Barnet and St. Albans, pulses with stirring incidents of the old
coaching days. It was, for example, in 1820 that what was described as
an “accident” to the Holyhead Mail took place a mile short of St.
Albans. As a matter of plain fact, it was not so much an accident as the
almost inevitable conclusion of a road race between the Holyhead and the
Chester Mails. The coachmen had been driving furiously all the way from
Highgate, and striving to pass one another. Through Barnet they
clattered, and by some miracle avoiding a smash on the old road, came at
last within sight of St. Albans, to where the Old Mile House still
stands by the way. Here, with an inch or two to spare, the coachman of
the Holyhead Mail took the off side and was coming past the Chester
Mail, when the coachman pulled his horses across the road. In the
collision that followed, both coaches were overturned, and one
passenger, William Hunt by name, killed. At the inquest held at the
“Peahen,” St. Albans, both coachmen were, very properly, found guilty of
manslaughter, and were committed for trial at the next Hertford
sessions, which did not open till six months later. During the whole of
that period they were kept in irons at St. Albans. Eventually they
received a further term of twelve months imprisonment each.
With happenings such as these, becoming more alarmingly frequent as the
pace of coaches and the rivalry between them increased, travelling grew
exceedingly dangerous, and Lord Erskine, when counsel for a person who
had had the misfortune to be thrown off one of the coaches from the
“Swan with Two Necks,” and to receive a broken arm, was not altogether
unduly severe in his witty address to the jury:—
“Gentlemen of the jury,” he gravely began, “the plaintiff in this case
is Mr. Beverley, a respectable merchant of Liverpool, and the defendant
is Mr. Chaplin, proprietor of the ‘Swan with Two Necks,’ in Lad Lane,—a
sign emblematical, I suppose, of the number of necks people ought to
possess who ride in his vehicles.”
A further development of coaching dangers about 1820 was found in the
growing mania of the young bloods of that day for driving honours. Every
young man about town cherished an ambition to become an expert coachman,
but unhappily they took their lessons, not on the box-seats of empty
coaches, but laid inexperienced hands upon the reins of well-filled
conveyances.
This driving ambition was a fine thing for the sportively inclined, but
staid and elderly persons were apt to be greatly terrified by it. An
“Old Traveller,” writing to the _Sporting Magazine_ in 1822, after
having read the coaching articles by “Nimrod,” asks the Editor if he
will have the goodness to request his distinguished contributor to
inform the travelling public how they are to travel fifty miles by coach
without having their necks broken, or their limbs shattered and
amputated. “In my younger days,” says he, “when I was on the eve of
setting out on a journey, my wife was in the habit of giving me her
parting blessing, concluding with the words, ‘God bless you, my dear, I
hope you will not be robbed.’ But it is now changed to, ‘God bless you,
my dear, I hope you will not get your neck broke, and that you will
bring all your legs safe home again.’ Now, Mr. Editor, this
neck-breaking and leg-amputating is all because one daring rascal wishes
to show that he is a better coachman than another daring rascal; or
because one proprietor on the road is determined not to be outdone by
another.
“Neither can I think, sir, that such writers as Mr. Nimrod mend the
matter much. By a lively and technical description of these galloping
coaches, he makes many a young man fancy himself a coachman, from which
cause many an old man gets upset and hurt. For example: a friend of mine
coming up to town a short time since by one of these galloping coaches,
was upset and much injured. On going to sympathise with his misfortune,
he informed me that the accident was occasioned by the leaders taking
one road and the wheelers another; so between them both, over they went.
‘My God!’ said I, ‘what was the coachman about; was he asleep, or
drunk?’ ‘Neither,’ replied my friend, ‘_he had nothing to do with it_; a
young Oxonian was driving.’ Now, Mr. Editor, it is not at all improbable
but that this Oxonian had been reading your magazine the night before,
instead of his classics, and meant the next day to put his theory into
practice, by which my friend, a very worthy man, the father of a large
family, nearly lost his life.
