AN INN-YARD, 1747. After Hogarth.
COACHES
So greatly was Guildford High Street crowded in the old coaching times that, just about a hundred years ago, it was widened at one point by the slicing off of a portion from one of Guildford’s three churches which projected inconveniently into the roadway. To gaze upon what is still a very narrow street, and to remember that this is its “widened” state, is calculated to impress a stranger with the singular parsimony of our ancestors, when land was comparatively cheap and considerations of space presumably not so pressing.
The pressure of traffic here in the Augustan age of coaching will be better understood when it is learned that not only did the Portsmouth coaches pass through Guildford, and the numerous local stages that ran no further than Guildford and Godalming, but that the Southampton coaches came thus far, and only turned off from this road at a point just beyond the town. The celebrated “Red Rover” Southampton coach came this way, and so did the equally famous “Telegraph”; and, leaving Guildford behind, they pursued their way to Southampton by way of Farnham and Winchester. To this route belonged many celebrated whips of those times whose names are almost unmeaning now-a-days; and some of the best of these once well-known wielders of the whipcord were stopped by Fate and the Railway in the full force of their careers. Happy the man whose spirit was not too stubborn to submit gracefully and at once to the new dispensation, and to seek employment on the rail. Good servants of the road found equally good places on the railways—if they chose to take them. But (and can you wonder at it?) they rarely chose to accept, having naturally the bitterest prejudices against the railways and everything that belonged to them; and many men wasted their energies and expended their savings in a fruitless endeavour to compete with steam, when they could have transferred their allegiance from the road to the rail with honour and profit to themselves and no less to their employers. John Peers, a well-known coachman, and driver of the London and Southampton “Telegraph,” was reduced by the coming of the railway to driving an omnibus. From this position, being scornful and quarrelsome, unable to adapt himself to changed circumstances, and altogether “above his station,” he drifted finally into the workhouse. A gentleman who had known him well upon the box-seat in more prosperous days, discovered him in this refuge of the poverty-stricken and superseded; started a subscription for him amongst his former patrons, and rescued him from the small mercies and little ease of the Guardians of the Poor. He was housed upon the road he had driven over so often in the days before steam had come to ruin the coaching interest, and there, in due course, he died.
And his was a fate happier than that of most others—coachmen, guards, post-boys, and ostlers—thrown out of employment by railways, and unable or unwilling to adapt themselves to new surroundings. Many of these soured and disappointed men lived on and on in a vain hope of “new-fangled notions” coming to a speedy and disastrous failure. When accidents occurred and lives were lost by railway smashes, their faces were lit up with a wintry joy, and they wagged their heads with an air of profound wisdom, and said individually, “I told you so!” When the “Railway Mania” of 1844 and succeeding years collapsed and brought the inevitable financial crash, they chuckled, and felt by anticipation the ribbons in their hands again. But though financial disasters came on top of collisions, and though the system of railway travel seemed for a while like a bubble on point of bursting, the promise was never fulfilled, and the old coachmen who actually did drive the roads once more did so as ministers to the amateur spirit that has since 1863 caused so many coaches to be put upon the country roads of Old England.
THE “RED ROVER” GUILDFORD AND SOUTHAMPTON COACH.