economised: at some places horses were changed within the space of a
minute, and so jealously punctual were the coachmen that the village
people set their clocks by the mail as it sped along the street. The
Royal Mail paid no tolls, and if a turnpike keeper had not his gate
open ready for its passage he was fined 40s. The passing of the London
coach was the event of the day in quiet villages during the coaching
age, as the guard performed the functions now discharged by the
newspaper and telegraph wire. “The grandest chapter in our experience,”
says a regular traveller during the stirring times of 1805-1815,
“was on those occasions when we went down from London with news of a
victory.”
THE “GOLDEN AGE” OF COACHING.
The adoption of Macadam’s system of road-making gave birth to the brief
“golden age” of coaching. John Macadam, an Ayrshire man, born in 1756,
had devoted many years to the subject of road improvement, and between
the years 1798 and 1814 travelled over some 30,000 miles of highway in
Great Britain, His method of spreading small broken fragments of hard
stone, none ever six ounces in weight, stamped or rolled into a compact
crust, was finally approved in 1818, and “macadamised” roads were
rapidly made all over the kingdom. The inventor was awarded a grant of
£10,000, and in 1827 he was appointed Surveyor-General of Roads. He
died in 1836, when fast coaching was at the zenith of its prosperity.
The portrait of which a reproduction is here given is believed to be
the only one in existence. It was painted by Raymond, about the year
1835, and was given by Mr. Macadam’s widow to Mr. Allen of Hoddesdon,
Essex, who for several years had made road-mending tools and appliances
to the great road-maker’s patterns. The portrait was bequeathed to Mr.
Allen’s granddaughter, by whom it was sold in 1902, to the present
owner, Major McAdam.
[Illustration: JOHN LOUDON MACADAM.
(_From a painting in the possession of his great-grandson, Major J. J.
L. McAdam, of Sherborne, Dorset._)]
To fully appreciate the enormous value of Macadam’s work it must be
considered in conjunction with that of Telford the engineer, and
with knowledge of the earlier methods of road-making. The original
high-roads in England were the tracks made by travelling chapmen or
pedlars, who carried their goods on pack horses. These naturally
selected routes over the hills when they sought to avoid the bogs and
quagmires of low-lying ground; and these routes, becoming in time the
regular coach roads, left much to be desired in point of gradient and
contour. Telford cut through the hills to obtain an easier ascent,
and when Macadam had “made” the new road thus outlined it was as
widely different from the original track it replaced as it is possible
to conceive. “Nimrod,” writing in 1826, said, “Roads may be called
the veins and arteries of a country through which channels every
improvement circulates. I really consider Mr. Macadam as being, next
to Dr. Jenner, the greatest contributor to the welfare of mankind that
this country has ever produced.”
With good, firm and level roads the speed of the mail and stage coaches
increased, and the endeavour to combine speed with safety brought
about numerous minor but important improvements in coach-building,
proprietors sparing neither pains nor money to insure the best
materials and workmanship. The greatest improvements, says Mr. Thrupp,
were those begun in 1820 by Mr. Samuel Hobson. He reduced the height
of the wheels to 3 feet 3 inches in front, and 4 feet 5 inches behind,
lengthened the coach body to better proportions and hung it lower,
so that a double step would give access to the door instead of a
three-step ladder. He wrought great improvements in the curves of the
carriage, and did much to strengthen the details of the underworks.
FAST COACHES.
Coach driving became a favourite occupation among men of good birth who
had run through their patrimony and could turn their hands to nothing
more congenial. “Horsing” coaches was a business to which all sorts and
conditions of men devoted themselves, and which did much to promote the
spirit of rivalry that made for good service. Innkeepers and others
contracted to supply horses for one, two, three, or more stages of a
journey, and thus acquired a personal interest in the coach. The best
coaches now ran at ten or ten and a half miles an hour, and faster
over favourable stretches of road. The Quicksilver mail from London
to Devonport, “Nimrod” tells us, was half a mile in the hour faster
than most of the coaches in England, and did the fastest stage of the
journey, four miles near Hartford Bridge, in twelve minutes. This coach
on one occasion accomplished its journey of 216 miles in twenty-one
hours, fourteen minutes, including stoppages.
The mail coaches, it should be said, carried three outside passengers
at most, and no luggage at all on the roof. Of course these rates of
speed, so much higher than had been known theretofore, called forth
protests. “Old Traveller,” writing to the _Sporting Magazine_ in 1822,
objects to the encouragement given such hazardous work by “Nimrod.” In
his younger days, he says, when about to start on a journey, his wife’s
parting hope was that he would not be robbed; now she had changed it
to the hope that he would not get his neck broken. It was no uncommon
thing, at the beginning of the century and earlier, for a Birmingham
merchant to make his will before he set out on a journey; and with all
respect to the “Old Traveller,” the risks he encountered on the road
in the days before Macadam were as great from ruts and holes as from
highwaymen.