“Whoever takes up a newspaper in these eventful times, it is even
betting whether an accident by coach, or a suicide, first meets the eye.
Now really, as the month of November is fast approaching, when, from
foggy weather and dark nights, both these calamities are likely to
increase, I merely suggest the propriety of any unfortunate gentleman,
resolved on self-destruction, trying to avoid the disgrace attached to
it, by first taking a few journeys by some of these Dreadnoughts,
Highflyer, or Tally-ho coaches; as in all probability he may meet with
as instant death as if he had let off one of Joe Manton’s pistols in his
mouth, or severed his head from his body with one of Mr. Palmer’s best
razors.”
It was all very well to complain of these sportsmen, but what about the
professionals? How, for instance, would he have relished being at the
mercy of a man like the driver of one of the Birmingham coaches on the
home stretch between London and Redbourne who, on one occasion, full of
port and claret, could just manage to keep his seat, and in this
condition started for London?
When “the drink was a-dying in him, like,” and he felt more alive, he
sprang his team at this dangerous part of the road known as Mimms Wash.
Here he met the Manchester “Coburg” coming round a corner at a terrific
pace. They met, with a resounding crash; the first coachman finding
himself in the ditch and his leaders charging over it into the gates of
a neighbouring park. The coach happily struck one of the posts and
stopped dead. No one was killed and the worst that happened to the
passengers was that one of them who had jumped off in alarm, sprained an
ankle. He, very naturally, objected to complete the journey on the coach
and had to be provided with a post-chaise at Barnet. Some of the other
passengers went with him. Only one of the horses received any injury,
and that was the off-leader of the “Coburg,” whose shoulder was smashed.
This affair cost the tippling coachman £20, and he thought himself lucky
(as indeed he was) that it was not worse. The same coachman, who by this
time had reformed, met the “Coburg” on another occasion on this stretch
of road. It was a moonlight night and the driver of the “Coburg” was on
the wrong side in order to avoid some heaps of gravel thrown down in
repairing the road. When he saw the other coach, the driver of the
“Coburg” tried to cross over to his proper side, and in doing so, the
heaped up gravel turned his coach over. The passengers were unhurt, and
when they had righted the vehicle and found a baby who had been flung
out of his mother’s arms off the roof into a field, they resumed their
journey.
XII
One shudders to think what would become of railway directors and
shareholders if the old Law of Deodand were still in existence. It was
an ancient enactment, going back to the days of the Saxon kings, by
which the object causing the death of a person was forfeited for the
benefit of his representatives. At least, that was originally the humane
intention of the law, which then really represented the etymology of its
name, making it a God-given compensation. Sometimes the death-dealing
object was valuable; occasionally it was practically valueless; just as
might happen. But, like many another originally just and equitable
thing, the Law of Deodand became perverted, and the inevitable Landowner
found his account in it. It is difficult to follow the reasoning that,
when the person killed left no representatives, made the offending
object forfeit to the Lord of the Manor on whose land the accident might
happen; but so it came about. Deodand became limited after a time, and
instead of those interested receiving the full value of the thing
causing death, a jury would sit to assess the damages due according to
circumstances. Thus, when the Holyhead Mail ran over and killed a boy on
the road near South Mimms, the deodand on the coach and horses was
assessed by the coroner’s jury at one sovereign. Rightly considered,
however, deodand should not in this case have been levied at all, for
the accident was entirely due to a group of three boys, of whom the
deceased was one, darting across the road under the horses’ heads to see
how nearly they could come to the coach without being run over: a common
feat with boys in those days, and one that ruined many a coachman’s
nerves. In this case the boy was killed, and clearly by his own fault.
Had the deodand not been limited, a curious legal point might have
arisen, as it had done before, in the case of a man being killed by a
horse and loaded waggon running over him; when, the value of the horse
and waggon being claimed, the lawyers successfully raised the point that
it was not the horse that killed the man but the waggon. In the result,
the deodand was lessened by the value of the horse. This law was finally
abolished before railways came into existence, or we might have seen
locomotives and whole trains forfeited to relatives of the accidentally
killed; or, failing these, to the Lord of the Manor in the particular
spot where the accident happened.
