Parker, farewell! thy journey now is ended,
Death has the whip-hand, and with dust thou’rt blended;
Thy way-bill is examined, and I trust
Thy last account may prove exact and just.
May He who drives the chariot of the day,
Where life is light, whose Word’s the living way;
Where travellers, like yourself, of every age
And every clime, have taken their last stage—
The God of mercy and the God of love
“Show you the road” to Paradise above.
The old whips had a whimsical way with them, and sometimes not a little pathetic as well. The road was not only the profession whence they drew their living, but it was their passion—their whole life. Thus, when a noted chaise-driver at Lichfield, one Jack Lewton, died in 1796, he was, at his last request, carried from the “Bald Buck” in that city by six chaise-drivers in scarlet jackets and buckskin breeches—the pall supported by six ostlers from the different inns. The funeral took place on August 22nd, in St. Michael’s churchyard, as near the turnpike road as possible; so that he might, as he said, enjoy the satisfaction of hearing his brother whips pass and repass.
Similar directions are said to have been left by Luke Kent, reputed to have been the first guard ever appointed to a mail-coach. The story goes that he was buried at Farlington, near Portsmouth, on the Chichester Road, and left an annual bequest to his successors on the Chichester coach, on condition that they should always sound their horns when passing the place of his interment. Diligent inquiry, however, does not disclose the fact of any one of that name lying at Farlington; but a Francis Faulkner, who died at Petersfield, May 18th, 1870, aged eighty-four years, lies in a vault in Farlington churchyard. He was a guard on the “Rocket” London and Portsmouth coach, and local gossip still tells that he left a request (perhaps also a bequest) that if ever stage-coaches should pass his vault, their horns should be sounded. Certainly, a few years ago, when a coach was run from Brighton to Portsmouth, its horn was always sounded on passing the churchyard.
A conclusion shall be made with the eulogy of Robert Pointer, coachman on the Lewes stage, which he is said to have driven thirty years without an accident. It does not appear what relation he was to the one-time famous “Bob Pointer,” of the Oxford Road, and in 1834 on the Brighton “Quicksilver”—a favourite coaching tutor. That Bob Pointer, according to the Duke of Beaufort, could always be depended on to start sober, but the horses had to be changed on the way anywhere but at public-houses, if it was desired that he should end his journey in the same condition:—
Those who excel, whatever line ’tis in,
Deserve applause, and ought applause to win.
Pointer in coachmanship superior shone;
His whip his sceptre, and his box his throne.
Not skilled alone the fiery steeds to guide,
For them in sickness and in health provide,
He, by a thousand nice minutiæ, knew
To win the restive, and the fierce subdue.
As man and master, punctual and approved;
By those who knew him best, the best beloved.
Many’s the time and oft, o’er Ashdown’s plain,
’Mid show’rs of driving snow and pelting rain;
When hurricanes bow’d down the lofty grove,
When all was slough beneath and storms above;
And oft, when glowing skies cheer’d all the scene
And threw o’er Sussex plains a joy serene;
When now the anecdote, and now the song
Beguil’d the moments as we roll’d along;
Snug at his elbow have I mark’d his skill
To rein the courser and to guide the wheel;
And had he Phaëton’s proud task begun,
To drive the rapid chariot of the sun,
Safe through its course the flaming car had run.
CHAPTER XIV
THE OLD ENGLAND OF COACHING DAYS
This is the time, now that we have passed the threshold of a new era, when old landmarks are disappearing everywhere around us as we gaze, and the Old England that we have known is being dispossessed and disestablished by a new and strange, an inhospitable and alien England of foreign plutocrats—this is the psychological moment for a brief review of what this England of ours was like in the old days of stage-coach and mail.