[Illustration: ROYAL MAIL COACH.]
Travelling on May-day was avoided by those who objected to fast work,
for it was customary for rival stages to race each other the whole
journey on that day, and old sporting papers contain occasional record
of the fact that a coach had accomplished its entire journey at a
rate of fifteen miles an hour. A law passed in 1820, to put an end to
“wanton and furious driving or racing,” by which coachmen were made
liable to criminal punishment if anyone were maimed or injured, did
not stop this practice. For on May 1, 1830, the Independent Tallyho
ran from London to Birmingham, 109 miles, in 7 hours, 39 minutes. The
writer in _Baily’s Magazine_ of June, 1900, before referred to, gives
a graphic account of a May-day race between two of the smartest West
country coaches, the Hibernia and l’Hirondelle, from which it appears
that these contests were not always free from foolhardiness, though it
must be admitted that they produced wonderful displays of coachmanship.
Captain Malet gives the following as the fastest coaches in England in
1836:—
London and Brighton, 51½ miles, time five hours, fifteen minutes;
London and Shrewsbury, 154 miles, time fifteen hours; London and
Exeter, 171 miles, time seventeen hours; London and Manchester, 187
miles, time nineteen hours; London and Liverpool, 203 miles, time
twenty hours, fifty minutes; London and Holyhead, 261 miles, time
twenty-six hours, fifty-five minutes.
Some of the smartest coaches in England ran from London to Brighton,
which, owing to George III’s patronage, had since 1784 risen from a
mere fishing village to the most fashionable of seaside resorts. In
1819, says Bradfield, upwards of 70 coaches visited and left Brighton
every day; in 1835, says Bradfield, there were 700 mail coaches and
rather under 3,300 stages running in England; he estimates the number
of horses used at over 150,000, while 30,000 men were employed as
coachmen, guards, horse-keepers, ostlers, &c. Mr. W. Chaplin, the
member for Salisbury, was the largest proprietor; he had five “yards”
in London and owned 1,300 horses. Messrs. Horne and Sherman ranked next
to Mr. Chaplin; each had about 700 horses.
HEAVY TAXATION OF COACHES.
The heavy taxes laid upon the stage coaches were a fruitful source
of complaint among proprietors. In 1835 a coach conveying eighteen
passengers paid 3½d. per mile run to the revenue. To show the decline
of coaching, it may be said that in 1835 the total revenue from the
stage coaches amounted to £498,497 and in 1854 it had fallen to
£73,903. The taxes were estimated to be one-fifth of the receipts, and
this being the case it is not remarkable that, in the earlier days of
the railroad, the people in country districts remote from railways
should have suffered more inconvenience than they had ever known. It
no longer paid to run a coach in such districts; and persons in the
humbler walks of life found themselves set down at the station, ten,
fifteen or twenty miles from home, with no means of getting there other
than their own legs. Such districts saw a revival of old postal methods
in the shape of boys mounted on ponies.
The unequal competition between coach and train was continued for
many years, ruinous taxation of the former notwithstanding. While the
coaches were paying 20 per cent. of their earnings to the revenue, the
railways paid 5 per cent., and carried passengers more rapidly and more
cheaply. The coaches held their place with great tenacity, aided no
doubt by the innate British tendency to cling to old institutions.
The _Quarterly Review_ of 1837 mentions as a curious and striking
instance of enterprise and the advantages of free competition that a
day coach then performed the journey between London and Manchester in
time which exceeded by only one hour that occupied by the combined
agency of coaches and the Liverpool and Birmingham railway. The Act for
transmitting the mails by railway was passed in 1838, eight years after
the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, and then it may
be said coach proprietors recognised that their industry was doomed;
but they maintained fares at the old scales until the coach was nearly
extinguished.
EARLY CABS.
We must now retrace our steps and endeavour to trace the progress made
in vehicles other than stage and mail coaches. In 1740 the first patent
was granted for a two-wheeled carriage; it is briefly described as a
“double shaft and pole carriage with two wheels drawn by two horses
harnessed abreast.” Another “coach with two wheels” was patented in
1786. Mr. Thrupp states that 27,300 two-wheeled vehicles paid duty in
the year 1814, a fact which shows how rapidly they grew in favour. It
is therefore somewhat curious that the first two-wheeled hackney cab in
London should not have appeared in London until 1823, when Mr. David
Davis built twelve of these vehicles.
“The body was a little like a hansom cab but smaller; it had a head,
of which the hinder half was stiff and solid, and the fore part made
to fold. This arrangement was probably an imitation of the gentleman’s
cabriolet, the hood of which was rarely put down altogether, as the
groom had to hold on by it. Outside the head on one side was a seat for
the driver of the cab, and the whole was hung upon stiff shafts. These
cabs were, I think, painted yellow, and stood for hire in a yard in
Portland Street close to Oxford Circus.”
