The would-be decorative gas-lamp that stands here in the centre of the road bears two tin tablets inscribed respectively, ‘To Slough’ and ‘To Staines,’ in a somewhat parochial fashion. They had no souls, those people who inscribed these legends. Did they not know that we stand here upon highways famed in song and story; not merely the flat and uninteresting seven and ten miles respectively to Staines and Slough, but the hundred and fifty-five miles to Exeter and the ninety-five miles to Bath?
Here, then, we see the Bath Road going off to the
AN OLD COACHMAN
right and the Exeter Road to the left in semi-suburban fashion. Had it not been for the winter fogs this level stretch would have invariably been the delight of the old coachmen; but when the roads were wrapped in obscurity they were hard put to it to keep on the highway. Sometimes they did not even succeed in doing so, but drove instead into the noisome ditches, filled with evil-smelling black mud, which at that time divided the road from Hounslow Heath.
Charles Ward, whom the coaching critics of his age united to honour as an artist with ‘the ribbons,’ drove the famous Exeter ‘Telegraph’ the thirty miles to Bagshot, reaching that village usually at 11 P.M., and taking the up coach from thence to London at four o’clock in the morning. He tells how in the winter the mails had often to be escorted out of London with flaring torches, seven or eight mails following one another, the guard of the foremost lighting the one following, and so on, travelling at a slow pace, like a funeral procession. ‘Many times,’ he says, ‘I have been three hours going from London to Hounslow. I remember one very foggy night, instead of arriving at Bagshot at eleven o’clock, I did not get there till one in the morning. On my way back to town, when the fog was very bad, I was coming over Hounslow Heath, when I reached the spot where the old powder-mills used to stand. I saw several lights in the road and heard voices which induced me to stop. The old Exeter mail, which left Bagshot thirty minutes before I did, had met with a singular accident. It was driven by a man named Gambier; his leaders had come in contact with a hay-cart on its way to London, which caused them to suddenly turn round, break the pole, and blunder down a steep embankment, at the bottom of which was a narrow deep ditch, filled with water and mud. The mail coach pitched on the stump of a willow tree that overhung the ditch; the coachman and the outside passengers were thrown over into the meadow beyond, and the horses went into the ditch. The unfortunate wheelers were drowned or smothered in the mud. There were two inside passengers, who were extricated with some difficulty, but fortunately no one was injured. I managed to take the passengers with the guard and mail bags on to London, leaving the coachman to wait for daylight before he could make an attempt to get the mail up the embankment. They endeavoured to accomplish this with cart horses and chains, and they had nearly reached the top of the bank when something gave way, and the poor old mail went back into the ditch again. I shall never forget the scene. There were about a dozen men from the powder-mills trying to render assistance, and with their black faces, each bearing a torch in his hand, they presented a curious spectacle. This happened about 1840. Posts and rails were erected at the spot after the accident. I passed the place in 1870, and they were there still, as well as the old pollard willow stump.’
HIGHWAYMEN
The old-time associations of Hounslow Heath are almost forgotten now, for, where Claude du Vall and Dick Turpin waited patiently for travellers, there are nowadays long rows of suburban villas which have long since changed the dreary scene. Nothing so romantic as the meeting of the lawyer with the redoubtable Dick is likely to befall the traveller in these times:—