If we could recapture those times we should find them spacious days, of much fresh air, illimitable horizons, a great deal of solid, unostentatious comfort for the stay-at-homes, and also of much discomfort for the traveller; but although no sensible person, fully informed of the conditions of life in the long ago, would wish he had been born into those times, yet among their disadvantages and the discomforts incidental to travel scarce more than two generations ago, there were to be found, as a matter of course, not a few things which would be looked upon with rapture by the modern sentimentalist. That was the era when the Suburb was unknown anywhere else than around London, and even London’s suburbs were sparse, scattered, sporadic, and separated by great distances from one another. Taking coach from the City, where the merchants and the shopkeepers commonly lived over their business premises, you came presently, north, south, east, or west, through suburban Stamford Hill, Sydenham, Clapton, or Kensington, to rural Edmonton, Croydon, Romford, or Chiswick, and so presently to the Unknown. That was, of itself, a charm in the old order of things—a charm lost long since in these crowded times, when constant and intimate travel have made us familiar with distant towns, and by consequence incurious and incapable of surprises. Everything is known, if not at the first hand of personal observation, at least by proxy of our reading in guide-book history, or by the debilitating photograph, which leaves nothing to the imagination, and renders us travelled in the uttermost nooks and corners of the land, even though we be bedridden, or thoroughgoing habitués of the armchair and the fireside. The picture-postcard—the lowest common denominator of the photograph—has come to give the last touch of satiety, the final revulsion of repletion. The Land’s End has long since been exploited, John o’ Groat’s is merely at the end of a cycle ride, the “bottomless” caverns of the Peak have been plumbed, every unscalable mountain climbed. “Connu!” we exclaim when we are told any fact. No surprises are left. We may never before have journeyed to Edinburgh, but photographs have rendered us so long familiar with its castle and rock that we cannot recollect a time when we were not familiar with the physical geography of the “modern Athens,” and we seem to have been born with a knowledge of the geographical peculiarities of every other place. We are, therefore, naturally bored and unresponsive in situations where our grandfathers were surprised and delighted; but although possessed thereby with a profound dissatisfaction with ourselves, we cannot hope to win back to the unsophisticated joys of old time.
Would that it could be done! The wish is everywhere evident, but only Lethean waters could sweep away the useless lumber of mental baggage that destroys imagination and blunts the senses. The many efforts made to bring back the “properties”—to speak in the theatrical sense—of old time are pitiful or ridiculous, as your humour wills it. These are the days when things quaint and old-fashioned are revived for sake of their quaintness, sometimes in spite of their inconvenience and unsuitability; when ingle-nooks and open hearths with fire-dogs are built into modern houses for effect, although slow-combustion stoves are infinitely more comfortable and less wasteful of fuel. Our forbears, who did not know slow-combustion stoves, were not the creatures of sentiment that we are, and would soon have abolished open hearths for the close stoves had they been given the chance, just as they would have exchanged the tallow dip for electric lighting had the opportunity offered. We do not know the feelings with which the first gentlemen to use carpets abolished the old rush-strewn halls and the manners and customs contemporary with them; but if their sense of smell was as acute as our own, they must have noticed with great relief the absence of the dirt and festering bones that found a hiding-place beneath those rushes. All the marvellous changes in habits of living—the cheapening of food, the conversion of the luxuries of a former age into the ordinary requirements of this, and even the alterations in the face of the country and the houses of towns and villages—are due to those increased facilities of intercourse which, owing to the gradual improvement in roads, the coaches and waggons of yore were first able to give. When public vehicles began to ply into the country, this England of ours was not only a land of wide unenclosed heaths and commons, but the people of one county—nay, even the inhabitants of towns and villages—were markedly different in thought and prejudices, in speech and clothing, from those of others; while local style in building, and the various building materials obtained locally, gave each successive place that appearance of something new and strange which the traveller does not always meet with nowadays in far distant lands. As the drainage of lakes and fens, the filling up of the valleys and the reduction of the hills, have quite revolutionised the physical geography of wide areas, often changing the natural history of the districts affected, so has cheap, constant and quick travelling and conveyance of materials helped to reduce places and people to one dead level. Romance flies abashed from the level, monotonous road, where, years before, in some darkling hollow between the hills, ringed in by dense woodlands, it lurked in company with the highwayman. We do not desire the return of those gentry, but what would literature have done without them? Highway and turnpike improvements long ago sliced off the most aspiring hilltops, and, carrying the roads through cuttings, used the material thus cut away for the purpose of filling up the gullies and deep depressions. Where the early coaches toiled, often axle-deep, through the watersplashes formed by the little rills and streams that ran athwart the way, later generations have built bridges, or have done things infinitely worse; so that a watersplash has become a rare and curious object, noteworthy in a day’s journey. Only recently, on the Dover Road, near Faversham, has such a watersplash—one of the most picturesque in the country—been abolished. Ospringe was a little Kentish Venice, with a clear-running shallow stream occupying the whole of the roadway, with raised footpaths for pedestrians at either side, and ancient gabled cottages looking down upon the pretty scene. Alas! the sparkling stream now goes under the road, in a pipe.