THE GUARD, 1832. After H. Alken.
The smiling chambermaid, she too forlorn,
The boots’ gruff voice, the waiter’s busy zest,
The ostler’s whistle, or the guard’s loud horn,
No more shall call them from their place of rest.
Then comes the final catastrophe:—
The next we heard, some new-invented plan
Had in a Union lodged our ancient friend.
Come here and see, for thou shalt see the man
Doom’d by the railroad to so sad an end.
The end was not yet, but the Lynn “Union” was off the road in 1847, and Cross could not obtain any form of employment on the railway. He had already, in 1846, petitioned Parliament, but without avail; and now entered upon those unhappy years in which he eked out a precarious existence on the occasional aid given him by such men as Henry Villebois, the good-hearted Norfolk sporting squire, and others who had often been passengers on the box-seat of the “Union.” In those years he published several pieces in verse, generally cast in the ambitious epic form. Unfortunately, he was not the poet he thought himself, and they are rather turgid and bombastic specimens of blank verse. He planned and wrote a History of Coaching, but in the bankruptcy of his printers the manuscript disappeared, and so what might have proved a really valuable work was lost. At last, in 1865, he found a home in Huggens’ College, a charitable institution at Northfleet, founded and endowed some twenty years earlier by a wealthy City merchant for gentlemen reduced to poor circumstances. This testimony to his social superiority above other coachmen seems to have cheered and invigorated him amazingly, for he was a collegian at Huggens’ beneficent institution for twelve years, and lived to be nearly eighty-six years of age.
Less fortunate was Jack Peer, or Peers, of the Southampton “Telegraph,” famous in his day, but reduced to driving an omnibus, and thence, being morose and quarrelsome in that position, by degrees to the workhouse. His unhappy situation became known to a gentleman who had often travelled by him in brighter times: a handsome subscription was raised, and he was at least enabled to end his days in quiet retirement.
A great many ex-coachmen became innkeepers and publicans. Among these was Ambrose Pickett, of the Brighton “Union” and “Item,” who anticipated the end of Brighton coaching in 1841, by becoming landlord of an inn in North Street, with the very appropriate sign of the “Coach and Horses.”
A much more famous coachman than he—Sam Hayward, of the Shrewsbury “Wonder”—followed Mr. Weller’s example, and married a widow, landlady of the “Raven and Bell,” on Wyle Cop; but he did not long survive the extinction of “the Road,” and the widow soon found herself again in that situation. John Jobson, who for many years drove the “Prince of Wales”—the “Old Prince,” as it was familiarly called—a London, Oxford and Birmingham coach, continued on to Shrewsbury and Holyhead—became a coach-proprietor, established at the “Talbot,” Shrewsbury, and a thorn in the side of Isaac Taylor, of the neighbouring “Lion.” Coaching came to an end at Shrewsbury in 1842, and the name of Jobson was heard no more.
Many coachmen were killed off the box in the exercise of their profession, as, in the chapter on accidents, has already been shown. A considerable number, secure in the affection of the wealthy amateurs, many of whom they had taught the art of driving, entered the service of those noblemen and gentlemen, in some horsy or stable capacity. The eighth Duke of Beaufort, one of the Sir Watkin Williams Wynns, and others, thus found employment for these refugees of the road, and continually aided many more; but something in the long overlordship they had exercised over four horses, and a good deal more perhaps in that hero-worship down the road, of which Washington Irving writes, had spoiled them. Their lives would not run sweetly in fresh grooves. They could not, or would not, take to new employments, and even, subsisting upon charity, were often absurdly haughty, insolent, and insufferable. Like horses, good living, coupled with little exercise, rendered them unmanageable, and they not infrequently quarrelled with the hand that fed them. “What do you know about throat-lashings and head-terrets?” contemptuously asked Harry Simpson, ex-coachman of the Devonport “Quicksilver,” of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, who, before him, had been holding forth to some of his guests upon the respective merits of those harnessing methods in the old coaching days. “Nothing practically,” answered the good-humoured baronet; “my ideas are only ideas. But you know all about the subject: let us have the benefit of a professional view.”
At this time Harry Simpson—“Little Harry,” as he was called, undersized and “looking like a tomtit on a round of beef when on the driving-box”—was stud-groom to that Welsh landowner, who, from compassion, had taken him into his employ when coaching failed. “Little Harry,” domineering and wilful as he was, remained in his service for thirty years, and died in 1886.