The “Bolt-in-Tun” coach-office in Fleet Street still stands at the corner of Bouverie Street, somewhat altered, and now the offices of Black and White. The walls are the same, and the archway depicted in the curious business-card, reproduced here, may yet be noticed.
BUSINESS-CARD OF THE “BOLT-IN-TUN” COACH OFFICE.
Of the coachmen on the road to Tunbridge Wells and Hastings we know as little as—nay even less than—of the coaches, and almost the only touch of character is that drawn by a writer in the Sporting Magazine of 1830, in describing one Stockdale, who drove some coach unnamed. He was, we are told, “a good whip.” He was also, like poor old Cross, on the King’s Lynn road, something of a literary character, and “beguiled the time on the road with Cockney slang and quotations from Pope!” He drove to London and back six days a week—the Sunday, he said, he spent at home studying the Greek Testament and translating Οἱ οἱ τυφοὶ ὁδηοί into “Wo, wo, ye blind leaders!”
But coaches were by no means the only public conveyances along this road. There were, indeed, in 1838, many vans and waggons to Tunbridge Wells and to Hastings. Bennett’s vans and waggons plied to Tunbridge Wells four times a week; those of Jarvis thrice, Diggen’s five times, Barnett’s four, Shepherd’s three, Young’s and Harris’s twice, and Wickin’s once: twenty-seven vans and waggons weekly to “the Wells.” To Hastings the waggons respectively of Moore & Co., Shepherd & Co., Stanbury & Co., and Richardson journeyed daily.
IV
The electric tramcars that nowadays take you all the way to Lewisham from Westminster Bridge for threepence, and occupy incidentally forty minutes in performing the journey of six miles, travel on the average at the same speed as those old coaches; but, of course, this not very brilliant rate of progression is determined by the crowded traffic of Walworth and Camberwell. When New Cross is reached, and the comparative solitudes of St. John’s, they bring you at a good twelve miles an hour along those switchback roads to the journey’s end. They are not looked upon with favour by that suburban neighbourhood, for, worse than the burglars’ “villainous centre-bits” in Maud they not only
Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless night,
but noisily disturb every night.
It is a hilly district, revealed in these times by ascending and descending vistas of roads and roof-tops, instead of the grass and fields of yore; and Loampit Hill—the “Loam Pit Hole” of Rocque’s map of 1745—is just a little interlude in the commonplace, where an old retaining-wall in the hill-top sliced through in a bygone era serves to keep the banks and the houses now built hazardously on them from settling in the roadway. A number of old hollies give the spot something of an old-world look.