A perhaps less sporting practice than that of permitting amateurs to
handle the ribbons, but one certainly also less dangerous to the
travelling public, was the wholly unauthorised and altogether
illegitimate custom that began to obtain in later years of admitting a
third person upon the box of the mails.
There was properly but one box seat beside the coachman, and this proud
eminence was most ardently coveted by every man. In early coaching days
it was attainable by an early appearance upon the scene and by tipping
the yard porter; but when competition had rendered coach proprietors
keener in their scent for fares, this pride of place was valued by them
at a considerable advance upon the inglorious seats away from the bright
effulgent genius who handled the ribbons, and diffused a strong odour of
rum around “the bench.”
There was a heavy penalty—£50, it has been said—against admitting a
third person upon the box, the reason of this tremendous regulation
being that the driver, it was considered, could not have sufficient room
for doing his work properly when encumbered with more than one passenger
on the box.
This heavy penalty, or part of it, was recoverable by any informer, and
the result was that the roads were infested by such gentry, not only on
the look-out for a contravention of the rule, but practising all manner
of dodges to inveigle a good-natured or greedy coachman into letting a
third man get up for “just a few miles.”
But the game was so well known that such an application was apt to be
answered by a coil of thong winding itself round the thighs of the
applicant. There was one particularly active informer, Byers by name,
who is referred to in the _Ingoldsby legends_ as “the accusing Byers,
the Prince of Peripatetic Informers, and terror of Stage-coachmen, when
such things were. Alack! alack!” says Barham, “the Railroads have ruined
his ‘vested interest.’”
The interests, “vested” or not, of these informers, were large and
varied. Mail and stage-coachmen, postboys, travellers with their
tax-carts, and waggoners, all contributed to their income. Sometimes
these lynx-eyed fellows would find a coach carrying more passengers than
it was licensed for. The discrepancy could be seen at a glance, for all
stage-coaches were bound to carry a conspicuous plate stating these
particulars. Perhaps the guard would artfully hang a rug over it, and
then the common informer, hanging about at the changing place, would
lift it up and have a look; finding, after all, that the coach was only
carrying its legal complement. Whereupon, the coachman and guard, who
had been lying in wait for him, would duck him finely in the nearest
horse-trough for his pains.
Even the humble turnpike men were liable to be informed against for not
giving a ticket, for taking too much toll, or for not having their names
displayed over their doorways.
There were at one time no fewer than five turnpike-gates between London
and St. Albans, a distance of only just over twenty miles. The series
originally began with the gate on Islington Green, removed afterwards to
the Holloway Road, and was continued by the one at Highgate Archway, and
others at Whetstone, and South Mimms; the fifth being at the entrance to
St. Albans itself. These numerous gates within so comparatively short a
distance, gave excellent opportunities to the informing gentry, who were
wont to take little excursions into the country along this route,
returning with memoranda that brought them a goodly return on their
enterprise. They cast their nets wide and captured an astonishing
diversity of fish. But their memoranda had to be made with discretion.
It was a risky thing to be seen noting down the name of a “collector of
tolls,” as a turnpike-man was officially styled. The present writer has
held converse with an old man who once kept the toll-gate at South
Mimms. Age had withered him, but custom had not staled his
reminiscences. He had an especially favourite and Homeric story of an
encounter with one of these pests.
It was springtime, and our toll-keeping friend had a mind to whitewash
the exterior of his house. To this end he not only took down the
climbing roses, that rendered his official residence a fugitive glimpse
of beauty to those who fared the road by coach, but he also removed his
name-board. To him entered, while engaged in wielding the whitewash
brush, one of the informing species, who, thinking himself unobserved,
made to examine the board, lying face downwards, on the ground. Our
friend, however, was not so intent upon his whitewashing but that he saw
with the tail of his eye what was toward behind him. He must have been a
man of elemental passions, for he reached over, his brush fully charged,
and delivered a staggering sideways blow with it upon the face of the
unsuspecting note taker. “I gin him a good ’un,” he always used to say;
“but he come up for more, an’ I punched his head and kicked his ——” No
matter what he kicked. Suffice it to say that his language was forcible,
adjectival, and Saxon.
