With spattered boots, strapped waist and frozen locks,
News from all nations lumbering at his back.
True to his charge, the close packed load behind,
Yet careless what he brings, his one concern
Is to conduct it to the destined inn,
And having dropped the expected bag, pass on.”
Such was the service with which our forefathers were more or less contented during the greater part of two centuries. At the end of the seventeenth century there were weekly posts to many parts of the country: there was a mail six days a week along the Kent road: at any place where the Court happened to be in residence a daily post was at once created, and during the season at Bath and Tunbridge Wells the visitors enjoyed the privilege of a daily despatch and delivery of letters.
It was not until late in the eighteenth century that any radical alteration in the system took place. For many years it had become a reproach against the Post Office that it had not kept pace with the travelling capacities and requirements of the time. What were called “Flying Coaches” had been established in the seventeenth century to many towns in the Kingdom, and while these conveyances were increasing in speed and comfort the Post Office was still satisfied with its four or five miles an hour. The slowness of the posts was in fact becoming intolerable to the people. The General Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland called the attention of the Postmasters-General to the slowness of the posts on the Great North Road. “Every common traveller,” they wrote, “passed the King's mail on the first road in the kingdom,” and complaints were made, generally by traders and professional men, that business was hampered by the backwardness of the Post Office.
To John Palmer, proprietor of the theatre at Bath, belongs the credit of the proposal to use the coach for the carriage of the mails. He was remorseless in his description of the system he wished to abolish. The correspondence, he said, “was entrusted to some idle boy without character mounted on a worn-out hack, who so far from being able to defend himself against a robber, was more likely to be in league with one.” Palmer's duties carried him into many parts of the country, and he thought letters should be conveyed at the same pace at which it was possible to travel in a chaise. He submitted his plan to Pitt, who was Prime Minister, and this statesman gave his warm approval to a trial of the scheme. On the 2nd August 1784 the first mail coach started from Bristol, and so successful was the experiment that in the following year there were coaches running to all parts of the Kingdom. Then ensued a period of great activity on the part of the General Post Office. There was competition with the private coaches, and year after year there were attempts to make records and to accelerate the mails.
The mail-coaching period extended a little over fifty years, and it marked as great an advance on the service of the past as the mail train has since shown compared with the mail coach. For instance, in 1715 the time allowed for the mail between London and Edinburgh was six days. Eighty years later a great advance had taken place. In 1798 Lord Campbell relates: “I was to perform the journey by mail coach to Edinburgh, and was supposed to travel with marvellous velocity, taking only three nights and two days for the whole distance from London. But this speed was thought to be highly dangerous to the head, independently of all the perils of an overturn, and stories were told of men and women who, having reached London with such celerity, died suddenly of an affection of the brain. My family and friends were seriously alarmed for me and advised me at all events to stay a day at York to recruit myself.” The fares he mentions were £10 from Edinburgh to London; to York, £4, 15s.; and from York to London, £5.