answer for. They will ruin the breed of horses, as they have already ruined the innkeepers and the coachmen, many of whom have already been obliged to seek relief at the poor-house, or have died in penury and want.”—The Times, 1839.
“Where,” asked Thackeray in Vanity Fair, “where is the road now, and its merry incidents of life? Is there no Chelsea or Greenwich for the honest, pimple-nosed coachmen?” No, there was not. The action of Parliament in sanctioning so many railways in so short a space of time, without making any legislative restriction or provision in favour of the coachmen whose careers were ruined by railways, seems strange to the present generation, but in no single instance were they considered. The greatest and swiftest revolution ever brought about in the methods and habits of travelling took place in the short period of time between 1837, when the effect of railways first began to be felt, and 1848, when most of the great main lines were opened. Eleven years is no great space in which to effect so sweeping a change, and it is not surprising that ruin and misery were wrought by it, not among coachmen alone, but dealt out impartially to every one of the many people and interests whose prosperity was bound up with the continuance of the old order of things. Coachmen were by no means the greatest sufferers: others felt the blow as severely, but in this chapter we have no concern with the great army of innkeepers, ostlers, post-boys and stable-helpers who so suddenly found their occupation taken away and no new means of livelihood provided.
THE COACHMAN, 1832. After H. Alken.
What became of the coachmen? In the vast majority of cases we do not, and cannot, know; for if one thing be more certain than another, it is that we are better informed in classic and mediæval lore than in the story of our forbears of two or three generations ago, and that most of the papers and documents necessary to a full and particular history of coaching have been destroyed.
Many among those not born in the age of coaches have marvelled at what they consider the wealth of reminiscences about the old coachmen. The truth is that there exists no such wealth. There were certainly no fewer than three thousand coachmen throughout the country in the days just before railways. What do we know of them? Very little. Even their names have been forgotten, except in some (comparatively few) special cases. No one can give us a complete list of the coachmen of the Edinburgh Mail, of the Exeter “Telegraph,” or Devonport “Quicksilver,” or of any of the crack day coaches. Nearly complete in some cases, but never quite, because the reminiscent travellers by famous mail or stage have never troubled to detail such things; caring only to narrate the peculiarly bad or good coachmanship, as the case might be, or the eccentricities in manner or dress, of the men who drove them. The merely efficient coachman, with no salient characteristics to be described enthusiastically or spitefully caricatured, stood little chance of notice in print. He drove until the natural end of his career came, or until it was cut short by the railway; and in either case ended obscurely.
On the other hand, the noted masters of the art of driving a coach, who taught the young bloods that accomplishment, or who were excellent companions with joke and song to while the hours away, have found abundant notice; and they are the chronicles of these men that make that apparent wealth of reminiscence.
The coachmen ended, as may be supposed, very variously. A generation ago, many of the city and suburban omnibuses were driven by gloomy, purple-faced men, confirmed misanthropes, who viewed the world with jaundiced eyes, and, living in vivid recollection of the past, despised themselves, their omnibuses, and the people they drove. Those were the old coachmen. The Richmond Conveyance Company, whose omnibuses in the ’sixties conveyed many Londoners between the “Goose and Gridiron,” St. Paul’s Churchyard, and that famous riverside town, employed a number of old-time coachmen, who wore tall hats with a gold band, and were never tired of telling their box-seat passengers about the open-handedness of the passengers of old, and incidentally that travellers by ’bus were “not worth a d——n”; not, perhaps, a tactful or ingratiating manner, but “out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh.”