The Colonel, as an amateur whip, often drove the Mail between Oswestry and Bangor, and tells how others occasionally did the same. There was, for example, one who took a glass or a bottle too much at the “Owen Glendower” at Corwen, and wrought havoc with the mail and other things along the road, with the result that the bags were too late for the packet at Holyhead, and the Post Office authorities heard of it. Result number two was that horse proprietors were severely admonished not to allow any one but the authorised coachman to drive. They did so all the same, but the reins were prudently made to change hands when nearing “the change.” Charlie Harper, who about that time had been promoted from the slower Chester and Holyhead to the fast direct Holyhead Mail, had resigned his ribbons one day to the Colonel, but took them over on nearing Bangor. The Colonel, however, good-humouredly took Bicknell to task for giving him the sack. The hotel-keeper was sorry, but no amateur could drive the Mail again after the wigging he had got from the Post Office.
Some little while later, one stormy evening, the Colonel was on the Mail at Bangor. Harper, at the end of his day’s work, got down and went home; the new team was put to, and the Mail stood waiting for Jack Williams, the coachman who was to take it across the bridge and on to Holyhead. Five minutes passed; time was up, and no coachman appeared. “What the devil are you waiting for?” asked Hodgson, the guard, coming back from the Post Office with the bags. “Where is Jack Williams?”
No one had seen Jack Williams, and no one seemed to know whether he was dead or alive. At last one of the horsekeepers seemed to remember all of a sudden that Williams had been summoned to attend a magistrates’ meeting on the other side of the Menai Bridge; that Harper was to have taken the Mail over the bridge, and Williams to get up at the public-house where the worthy beaks who had summoned him were to hold their conclave. “Yess, inteet, I remember it wass summoned to attend the magistrates’ meeting” (it standing, of course, for ‘Chack’ Williams).
“Now then,” said Hodgson, growing impatient, “we can’t wait here all day; somebody must drive. Mr. Reynardson, will you be so good? We shall be late for the packet.”
“I don’t care,” said the Colonel, “whether you are late or not; I am thankful to say I am not going to cross such a day as this. Jump up and drive yourself, and I’ll take charge of your bags. Bicknell has said that I am not to drive his horses, and if you take root here I don’t care; I’ll not touch them.” “Well, sir, we shall be late for the packet if you won’t,” said Hodgson. “I don’t care,” he replied, “I dare say I shall be able to get to where I am going in time for dinner, or at all events before bedtime, so I’ll have nothing to do with either the mail or Mr. Bicknell’s horses, and if the mail stays here all night it’s nothing to me.” “Now, Hodgson,” said Bicknell, who just then appeared at the door, “what’s the Mail standing there for.” “That’s just what I should like to know,” answered Hodgson; “but the Mail can’t go, sir, without some one to drive it. Jack Williams is not to be found, Charlie Harper has gone home long ago, and Mr. Reynardson says you said he was not to drive your horses any more, and he won’t have anything to do with them; so what’s to be done I don’t know. We shall be late for the packet, and then you know there’ll be a row again with the Post Office people.”
Things seemed to be in something of a fix, and Hodgson, though in a fuss to be off, was rather enjoying the joke, which began to be a serious one; for there seemed to be no chance of any one to drive. It was blowing great guns, and the Menai Bridge would be rocking about like a cradle, and the team of greys were not the handiest in the world, if they had not got up the right way in the morning, and if things went a little wrong.
“Well,” said Bicknell, “this won’t do. Will you drive them, Mr. Reynardson, till you find Jack Williams on the other side of the bridge?” “No,” said the obstinate Colonel, “you may drive them yourself, if you like; I won’t touch them.” Things looked bad; Bicknell was no coachman; Hodgson said he could not, and Reynardson that he would not, drive, and there seemed none of the horsekeepers competent to perform the feat. So at last, Mr. Bicknell, putting on his most affable face, said: “Mr. Reynardson, Sir, will you be so kind as to take them across the bridge? I shall be very much obliged to you if you will.” “Oh! Oh!” said the pacified amateur, “if you are going to be obliged, or anything of that kind, I don’t mind obliging you, Mr. Bicknell,” and the thing was done.
XLIX
Bangor is a forbidding place—a squalid and uninteresting mile-length of street, extending from this spot to the railway station, where a more recent and less objectionable continuation of it, called Upper Bangor, climbs for another half-mile towards the Menai Bridge. The long, long street of Bangor, narrow and dirty, gives an indescribably second-hand appearance to everything exposed for sale in its shop-windows; and the stranger, newly arrived from the champagne-like air of Capel Curig, has not been in Bangor half an hour before he, too, feels second-hand and soiled. He goes weak at the knees, totters, and feels utterly undone. The town lies as it were in the bottom of a funnel, and, tucked away from actual contact with the vivifying breezes of the Menai Strait, has air neither from one side nor the other. It is, by consequence, a town of the sickliest. Let these things, however, be said rather in sorrow than contempt, for of contempt Bangor has already had sufficient at the hands of generations of travellers. Many are attracted to Bangor by reason of its cathedral, but it were better the building had not that proud title, because those who have already made acquaintance with the famous cathedrals of England see a lack of proportion in thus dignifying a church that, for both size and beauty, is surpassed times without number by parish churches in the shires. For its present want of interest, such individually remote and entirely dissimilar persons as Owain Glyndwr and Sir Gilbert Scott are responsible. Owain in 1402 laid it in ruins; and Scott, who, at a cost of £35,000, was engaged from 1866 to 1875 in “restoring” the debased Perpendicular building he found here, has impressed his own architectural nostrums upon it in a very disastrous manner. It is a long, low structure, with a dwarf central tower, and its own inherent disadvantages are greatly worsened by its site being in a hollow beside the shabby street.
Doctor Johnson, who, touring North Wales in 1774, found the “quire” of Bangor to be “mean,” could quite honestly repeat that criticism to-day. The service in his time was also “ill-read.” A “very mean inn” in the town further helped to jaundice his views—an inn with little accommodation, for he records: “I lay in a room where the other bed had two men.”