Palmer’s mail coaches, which were started on the Exeter Road in the summer of 1785, rendered all this kind of meandering progress obsolete, except for the poorest class of travellers, who had still for many a long year (indeed, until road travel was killed by the railways) to endure the miseries of a journey in the great hooded luggage waggons of Russell and Company, which, with a team of eight horses, started from Falmouth, and travelling at the rate of three miles an hour, reached London in twelve days. A man on a pony rode beside the team, and with a long whip touched them up when this surprising pace was not maintained. The travellers walked, putting their belongings inside; and when night was come either camped under the ample shelter of the lumbering waggon, or, if it were winter, were accommodated for a trifle in the stable lofts of the inns they halted at. Messrs. Russell and Company were in business for many years as carriers between London and the West, and at a later date—from the ’20’s until the close of the coaching era—were the proprietors of an intermediate kind of vehicle between the waggon at one extreme and the mail coaches at the other. This was the ‘Fly Van,’ of which, unlike their more ancient conveyances which set out only three times a week, one started every week-day from either end. This accommodated a class of travellers who did not disdain to travel among the bales and bundles, or to fit themselves in between the knobbly corners of heavy goods, but who would neither walk nor consent to the journey from the Far West occupying the best part of a fortnight. So they paid a trifle more and travelled the distance between Exeter and London in two days, in times when the ‘Telegraph,’ according to Sir William Knighton, conveyed the aristocratic passenger that distance in seventeen hours. He writes, in his diary, under date of 23rd September 1832, that he started at five o’clock in the morning of that day from Exeter in the ‘Telegraph’ coach for London. The fare, inside, was £3: 10s., and, in addition, four coachmen and one guard had to be paid the usual fees which custom had rendered obligatory. They breakfasted at Ilminster and dined at Andover. ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘can exceed the rapidity with which everything is done. The journey of one hundred and seventy-five miles was accomplished in seventeen hours[2]—breakfast and dinner were so hurried that the cravings of appetite could hardly be satisfied, and the horses were changed like lightning.’ The fare, inside, was therefore practically 5d. a mile, to which must be added at least fifteen shillings in tips to those four coachmen and that guard, bringing the cost of the smartest travelling between London and Exeter up to £4: 5s. for the single journey; while the fares by waggon and ‘Fly Van’ would be at the rate of a halfpenny and twopence per mile respectively, something like 7s. 6d. and 29s. 6d.; without, in those cases, the necessity for tipping.
There were, however, more degrees than these in the accommodation and fares for coach travellers. The proper mail coach fare was 4d. a mile, but the mails were not the ne plus ultra of speed and comfort even on this road, where the ‘Quicksilver’ mail ran a famous course. Hence the 5d. a mile by the ‘Telegraph.’ But it was left to the ‘Waggon Coach’ to present the greatest disparity of prices and places. This was a vehicle which, under various names, was seen for a considerable period on most of the roads, and can, with a little ingenuity, be looked upon as the precursor of the three classes on railways. There were the first-class ‘insides,’ the second-class ‘outsides,’ and those very rank outsiders indeed, the occupants of the shaky wickerwork basket hung on behind, called the ‘crate’ or the ‘rumble-tumble,’ who were very often noisily drunken sailors and people who did not mind a little jolting more or less.
Some very fine turns-out were on this road at the end of the ’30’s. Firstly, there was the ‘Royal Mail,’ between the ‘Swan with Two Necks,’ in Lad Lane, and the ‘New London Inn,’ Exeter, both in those days inns of good solid feeding, with drinking to match. It was of the first-named inn, and of another equally famous, that the poet (who must have been of the fleshly and Bacchic order) wrote:—
At the Swan with Two Throttles
I tippled two bottles,
And bothered the beef at the Bull and the Mouth.
One can readily imagine the sharp-set and shivering traveller, fresh from the perils of the road, ‘bothering the beef’ with his huge appetite, and tippling the generous liquor (which, of course, was port) with loud appreciative smackings of the lips.
Then there were the ‘Sovereign,’ the ‘Regulator,’ and the ‘Eclipse,’ going by the Blandford and Dorchester route; the ‘Prince George,’ ‘Herald,’ ‘Pilot,’ ‘Traveller,’ and ‘Quicksilver,’ by Crewkerne and Yeovil; and the ‘Defiance,’ ‘Celerity,’ and ‘Subscription,’ by Amesbury and Ilminster; to leave unnamed the short stages and the bye-road coaches, all helping to swell the traffic in those old days, now utterly forgotten.
IV
A very great authority on coaching—the famous ‘Nimrod,’ the mainstay of the Sporting Magazine—writing in 1836, compares the exquisite perfection to which coaching had attained at that time with the era
A RIP VAN WINKLE
