These were the good old times; and no doubt to us they have a romance, though to the people who lived in them they had a very practical aspect.
The general instructions to mail-guards in cases of breakdown were as follows:—
"When the coach is so broke down that it cannot proceed as it is on its way to London, if you have not above two passengers, and you can procure a post-chaise without loss of time, get them and the mail forward in that way, with the horses that used to draw the mail-coach, that they may be in their places (till you come to where a coach is stationed); and if you have lost any time, you must endeavour to fetch it up, which may be easily done, as the chaise is lighter than the coach.
"If you cannot get a post-chaise, take off one of the coach-horses, and ride with your bags to the next stage; there take another horse,—and so on till you come to the end of your ground, when you must deliver the bags to the next guard, who must proceed in the same manner. If your mail is so large (as the York, Manchester, and two or three others are at some part of the road) that one horse cannot carry it, you may take two; tie the mail on one horse and ride the other. The person who horses the mail must order his horsekeeper at every stage to furnish you with horses in case of accidents. Change your horses at every post-town, and do all your office-duty the same as if the coach travelled.
"If in travelling from London an accident happens, use all possible expedition in repairing the coach to proceed; and if it cannot be repaired in an hour or two, take the mail forward by horse or chaise—if the latter, the passengers will go with you."
In pursuance of these instructions, many instances of devotion to duty were given by the mail-guards, in labouring to get the mails forward in the midst of the snowstorm of 1836.
On the 26th of December the Birmingham mail-coach, proceeding to London, got rather beyond Aylesbury, where it broke down. Some things having been set right, another effort was made, and some little further way made; but the attempt to go on had to be given up, for the snow was getting deeper at every step. A hurricane was blowing, accompanied with a fall of fine snow, and the horses shook with extreme cold. In these circumstances, Price the mail-guard mounted one of the horses, tied his mail-bags on the back of another, and set out for London. He was joined farther on by two postboys on other horses with the bye-bags, and all three journeyed in company. The road-marks being frequently effaced, they were constantly deviating from their proper course, clearing gates, hedges, and ditches; but having a general knowledge of the lie of the country, and Price being possessed of good nerves, they succeeded in reaching the metropolis. The guard was in a distressing state of exhaustion when he reached his destination. This was only one instance of the way in which the guards acquitted themselves during this memorable storm, and for their great exertions they received the special thanks of the Postmaster-General.
At a place called Cavendish Bridge the mails were arrested by the storm, and the exertions of the coachman and guard were thus referred to by a private gentleman of the neighbourhood, who communicated with the Post-office on the subject: "I take leave to remark that the zeal and industry evinced by the guard and coachman, more especially the former (named Needle), upon the trying occasion to which your communication has reference, was well worthy of imitation, and formed a striking contrast to the reprehensible apathy of two gentlemen who were inside passengers by the mail."
A notable instance of the devotion to duty of a coachman and mail-guard, and one illustrating the dangers and hardships which Post-office servants of that class had to encounter, occurred in the winter of 1831. On Tuesday the 1st February of that year, James M'George, mail-guard, and John Goodfellow, coachman, set out from Dumfries for Edinburgh at seven o'clock in the morning, and after extraordinary exertions reached Moffat,—beyond which, however, they found it impossible to proceed with the coach, owing to the accumulation of snow. They then procured saddle-horses, and with these, accompanied by a postboy, they went on, intending to continue their journey in this way. They had not proceeded beyond Erickstane Hill, a rising ground in close proximity to the well-known natural enclosure called the Deil's Beef-Tub, when it became evident that the horses could not make the journey, and these were sent back in charge of the postboy to Moffat. The guard and coachman, unwilling to give in, continued their journey on foot, having in view to reach a roadside inn at Tweedshaws, some two or three miles farther on. The exact particulars of what thereafter happened will never be known, beyond this, that the mail-bags were afterwards found tied to one of the road-posts set up in like situations to mark the line of road on occasions of snowstorms, and that the two men perished in the drift. The last act performed by them, before being quite overcome by exhaustion and fatigue, was inspired by a sense of duty, their aim being to leave the bags where they would more readily be found by others, should they themselves not live to recover them. Shortly after this the two men appear to have succumbed; for their bodies were found five days afterwards within a hundred yards of the place where they left the bags, and where at the cost of their lives they had rendered their last service to the Post-office and their country.
"And down he sinks
Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift,
Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death,
Mix'd with the tender anguish Nature shoots
Through the wrung bosom of the dying man,
His wife, his children, and his friends unseen.
. . . . . On every nerve
The deadly winter seizes; shuts up sense;
And, o'er his inmost vitals creeping cold,
Lays him along the snows, a stiffened corse,
Stretch'd out, and bleaching in the northern blast."
—Thomson.