Some of the undoubted veterans of the old order lived to patriarchal ages, and when they died their obituary notices confounded many a writer who had lightly declared, years before, that the last of the coachmen was dead.
THE GUARD, 1852. After H. Alken.
Matthew Marsh, who for many years drove the Maidstone “Times,” had been a private soldier in the 14th Foot, and fought and was wounded at Waterloo. He was generally averse from mentioning that fact, but one day, hearing from his box a dispute about the battlefield in which both disputants were in error, he corrected them, simply adding, “I happened to be there.” He died in 1887, aged ninety-four years, aided in his declining days by the Earl of Albemarle, who had fought in the same campaign.
William Clements, of Canterbury, who had driven the “Tally-Ho” and “Eagle” coaches between Canterbury and London before the nineteenth century had grown out of its teens, died in 1891, aged ninety-one. He was “the last of the coachmen,” yet, two years later, in the early part of 1893, we find the death recorded of Philip (commonly called “Tim”) Carter, aged eighty-eight. He it was who drove the “Red Rover” on June 19th, 1831, from the “Elephant and Castle” to Brighton in 4 hours 21 minutes—a pace then greatly in excess of anything before accomplished on that road. The occasion was the opening of William IV.’s first Parliament, and the haste was for the double purpose of speedily carrying the King’s Speech to Brighton and of advertising the “Red Rover” itself, then a newly-established coach. He did not run light, as many of the record-making coaches used, but carried fourteen passengers on that trip.
A year after Carter’s death Harry Ward passed away, August 4th, 1894, aged eighty-one. He was one of a family of ten, and the last, except his elder brother Charles, of whom mention will presently be made. Their father had himself been a coachman on the Exeter Road, and lived at Overton at the time Charles was born. He afterwards became landlord of the “White Hart,” Hartford Bridge, on the same great highway, eighteen miles nearer London. Harry Ward’s career is partly told on page 247, Vol. I. In after years he drove coaches started in the revival on the Brighton Road and elsewhere.
“Last,” it was again said, of the coachmen who drove the famous coaches up to the time when railways ran them off the road, was Charles S. Ward, elder brother of the above. He was born in 1810, and died in his eighty-ninth year, December 9th, 1899. His was an interesting career. Son of one who had been a small proprietor as well as coachman, and thus familiar from his birth with horses, he was driving the Ipswich and Norwich Mail as far as Colchester at the early age of seventeen, and was thus probably the youngest coachman ever entrusted with the conduct of a mail on any road. But he drove it for nearly five years without an accident, and was then promoted to the Devonport “Quicksilver,” at that time the fastest out of London, nightly driving the 29 miles to Bagshot, and then back, in the small hours of the morning, with the up-coach. After nearly seven years of this night-work, trying and monotonous even in summer, but extremely hazardous in winter, he sought a change, and applied to Chaplin, who was the proprietor of the “Quicksilver,” for day-work. The very fact of his being so sure and safe a coachman on the night mail operated at first against his being transferred to a coach not calling in so great a degree for those qualities, but in 1838 he obtained the offer of the Brighton Day Mail, which Chaplin was about to start, together with the chance of horsing it a stage. Like many coachmen, ambitious of becoming a proprietor, Ward closed with this offer, but the Day Mail did not load well, and he soon gave up his share. He might have known that Chaplin, so keen a business man, was not precisely the person to offer any one else a share worth retaining.
Ward then left Chaplin, and went over to the Exeter “Telegraph,” the fast day coach run by Mrs. Ann Nelson, in opposition to Chaplin’s “Quicksilver Mail.” Mrs. Nelson was glad to get so steady a whip as Ward, who for three years from this time drove the “Telegraph” daily between Exeter and Ilminster, a double journey of 66 miles. In 1841 the Bristol and Exeter Railway, a continuation of the Great Western, was opened as far as Bridgewater, and, by consequence, the “Telegraph” was withdrawn by Mrs. Nelson and her co-partners. Ward, however, held on, and, with the coachman on the other side of his stage and the two guards, extended the journey at one end as the railway cut it short at the other. From 1841 to April 30th, 1844, the “Telegraph” therefore ran the 95 miles between Bridgewater and Devonport, taking up the railway passengers at the former place. On May 1st, 1844, the railway was opened to Exeter, and the journey of the poor old “Telegraph” was cut down to 50 miles. But those were spirited times, and even then, driven thus into the West, there were competing coaches. A “Nonpareil” Bristol and Devonport coach had been running daily at the same hours as the “Telegraph,” but was taken off, and a “Tally-Ho” put on the shorter Exeter and Devonport trip. Then the racing became furious. Up out of Exeter, on to the breezy heights of Haldon, and by the skirts of Dartmoor the two coaches sped—the “Telegraph,” as Ward tells us in his reminiscences, always leading. Several times they did the 50 miles in 3 hours 20 minutes, and for months together never exceeded 4 hours!
That mad pace could not last; and so, as neither could run the other off the road, they agreed to keep it amicably for so long as the railway, pushing irresistibly onward, would suffer them to exist. On May 1st, 1848, the South Devon Railway was opened to Plymouth, and it seemed as though coaching in the West of England was quite killed; but a number of Cornish gentlemen approaching Ward with the proposal that he should start a fast coach into Cornwall, and promising to support it, he put a “Tally-Ho” on the road between Plymouth, Truro and Falmouth, a distance of 62 miles. He was so fortunate as to be offered the contract for carrying the mail between those places, and the “Tally-Ho” was converted into a mail, and ran for a number of years until the railway was opened to Truro, in May 1859. Then, and then only, did Ward’s career as a coachman end, for although for some years, being proprietor, he had seldom driven, he had not hitherto deserted the box-seat, despite the calls upon his time of the horse-mart and driving-school business he had meanwhile established at Plymouth.
Charles Ward, more fortunate, more businesslike and far-seeing than the majority of his fellows, ended as the prosperous proprietor of livery stables in the Brompton Road, in whose yard he might be seen on sunny days during his last years sitting on a bench against the warm brick wall, and dozing the afternoons away.