On January 23rd, 1686, he went to London by himself. Starting from Rye at 8.30 a.m., he rode the twenty-three miles to Lamberhurst by 2 p.m. Refreshing there for an hour, he resumed his journey, in company with others, for the security afforded by numbers, and between Woodgate and Tonbridge, in the moonlight, the tracks being very bad and uneven, he and another became separated from the party, and immediately lost themselves. It was freezing hard. He alighted and led his horse, until at last, coming to a pretty good track, he remounted, and by the grace of God and at a very late hour came into Tonbridge.
Whether this adventure was due partly to the good cheer of the “Chequers” at Lamberhurst, or wholly to the uncertainty of the track, it would be rash to say. But it is all very vivid to me: the brushwood alleys, the rimy branches of the shrouded woods, the clear, cold radiance of the frosty moon, the iron-hard ruts, and the breath arising like steam from Mr. Samuel Jeake and his horse; but most real to me his joy when he saw at last, at the foot of Somerhill, the lights of Tonbridge town.
Next morning he left Tonbridge for London, and—being by himself—rode horseback all the way, performing the journey of thirty miles in ten hours.
The stage-coach of 1682, in which the worthy Samuel Jeake brought his wife and mother-in-law, went no further than Tunbridge Wells. It was probably, even at that date, no new thing, for the “happy springs of Tunbridge” had long been known, and had for some years been gaining popularity among real or fancied invalids. We may well suppose it to have been started somewhere about 1650.
III
With the dawn of the nineteenth century the service of coaches between London and Hastings begins to take some definite shape. In 1807 Robert Gray, of the “Bolt-in-Tun,” Fleet Street, horsed the Hastings Mail, and continued for many years. In 1828 it was jointly run by Gray and by Benjamin Worthy Horne, of the “Golden Cross.” Being only a “pair-horse” mail, it was, like its fellows in the same category, very slow. The Brighton, Portsmouth, and Hastings mails were, in fact, the three slowest in the kingdom, and of these the Brighton was the worst laggard. The mails, it should be explained, to correct the impression created by the eloquence of De Quincey and Hazlitt, were not necessarily faster than the stage-coaches. In some instances they were: in others they were not. Everything depended upon individual cases, and much upon distance. Where great distances had to be covered the speed would be very high, as in the Bristol, Devonport (“Quicksilver”), and Birmingham mails, of which the first averaged considerably over ten miles an hour; but in cases such as these of Hastings, Portsmouth, and Brighton, all the night lay before them, and the short distance could be taken very easily with pair-horse teams; while the four-horse teams running to the West and North were always upon their mettle, to keep their time-bills. The speed of the Hastings Mail in 1837, its best period, averaged eight miles an hour; and that in itself was a great advance from 1828, when the pace was under seven miles an hour.
Mail-coaches were, therefore, not always the most dashing public equipages of the King’s Highway. From about 1825, when the “fast” day-coaches and the post-coaches began to set the pace, the mail on the Hastings Road was for a time left hopelessly behind. In 1826 the “Royal William,” starting from the “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn, at 9 a.m., was at Hastings by 5 o’clock: speed rather more than eight miles an hour. Prodigious!
But that rate was very poor in comparison with the stage-coaches of almost every other road, and even in 1828, the Golden Age of coaching, proprietors, in announcing “Hastings to London in Eight Hours” appear to have considered themselves wonderful fellows. Indeed, on the old coaching bills of this period, discovered in 1893, during some alterations, on the walls of a building in Castle Street, Hastings, one coach-proprietor had the impudence (as we must think it) of setting forth “Hastings to London in 9 hours!” He did well to conclude with that exclamation-mark, although he placed it there in a different sense from that in which we read it.
There were then, among others, the Royal Mail, in 9¾ hours; the “Express” (a misnomer, indeed), in nine hours, from the “Golden Cross,” by Tunbridge Wells; “Paragon,” in eight hours, by Tunbridge Wells; and “Regulator,” by Tonbridge. Hastings, therefore, was always badly served, and must have grumbled quite as much in the coaching era as it does under the dilatory service of the South Eastern Railway.
The last years of the Hastings Mail, or, as it was known in its two ultimate decades, the “Hastings and St. Leonards,” were signalised by a successful attempt on the part of Horne and Gray and their country partners to screw an extra mileage rate out of the tight-fisted Post Office for carrying the mails. It seems that the Mail had not been keeping time, and that the partners had received some remonstrances on the subject from St. Martin’s-le-Grand. It was a fine opening for a revision, and accordingly, in December, 1841, they informed the Postmaster-General that they really could not keep strictly to the terms laid down by the contract they had signed in 1835, unless the mileage rate were raised from 1-3/8d. a mile to 3-3/8d. The extra allowance would permit of four horses being used instead of two: a thing not only desirable, they said, but really necessary on so hilly a road. In January, 1842, the Postmaster-General graciously acceded to this request, and for its expiring years the Mail rose to this unwonted dignity.