III
SOCIETY: THEN AND NOW
The coaching and waggoning history of the road to Brighthelmstone (as it then was called) emerges dimly out of the formless ooze of tradition in 1681. In De Laune’s “Present State of Great Britain,” published in that year, in the course of a list of carriers, coaches, and stage-waggons in and out of London, we find Thomas Blewman, carrier, coming from “Bredhempstone” to the “Queen’s Head,” Southwark, on Wednesdays, and, setting forth again on Thursdays, reaching Shoreham the same day: which was remarkably good travelling for a carrier’s waggon in the seventeenth century. Here, then, we have the Father Adam, the great original, so far as records can tell us, of all the after charioteers of the Brighton Road. It is not until 1732, that, from the pages of “New Remarks on London,” published by the Company of Parish Clerks, we hear anything further. At that date a coach set out on Thursdays from the “Talbot,” in the Borough High Street, and a van on Tuesdays from the “Talbot” and the “George.” In the summer of 1745 the “Flying Machine” left the “Old Ship,” Brighthelmstone at 5.30 a.m., and reached Southwark in the evening.
But the first extended and authoritative notice is found in 1746, when the widow of the Lewes carrier advertised in The Lewes Journal of December 8th that she was continuing the business:
Thomas Smith, the Old Lewes Carrier, being dead, THE BUSINESS IS NOW CONTINUED BY HIS WIDOW, MARY SMITH, who gets into the “George Inn,” in the Borough, Southwark, EVERY WEDNESDAY in the afternoon, and sets out for Lewes EVERY THURSDAY morning by eight o’clock, and brings Goods and Passengers to Lewes, Fletching, Chayley, Newick and all places adjacent at reasonable rates.
Performed (if God permit) by
MARY SMITH.
We may perceive by these early records that the real original way down to the Sussex coast was by the Croydon, Godstone, East Grinstead and Lewes route, and that its outlet must have been Newhaven, which, despite its name, is so very ancient a place, and was a port and harbour when Brighthelmstone was but a fisher-village.
STAGE WAGGON, 1808.
From a contemporary drawing.