On the way to Brighton, two years later, she says, “I never saw this road so rotted, so heavy, or so deep. It was with difficulty my poor poneys could drag us.”
We have therefore a tolerable notion of the fatigues attendant on a journey in those days.
Another drawback was, that if one wished to travel by coach instead of going post, one could not always be sure of a place unless booked beforehand. This kind of thing frequently happened—
“I was called up early—to be ready for the coach, but judge my disappointment and chagrin, when on my approach I found it chock-full. I petitioned, reasoned, urged and entreated, but all to no effect. I could not make any impression on the obdurate souls, who, proud and sulky, kept easy and firm possession of their seats, and hardly deigned to answer, when I requested permission to squeeze in. I was hoisted on the coach box as the only alternative; but on the first movement of the vehicle, had it not been for the arm of the coachman, I should have been instantly under the wheels in the street. I was chucked into a basket as a place of more safety, though not of ease or comfort, where I suffered most severely from the jolting, particularly over the stones; it was most truly dreadful and made one suffer almost equal to sea sickness.” (Tate Wilkinson, Memoirs.)
This basket was actually a basket slung on for the purpose of carrying luggage, though it was also used for passengers, and sometimes filled with people in spite of its discomfort, because seats here were charged at a low price.
Richard Thomson, in Tales of an Antiquary, gives a very good word-picture of a stage coach: “Stage coaches were constructed principally of a dull black leather, thickly studded by way of ornament with broad black head nails tracing out the panels, in the upper tier of which were four oval windows with heavy red wooden frames or leathern curtains. The roofs of the coaches in most cases rose in a swelling curve. Behind the coach was the immense basket, stretching far and wide beyond the body, to which it was attached by long iron bars or supports passing beneath it. The wheels of these old carriages were large, massive, ill-formed and usually of a red colour, and the three horses that were affixed to the whole machine were all so far parted from it by the great length of their traces that it was with no little difficulty that the poor animals dragged their unwieldly burden along the road.”
FROM “A SUMMER’S EVENING”
The accidents attendant on coach journeys were many and various, and the badness of the roads was the principal cause. In Under England’s Flag, the autobiography of Captain Charles Boothby, R.E., we have this account of what happened to him in 1805 when he first left home—