XIII
The old road regains Telford’s Holyhead Road of the Twenties a little
distance short of South Mimms, close by where the cast-iron plate of the
old milestone proclaims “Barnett” to be three miles distant. It crosses
the broad highway at an acute angle and goes in an ascent, and with many
curves behind the village; descending again and almost returning upon
itself through the village street, as though a circuitous course and the
mounting of every hill were things greatly to be desired by travellers
bound on a long and toilsome journey. South Mimms, village and church,
is completely islanded by these old and new roads.
[Illustration: SOUTH MIMMS.]
In the accompanying illustration, the church with the houses behind it
may be seen standing on a knoll. It is a hillocky and picturesque place,
with a church unspoiled by the restoration of 1868, and rustic cottages
that might well be fifty, instead of less than fifteen, miles from
London. The view is towards London, and the road in the foreground is
Telford’s; the old road coming steeply down and crossing again. There
was an excellent reason for that ancient way taking such high ground at
this point. It was for the accommodation of the village, and continued
to be the main road until the days of a mere local intercourse between
one parish and its next neighbour gave place to the more frequent and
extended travel of later times, when direct communication between
distant places became of much more importance than the convenience of
wayside hamlets. The black despair that overtook the innkeepers and
other frontagers relegated by Telford from a position in the midst of
the traffic to a stagnant backwater of life may readily be imagined, but
they received no compensation for this “worserment,” which must have
practically ruined many of them; nor did those more fortunate ones pay
for betterment who, in the making of new roads, found themselves, from
being in a bye-lane, suddenly placed in the best of situations, on the
main road.
Mimms was not only infamous for its floods. In days of yore it harboured
highwaymen and footpads in plenty, and for quite a long time. It seems
odd, nowadays, that a particular spot should have been of so evil a
repute, and yet that no efforts were made to secure the rascals. A
quaint document still preserved in the archives of the House of Lords
recounts what befell William Symonds here in 1647. It is a petition in
which he, as a prisoner in the King’s Bench prison, prays for a new
trial. It seems that he was entrusted by Henry Fitzhugh and Richard
Wells with a sealed packet of money, for him to carry from Bedford to
London, and that when he reached Mimms at break of day he was set upon
and robbed by three or four thieves and lost not only the money, but
almost all the rest of what he had to bring to London. He further says
that he was no common carrier, and that he had not negligently lost the
money. Yet Fitzhugh and Wells prosecuted him, and, obtaining judgment,
laid him prisoner in the King’s Bench. He concludes by praying for a new
trial; but whether or not he ever obtained it does not appear. In any
case, coming from Bedford to London, he had no business on this road.
The strange story of unfortunate William Symonds is followed by equally
strange happenings some forty years later; when, for example, on
November 9th. 1690, seven highwaymen not only robbed the Manchester
carrier near this spot of £15,000, tax-money being conveyed from the
Midlands to London, but also killed or hamstrung eighteen horses of the
escort, in order to prevent pursuit. It was a leisurely business and
thoroughly well carried out; all travellers who were unlucky enough to
be passing at the time being robbed first and then tied to wayside
trees, where they were left to be released by later wayfarers. Two Roman
Catholics were subsequently arrested on a charge of being concerned in
this affair, and committed for trial, but it does not appear what
happened to them. At any rate, whatever their fate may have been, it did
not stop these outrages on the Holyhead Road; for, two years later, the
most audacious bands were still at work in this district, reaping almost
incredible plunder. On the night of August 23rd, 1692, for instance, the
great Churchill, the terrible “Malbrouck,” scourge of the foreigner on
many a stricken field, tamely submitted to be robbed by the highwaymen
who lay wait for him near “Coney,” as Narcissus Luttrell calls London
Colney, and plundered him of 500 guineas; a loss “which,” says Macaulay,
alluding to that great captain’s miserly disposition, “he doubtless
never ceased to regret to the last moment of his long career of
prosperity and glory.”
