When the fashionables travelled down by coach to Bath, one might safely have offered a prize for every brick house to be found there, for Bath was, and is, built of the local oolite known as “Bath stone.” The prize would never have been claimed; but something like a modern miracle is now happening, for even at Bath red brick has underbid the native stone and gained an entrance.
Nothing escapes the modern desecrating touch. “Auld Reekie” itself—Edinburgh, that last stronghold of the Has Been—is not the same “beloved town” that Sir Walter Scott knew. The French Renaissance character of its grandiose new buildings does not alone tend to change it into something alien to sentiment and ancient recollection; but that which our ancestors would have thought a mere impossibility, that which themselves would, and ourselves should, stigmatise as a crime committed against History and the Picturesque, has almost come to pass. In short, the deep ravine where the Nor’ Loch stagnated of old, where the Waverley Station is now placed, has been deprived of something of its apparent depth, and the Castle Rock of a corresponding height, by the towering proportions of the vast buildings that fill up the valley and desecrate the site of the northern capital.
Sturdy survivals of olden days are the local delicacies that first obtained a wider fame from that time when they were set before the coach passengers at the country inns where the coach dined, or had tea, or supped, and were so greatly appreciated that supplies were carried away for the benefit of distant friends. Some, however, of these delicacies have disappeared. No longer does Grantham produce the cakes mentioned by Thoresby in 1683. Grantham, he says, was “famous in his esteem for Bishop Fox’s benefactions, but it is chiefly noted of travellers for a peculiar sort of thin cake, called ‘Grantham Whetstones.’” What precisely were the cakes known by this unpromising name we cannot say, for the making of them is a thing of the past.
Stilton cheese, never made at Stilton, obtained its name exactly in the manner already described. It was a cheese made at Wymondham, in Leicestershire, but its merits were first discovered by the coach-parties who dined at the “Bell” at Stilton, whose landlord obtained his supply from Wymondham, and drove a roaring trade in old cheeses sold to the coaches to take away. “Stilton” cheese is now only a conventional name, like that of “Axminster” carpets, made nowadays at Kidderminster.
To bring home with him bags and boxes of local delicacies was to the old coach-traveller as much an earnest of his travels as the bringing back of a storied alpenstock is to the tourist in Switzerland. The Londoner, returning home from Edinburgh, could come back laden with a number of things which, easily obtainable now, were then the spoils only of travel. From Scotch shortbread the list would range to Doncaster butterscotch, York hams, Grantham gingerbread, and Stilton cheeses. On other roads he might secure the cloying Banbury cake, still extant, and as sickly-sweet and lavish of currants as of yore; the famous Shrewsbury cakes, manufactured by the immortal Pailin, who left his recipe behind him, so that the cakes of Shrewsbury still continue in the land; Bath buns, phenomenally adhesive and sprinkled with those fragments of loaf sugar without which the exterior of no Bath bun is complete; the cheese of Cheddar; the toffee of Everton; pork pies from Melton Mowbray; or a barrel of real natives from Whitstable. All or any of these, I say, he might carry home with him, while few places were so unimportant in this particular way that he could not ring the changes on gastronomic rarities as he went.
All these things were the products of that old English tradition of good cheer and hospitality which lasted even some little way into the railway age. Journeys were cold, but hearts were warm, and the more rigorous your travelling the better your welcome. It would seem, and actually be, absurd to surround a modern arrival by railway with the circumstance that greeted the advent of the coach. In the bygone times the guest had no sooner alighted at his inn and proceeded to his room than a knock came at his door, and lo! on a tray a glass of the choicest port or cordial the house contained. To this day the courteous old custom survives at the “Three Tuns,” in Durham, whose traditional glass of cherry brandy is famous the whole length of the great road to the north.
“ALL RIGHT!” THE BATH MAIL TAKING UP THE MAIL-BAGS.
From the contemporary lithograph.
For the little folks who travelled by coach, either with their own people or, like Tom Brown, in charge of the guard, warm motherly hearts beat in the bosoms of the stately landladies of the age, all courteous punctilio to their grown-up guests, but sympathy itself to the wearied youngsters. Such was Mrs. Botham, of the “Pelican,” at Speenhamland, on the Bath Road—that “Pelican” of whose “enormous bill” some waggish poet had sung at an early period. Mrs. Botham, an awesome figure—like Mrs. Ann Nelson, of the “Bull,” Whitechapel, dressed in black satin—unbent to the youngsters, for whom, indeed, she had always ready a packet of brandy-snaps.
The earlier travellers were even more welcomed, not by the innkeepers alone, whose welcome was not altogether altruistic, but by the country folk in general.