With the exception of the Brighton, Portsmouth, Dover and Hastings, they were all splendidly-appointed four-horse coaches; but those four places being only at short distances, speed was unnecessary, and they were only provided with pair-horse mails. Had a speed similar to that maintained on most other mails been kept up, letters and passengers would have reached the coast in the middle of the night.
The so-called “Yarmouth Mail” was, we are told by those who travelled on it, an ordinary stage-coach, carrying the usual four inside and twelve outside, chartered by the Post Office to carry the mail-bags; but the old print, engraved here, does not bear out that contention.
The arrival of the mails in London was an early morning affair. First of all came the Leeds, at five minutes past four, followed at an interval of over an hour—5.15—by the Glasgow, and then, at 5.39, by the Edinburgh. All arrived by 7 o’clock.
There was then, as now, no Sunday delivery of letters in London, and Saturday nights were, by consequence, saturnalias for the up-mails. Although the clock might have been set with accuracy by their passing at any other time, their coming into London on Sundays was a happy-go-lucky, chance affair. The coachmen would arrange to meet on the Saturday nights at such junctions of the different routes as Andover, Hounslow, Puckeridge, and Hockliffe, and so in company have what they very descriptively termed a “roaring time.”
THE YARMOUTH MAIL, AT THE “COACH AND HORSES,” ILFORD.
After J. Pollard.
In 1836 the fastest mail ran on a provincial route. This was the short 28-miles service between Liverpool and Preston, maintained at 10 miles 5 furlongs an hour. The slowest was the 19-miles Canterbury and Deal, at 6 miles an hour, including stops for changing. The average speed of all the mails was as low as 8 miles 7 furlongs an hour.
In 1838 there were 59 four-horse mails in England and Wales, 16 in Scotland, and 29 in Ireland, in addition to a total number of 70 pair-horse: some 180 mails in all. It was in this year that—the novelty of railways creating a desire for fast travelling—the Post Office yielded to the cry for speed, and, abandoning the usual conservative attitude, went too far in the other direction, overstepping the bounds of common safety. For some time the mails between Glasgow and Carlisle, and Carlisle and Edinburgh were run to clear 11 miles an hour, which meant an average pace of 13 miles an hour. These were popularly called the “calico mails,” because of their lightness. The time allowed between Carlisle and Glasgow, 96 miles, was 8 hours 32 minutes, and it was a sight to see it come down Stanwix Brow on a summer evening. It met, however, with so many accidents that cautious folk always avoided it, preferring the orthodox 10 miles an hour—especially by lamplight in the rugged Cheviots. Even at that pace there had been more than enough risk, as these incidents from Post Office records of three years earlier clearly show:—
| 1835. February | 5. Edinburgh and Aberdeen Mail overturned. |
| 9. Devonport Mail overturned. | |
| 10. Scarborough and York Mail overturned. | |
| 16. Belfast and Enniskillen Mail overturned. | |
| 16. Dublin and Derry Mail overturned. | |
| 17. Scarborough and Hull Mail overturned. | |
| 17. York and Doncaster Mail overturned. | |
| 20. Thirty-five mail-horses burnt alive at Reading. | |
| 24. Louth Mail overturned. | |
| 25. Gloucester Mail overturned. |
No place was better served by the Post Office than Exeter in the last years of the road, and few so well. Before 1837 it had no fewer than three mails, and in that year a fourth was added. All four started simultaneously from the General Post Office, and reached the Queen City of the West within a few hours of one another every day. On its own merits, Exeter did not deserve or need all these travelling and postal facilities, and it was only because it stood at the converging-point of many routes that it obtained them. Only one mail, indeed, was dedicated especially to Exeter, and that was the last-established, the “New Exeter,” put on the road in 1837. The others continued to Devonport or to Falmouth, then a port, a mail-packet and naval station of great prominence, where the West Indian mails landed, and whence they were shipped. To the mail-coaches making for Devonport and Falmouth, Exeter was, therefore, only an incident.