In my first chapter I made a point of the fact that at the moment when travelling by mail coach had reached its highest point of excellence the coming of the railway gave the death-blow to the whole system. The long-distance traffic of this country was in the course of a few years diverted from the main roads, and for thirty years these thoroughfares, save for the local traffic between neighbouring places, were silent and unused. Nowhere was this revolution more noticeable than in the district round London. The Great North Road was perhaps the busiest of all the coach routes, and in 1832 no fewer than between fifty and sixty coaches, twenty of them mail coaches, ran on this road alone. At Barnet, the first stage out of London, the double trips resulted in a coach passing through the town in one direction or the other every quarter of an hour.
The coaching inn with its courtyard and fine stabling fell from its high estate, and a younger generation marvelled at the number of public-houses on a road with little or no traffic. They wondered, too, at the fine wide thoroughfares running through the country towns. Where was the traffic? Why the extravagance of space?
I suppose that as late as the year 1870 the life of the road appeared dead beyond recall, and nothing seemed more unlikely than that the coaching inn would come into favour again. The whole tendency of the time seemed to be to develop the traffic on the railway. Even walking appeared to be in danger of becoming a lost art.
Then in the early seventies began a little stream of bicycles along the forsaken highways: the stream grew and grew: tricycles came in, then safety bicycles, and ladies took to the wheel. Wayside inns began to find their use once more, and the road was alive again. Then arrived the motor, and we have now the astonishing result that on many routes out of London the quieter and least dangerous thoroughfare for foot passengers to cross is the railway.
But I am anticipating. I want to tell the story of the return of the Post Office to the road, and to draw an interesting parallel between the traffic of a hundred years ago and that of to-day. The first of John Palmer's mail coaches began to run in 1784, and the system lasted nearly sixty years. The determining cause which induced the Post Office to take to the road again was the introduction of the Parcel Post. The railway company receives 55 per cent. of the stamp value of every parcel, and as the collecting, sorting, and distributing expenses are heavy, the cost of transmitting parcels in this manner is considerable. The Post Office naturally dislikes to hand over to the railway companies postage which it can economically retain in its own hands, and it was to avoid the railway charges that road services, extending to places not exceeding fifty miles or thereabouts from London, were instituted. On the 1st June 1887, the revival of the road began for the Post Office, and a parcel mail coach service was started between London and Brighton. This was the Jubilee year, and the running of the new service attracted a great deal of public attention. In a short time there were coaches running from London Bridge to Tunbridge Wells and Chatham, and from Mount Pleasant to Watford, Colchester, Hertford, Ware with branches. There was a coach to Bedford with a branch to Cambridge, another from Paddington to Oxford via Reading, and yet others to Windsor and Guildford with services to Epsom and Leatherhead. These coaches, drawn by three or four horses, were in charge of guards who carried arms; and for more than ten years the resemblance between the old and the modern mail service was striking. The difference, and of course a very notable one, was that the modern coach carried no passengers. But it carried with it all the prestige of “His Majesty's Service,” and it maintained all the old traditions of speed and punctuality—so much so that the villagers on the route set their clocks when the mail passed.
The coming of the motor brought about another revolution. Many of my readers will remember the 14th November 1896, when a large number of motor carriages and vans assembled at Northumberland Avenue, Charing Cross, to celebrate by a run to Brighton the passing of the Act of Parliament which regulated the use of these vehicles. The Act came into operation on that day. Many of these motors never reached Brighton; they broke down at various points on the route; but the trip was an object-lesson to the British public of the possibilities of motor traffic. It impressed the Post Office authorities, who were among the first of the large business concerns in this country to adopt motor traction. As early as 1897 experimental trials were made between the General Post Office and the South-Western District Office, and between the latter office and Kingston-on-Thames. During the same year a steam motor was tried between London and Redhill, a distance of about 46 miles there and back. Experiments were also made with electric motors in different parts of the country at the same time.
There was a difficulty at the outset owing to the Board of Trade regulations which prohibited vans weighing more than 1½ tons (unladen) from travelling more than 8 miles an hour. Difficulty was experienced in constructing cars of sufficient carrying capacity which should be within the limit of weight. This restriction was afterwards removed, so that it has been possible to build much larger motors, timed to travel at a faster rate of speed.
In spite, however, of the numerous improvements in the mechanism of motors, the new method of traction was far from perfect for several years, and as late as 1902 the official report was, “So far no motor vehicle which has been found can be relied on to carry heavy mails with the same regularity as vans drawn by horses.” Even two years later, in 1904, the opinion held was “that motor vans were not so reliable as horse-drawn vehicles.”
It is obvious that what the Post Office required was regularity and certainty rather than speed for their parcels traffic, and so long as the motor was constantly liable to breakdowns and maintained uncertain speeds it was unsuitable.
The steam motor service between London and Redhill was only an experiment, and the horse-drawn vehicle maintained its old position on that route until 1902, when the improvements in motors justified the Post Office in starting a motor service. Since 1902 the London and Redhill service has been performed by motors. Since 1905 the Brighton service has been worked by motor van, the daily journey there and back being 109 miles. In the following year motor vans ran to Hastings, Tunbridge Wells, and Eastbourne. Then followed in three succeeding years new motor services to Ipswich, Southampton, Cambridge, Reading, Portsmouth, Oxford, Birmingham, Stony Stratford and Leicester, Tilbury, Aylesbury, Dover, and Ramsgate. In addition there were cross services between Manchester and Liverpool, Birmingham and Warwick and Worcester, Leeds and York, and a number of other places.