Cabs of this kind stood for hire in the streets, a few years later,
if we may accept the authority of Charles Dickens. Readers of the
_Pickwick Papers_ which was published (in monthly parts) in 1837 and
1838, will remember how Mr. Pickwick, when he set out upon his travels
took a cab from “the coach stand at St. Martins-le-Grand”; and took
notes of the driver’s account of his horse as he drove to Charing
Cross. On another page we find Mr. and Mrs. Raddle and Mrs. Cluppins
“squeezed into a hackney cabriolet, the driver sitting in his own
particular little dickey at the side.” This vehicle was perhaps the
light two-wheeled cab with a fixed panel top, built to carry only two
persons inside, which was introduced about 1830. The driver sat on a
little seat over the off-side wheel.
This vehicle was succeeded by Mr. Boulnois’ patent cab, of which an
illustration is given. It opened at the back, and the driver’s seat
was on the roof; the passengers sat facing one another. This cab was
light and convenient, but appears to have fallen into disuse because
the fore part was within too easy reach of the horse’s heels to make
it quite acceptable to nervous passengers, Harvey’s “Quarto Bus” to
carry four was the next popular conveyance, but it was superseded about
1836 by the “brougham cab” for two. This cab was rather smaller than
the vehicle to which Lord Brougham’s name was given in 1839. From this
conveyance was developed the “clarence cab,” which remains with us
still as the familiar “four-wheeler.” It should be mentioned that the
first four-wheeled cabs appeared in London about 1835; these however,
carried only two passengers inside. The modern hansom belongs to a
later period. In 1802 there were 1,100 hackney carriages in London,
and in 1855 the number was 2,706.
[Illustration: LONDON HACKNEY CAB (BOULNOIS’ PATENT) ABOUT 1835.]
In 1824 was published _The Hackney Coach Directory_; this book, which
must have been hailed as a real boon to the users of cabs in London,
was compiled by James Quaife, “Surveyor to the Board of Hackney
Coaches.” It set forth the “Distances checked from actual admeasurement
from eighty-four coach stands in and about the Metropolis,” and the
title page tells us “The number of fares set forth is nearly eighteen
thousand.”
PRIVATE AND STATE COACHES, 1750-1830.
A volume might easily be filled with the particulars of private
carriages which came into use between the middle of the eighteenth
century and the end of the coaching era. Great ingenuity and a great
deal of art of a florid kind was expended on the private coaches
of the upper classes. A patent granted in 1786 gives us an idea of
the materials used for the purpose; the patent was for a method of
“ornamenting the outsides of coaches and other carriages with foil
stones, Bristol stones, paste and all sorts of pinched glass, sapped
glass and every other stone, glass and composition used in or applied
to the jewellery trade.” Mr. Larwood writes of the carriages in Hyde
Park:—
“The beautiful and somewhat vain Duchess of Devonshire had a carriage
which cost 500 guineas without upholstery. That of the Countess of
Sutherland was grey, with her cypher in one of Godsell’s newly-invented
crystals. A Mr. Edwards had a _vis-à-vis_ which cost 300 guineas, and
was thought ‘admirable’; while another nameless gentleman gladdened
the eyes of all beholders with a splendid gig lined with looking
glass; while the artistic curricle, with shells on the wheels, of Romeo
Coates, was one of the features of Hyde Park.”
Six horses were not uncommonly driven. Sir John Lade drove a phaeton
and six greys. The Prince of Wales, in 1781, drove a pair caparisoned
with blue harness stitched in red, the horses’ manes being plaited with
scarlet ribbons while they wore plumes of feathers on their heads.
The decorative art as applied to vehicles naturally found greatest
scope in State coaches. The State carriage of Queen Victoria was built
in 1761 for George III. from designs by Sir William Chambers, a famous
architect, who was born in 1726. The length of this coach is 24 feet,
the height 12 feet, the width 8 feet, and the weight is between 3 and
4 tons; the various panels and doors are adorned with allegorical
groups by Cipriani. This superb carriage, having only been used on rare
occasions, is still in a good state of preservation. It cost £7,562 to
build and adorn. The State coach of the Lord Mayor of London has been
of necessity more frequently used, and alterations and repairs have
left comparatively little of the original vehicle built in 1757. In
style it is generally similar to the Royal State coach,
While money and artistic talent were lavished freely on the adornment
of the carriages built for pleasure or display in London, it must not
be supposed that sound workmanship was neglected. The highly decorated
vehicles driven in the Park were well built, but the best and strongest
work was necessarily put into carriages which were required for more
practical purposes, and we must therefore discriminate between the
pleasure carriage and that used for travelling.
