THE DRIVER, 1852. After H. Alken.
When the London and South-Western Railway was opened to Richmond, in 1843, the first station-master was a former coachman and coach-proprietor, and a very notable one: no less a man, indeed, than Thomas Cooper, who had in his time run a service of coaches between London, Bath and Bristol, and had been landlord of that very fine old inn, the “Castle,” at Marlborough, now and for many years past a part of Marlborough College. Cooper’s varied enterprises on the Bath Road at last led him direct into the Bankruptcy Court. When he emerged from the official whitewashing process, Chaplin had acquired his line of coaches, and to that highly successful man he became a local manager. It was Chaplin who obtained him the position of station-master, as doubtless he had, in his influential position of director and chairman of the L. & S.W.R., already found many posts on that line for coachmen, guards, and others.
Jo Walton, the famous whip of the “Star of Cambridge,” became a messenger at Foster’s Bank in that town, after the railway had run him off. At an earlier date Dick Vaughan, of the Cambridge “Telegraph,” had been killed by being thrown out of a gig; but of him we know little. Of Thomas Cross, who was intimately connected with Cambridge, we know a good deal. He drove the Lynn “Union” for many years. Born in 1791, he died in 1877, in his eighty-sixth year. His occupancy of the box-seat lasted from 1821 to 1847, when his coaching career was brought to a close by the opening of the length of railway between Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn, His was a remarkable history. His father, John Cross, from being a highly prosperous coach-proprietor, with large estates and considerable social standing in the district between Petersfield and Portsmouth, was gradually brought low by misfortune and reckless speculations. John Cross, with the wealth and status of a country squire, had given his son Thomas an excellent education, and had destined him for the Navy; but serious attacks of epilepsy, and the results of an accident caused from falling in one of these fits on a number of wine-bottles, cut his career in the Service short. He was a midshipman when these distressing circumstances entirely altered his future. He then started farming, but misfortune dogged his steps. As owners of horses, himself and his father fared no better, for the terrible disease of glanders broke out and quickly carried off 120 animals. Eventually ruin faced the family, and Thomas Cross at last was reduced to seeking employment as a whip in the very yard once owned by his father. At the age of thirty, then, married and with a family of his own to support, we perceive him pretty thoroughly graduated in the school of life, and already familiar with the worst blows that adversity could give. In the beginning of his coaching career he drove the “Union” between London and Cambridge, but at different periods had the middle and the lower ground.
“A VIEW OF THE TELEGRAPH”: DICK VAUGHAN OF THE CAMBRIDGE “TELEGRAPH.”
From an etching by Robert Dighton, 1809.
He was not altogether a genial coachman, and held little intercourse with his brethren of the bench, to whom he considered himself, as indeed he was, superior. It was not, however, a judicious attitude to adopt, and those who drove the “Star” and “Telegraph” Cambridge coaches—Jo Walton, James Reynolds, and others—retorted by describing him as an indifferent whip. Perhaps, in fact, he was, but the “Lynn Union” was never a dashing coach, and gave no opportunity of displaying the skill demanded on others.
Tommy Cross was never so pleased as when he could pick up a box-seat passenger well grounded in the classics, or interested in poetry—for poetry first, and the classics afterwards, engaged his thoughts. He drove four-in-hand all day, and when his day’s work was done retired to some solitary chamber and mounted Pegasus, who carried him on the wings of the wind to the unearthly regions where dwell the spirits of Homer and Virgil. In short, he seems altogether to have lived a fine confused unpractical life, reflected to some degree in his book, The Autobiography of a Stage-Coachman, an interesting but formless work, so lacking in arrangement that it is difficult from its pages to gain any very clear view of his career, and actually impossible from it to discover what was the name of the Lynn coach he drove and so constantly mentions. That it was the “Union” only independent inquiries disclose. The name “Union” must in later years have taken an equivocal and prophetic meaning to poor Thomas, for, like many another coachman, he saw with apprehension railways building all over the country and running the coaches off successive roads. He knew his own turn must come, and was early seized with fears for the future. In 1843 he published, at Cambridge, in pamphlet form, some verses in imitation of Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard. He called it The Lament and Anticipation of a Stage-Coachman. It was, indeed, a very doleful production, describing what was already happening on other roads and was presently to befall on this. It is not proposed to quote the sixteen pages of this poetical effort. Let two verses suffice to show at once how, if his Muse did limp unmistakably, she was not wholly destitute of descriptive force:—