The plunder reaped by these daring highwaymen must have been immense,
and inferior only to that bagged by modern company promoters. Three
months later than their little parley with Marlborough, a party of eight
or nine made a haul of between £1,500 and £2,000 out of a waggon “near
Barnet,” and might have long continued their career had it not been for
the King, who suspecting Roman Catholics and Jacobites in all these
marauding bands, took measures that for a time effectually cleared the
roads near London. Detachments of a regiment of Dragoons were posted
some ten miles out, along all the great roads, and formed patrols.
Captures were numerous, and executions almost as many. Among their
notable seizures was that of Captain James Whitney, at some unspecified
spot “at Barnet.” In this later Battle of Barnet, between the soldiers
and Whitney’s band, December 6th, 1692, in which one dragoon was killed
and several wounded, he was captured, and afterwards promptly hauled off
to Newgate, amid great rejoicings, for he had been a terror in many
widely separated districts of England. They hanged the “Captain,” not at
Tyburn but in Smithfield, in the beginning of 1693, and the roads knew
an interval of peace.
The parish registers and churchwardens’ accounts of South Mimms throw a
further and a sombre light upon the history of the road, with their
entries of “strangers” buried and “poor people” relieved. No fewer than
seven “strangers” were found dead on the road, within the limits of the
parish, in 1727, one of them having been drowned in Mimms Wash. Among
other items in the accounts is one of 1737, “To a man that had the
small-pox, to go forwards, 00 . 1 . 00_d._” Set down in this manner a
shilling looks a great deal, but what astonishes the reader of these
things more than anything else is the heartless way in which the poor
and the sick were given a trifle and hurried off to the next parish, to
die on the way, if they would, in order that some other community should
have the expense of them, or the infection, as the case might be.
XIV
The Holyhead Road goes broad and straight, and with a long perspective
of dust-clouds and telegraph-poles, up Ridge Hill, where the borders of
Middlesex are crossed and Hertfordshire entered; but the old way, after
passing the “White Hart,” crosses to the right hand and climbs up by
itself as a deserted track. Near the hill-top it crosses again, and so
descends on the left hand towards St. Albans. It is quite a narrow way,
measuring at the most twelve feet across, against the average twenty
feet of the modern road; and, sunk between deep banks as it is, giving
rise to astonishment that a road such as this was, until the first,
quarter of the nineteenth century had nearly passed away, the chief
means of communication between the capitals of England and Ireland.
Nature, left to herself, has long since resumed sway over the old road,
here and there scored with waggon-ruts through eighty years’ deposit of
leaf-mould, or, in other places, become a green ride through the
unchecked trees that grow along it and interlace overhead. It is a relic
of Old England of the days before railways: no museum specimen, but an
open-air survival, unnoted and untravelled; discovered by the few who,
haply realising what it is, thread its winding course and leave the
modern well worn road to the crowd.
Descending Ridge Hill, into the valley of the Colne, London Colney is
reached, skirting the road by that insignificant stream, spanned by a
picturesque old red-brick bridge, whose generous proportions seem to be
much too large for so unassuming a runlet. Such criticism, however, is
severely deprecated by those who know the Colne throughout the year.
They tell wondrous stories of the things it is capable of. London
Colney’s name is perhaps not a very attractive one, but the place itself
is exceedingly picturesque. Quaint village inns, timber-and-plaster
gabled cottages, and old brick houses with a certain air of refinement
that comes of chaste design and sound workmanship, are its constituent
features.
[Illustration: THE OLD ROAD, RIDGE HILL.]
[Illustration: LONDON COLNEY.]