The mail and stage coaches were used by nearly all classes of society,
but these worked only the main roads throughout the kingdom; therefore
country gentlemen who resided off the coach routes had to find their
own way to the nearest stage or posting house; moreover, wealthy men
who could afford the luxury of taking their own time over a journey,
were still much addicted to the use of private travelling carriages
drawn by their own horses or, more often, horsed from stage to stage
along the route by the post masters.
For many years after Mr. McAdam’s methods had been applied to the main
highways, the narrower and less used by-roads left much to be desired;
and however good the roads it is obvious that lavishly adorned
carriages would have been out of place for travel in all weathers.
A single day’s journey through mud or dust would play havoc with
ornamentation contrived of “foil stones, Bristol stones, sapped glass”
and similar materials; what was required in the travelling carriage,
such as that so well portrayed by the late Charles Cooper Henderson,
was the combination of strength and lightness. Hence the best of
the coach-builder’s art, the finest workmanship in the practical,
as opposed to the decorative sense, was applied to the travelling
carriage, which was constructed to secure the greatest comfort to the
occupants, together with the greatest strength to withstand rapid
travel over roads of all kinds with the least weight.
[Illustration:
_After the Picture by Chas. Cooper Henderson._
TRAVELLING POST, 1825-1835.]
The picture by Cooper Henderson, from which the illustration is
reproduced, refers to the period about 1825-35, and it will be observed
that while the body of the carriage is hung lower than the posting
carriage of seventy years earlier, the general plan is not greatly
dissimilar.
VARIETIES OF CARRIAGE.
About 1790 the art of coach-building had arrived at a very high degree
of perfection,[25] and carriages in great variety of shape were built.
A feature common to all, or nearly all, was the height of the wheels.
The highest were 5 feet 8 inches in diameter; these had 14 spokes, and
the number of spokes were reduced in ratio with the size of the wheel,
till the smallest, 3 feet 2 inches in diameter, had only 8 spokes. A
good example of the coach of 1790 may be seen in the South Kensington
Museum; it belonged to the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and, save for
the greater size of the body, the flatness of its sides and greater
length above than below, is not widely dissimilar from coaches of the
present day.
[25] _Treatise upon Carriages and Harness._ W. Felton, London, 1794.
The Landau, invented at Landau in Germany, in 1757, was, about 1790,
made to open in the middle of the roof or “hood,” and became very
popular as combining the advantages of a closed coach with an open
carriage; the chief objection to Landaus was the greasiness and smell
of the blacking leather of which the hoods were constructed. The name
of the phaeton first occurs in a patent granted in 1788. Phaetons
of various shapes came into fashion later: all were built to be driven
by the owner, and probably gained much in popular esteem from the fact
that George IV., when Prince of Wales, used to drive a “Perch High
Phaeton” in the Park and to race meetings. Some of these vehicles were
extravagantly high, and it was the correct thing to drive four horses
in them at the fastest trot. The “Perch High Phaeton” was shaped like a
curricle and had a hood. “The centre of the body was hung exactly over
the front axle-tree, the front wheels were 4 feet high, and the hind
wheels 5 feet 8 inches” (Thrupp).
[Illustration:
_By J. Doyle._
KING GEORGE IV. IN HIS PONY PHAETON.]
The pony phaeton owed its popularity to King George IV., who, in 1824,
desired to possess a low carriage into which he could step without
exertion; old pictures show us that the pony phaeton of the present day
is very like the original vehicle. Such a phaeton was built for our
late Queen, then Princess Victoria, in 1828. It should be said that C
springs were first used by English coach builders about the year 1804.
Among other curious carriages was the “Whisky,” a two-wheeled gig with
a movable hood, the body connected with the long horizontal springs by
scroll irons, The “suicide gig” was an absurdly high vehicle which
was popular in Ireland; in this the groom was perched on something
resembling a stool 3 feet above his master who drove.
Dr. R. Lovell Edgeworth, writing in 1817, says that a sudden
revolution in the height of private carriages had taken place a few
years previously. Such as might be seen in Bond Street were so low
that gentlemen on foot could hold conversation with ladies in their
carriages without the least difficulty; but it was soon discovered that
other people over-heard their conversation, and carriages “immediately
sprang up to their former exaltation.” It is difficult to believe that
such a reason accounted for a revolution in the method of carriage
building.
Driving as a pastime came into vogue about the beginning of the
century, when it became fashionable for ladies to display their skill
on the coach box, The “Benson Driving Club” was founded in 1807, and
survived until 1853 or 1854; the Four Horse Club came into existence in
1808, but only continued for eighteen years. The Four-in-Hand Driving
Club was founded in 1856, and the Coaching Club in 1870.
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