Here, then, for the present, ends Coventry’s romance. There be those who look forward to a new and stirring chapter of it, in a wished-for manufacture of motor-cars; but the future lies on the knees of the gods, to order as they will.
XLIV
Coaching history at Coventry begins in 1658, with the establishment of a stage-coach between London, Lichfield, and Chester. This pioneer, starting from the “George” Inn, Holborn Bridge, reached Coventry in three days, or professed to do so. Suspicions that this was only a profession, not often put into practice, are aroused by the title of a new coach, put on the road in 1739. This was the “London, Birmingham, and Lichfield Flying Coach,” that took just the same time to reach Coventry, and yet arrogated the term “flying” to itself, as a superior recommendation above all earlier conveyances. The fare between London and Coventry was 25s. In 1773 a wonderful thing happened, for in that year the “Coventry Flying Machine” winged its way in one day. Later coaches belong to the road in general, and Coventry was but an incident on the way; but there were many short distances covered by local coaches, such as the “Peeping Tom” and the “Manchester Hero,” between this and Manchester, and numerous others to Birmingham, Lichfield, Warwick, Leamington, Cheltenham, and Stratford-on-Avon. A “Little Wonder” Coventry and Birmingham stage ran in the last years of coaching. Tom Pinner, its driver, was an expert with the whip, and could snatch the pipe out of a wayfarer’s mouth with it, and not touch him, as he drove along. One quite expects, in reading Tom Pinner’s career, to light upon the record of one of the victims of these little pleasantries waiting for their author and pounding him into a jelly; but no one ever seems to have had sufficient spirit.
Besides the “King’s Arms,” there were the “Queen’s Head,” the “Bull,” and the “White Bear” prominent among Coventry inns. The “Bull” stood where the Barracks are now situated, in Smithford Street. The “White Bear,” in High Street, changed its sign in 1811 to the “Craven Arms”; a name it still retains. The change was made out of compliment to the third Earl of Craven, who had then returned to live at Combe Abbey, a family seat near Coventry that had long been closed. His residence there brought much custom to the city and to the house.
The old inn remains just as it was in coaching days. There are the long yard, with stables of Elizabethan date, and the solid red-brick portions of the house, rebuilt in the time when George III. was King, facing the narrow passage. Fronting on the street, the building is of old white-painted plaster. It was in front of the “Craven Arms” that the fatal accident, already recounted, to Tom Peck, the guard of the “Eclipse” coach, happened. Opposite was one of the many coach offices; the scene, perhaps, of that story of the little girl being booked overnight at half-price, as the custom was. Her elder sister took the seat in the morning, when the book-keeper remarked to her mother, “Your little girl has grown in the night.”
One of the last relics of old times went, unhonoured, in 1872, when the turnpike-gates on either side of Coventry were abolished; and a long-enduring link was broken when Thomas Clarke died, in Coventry Hospital, April, 1899. Clarke was, according to the newspapers chronicling the event, the “oldest postboy in England.” Not a few, also, proclaimed him to be “the last”; but last postboys have been dying in considerable numbers since then, and modest paragraphs in the daily papers still appear, now and again, recording the passing of another. The Last Postboy, indeed, is not yet, and those paragraphs are not uncommonly followed by letters from survivors, who are always found to write and claim the honour for themselves. They are as inexhaustible as the widow’s cruise of oil, pieces of the True Cross, or relics of the saints in Roman Catholic churches. When the traveller of experience has seen the skull of St. Jerome in one place, he is not surprised „to be shown another somewhere else, for he has already seen five thigh bones of some other saint at different shrines, and knows that, if he perseveres, he will probably find some more. Just in the same way, there is always another postboy when the last has died. They were—or are, we must perhaps say—a long-lived race, all bone and gristle; without a spare ounce of flesh for disease to fasten upon, and, inured for long years to hard work in all weathers, little affected in old age by the chills and bitter winds that carry off the less hardy among elderly folks. The coachman was of another kind. He sat on his box all the time, and grew fat in fingering the ribbons; while the postboy bumped his flesh away on horseback. Did any one ever see a fat postboy? And was it not the exception for a coachman to be lean? His fatness long since carried off the last coachman of the old days, but the
Three jolly postboys, drinking at the Dragon,
who, in the words of the old chorus, “determined to finish off the flagon,” are probably still living, in a hale and lean old age, although coaches, and chaises, and all the old life of the road have gone, and the “Dragon” itself no longer looks down the dusty highway.
THE OLD “KING’S HEAD,” COVENTRY. From a Print after Rowlandson.