'Captain Bethel Ramsden undertook to drive tandem from Theale to
London, 43 miles, in 3 hours and 40 minutes. The start took place at
four o'clock in the morning, and in the first hour the captain did 12½
miles to between Twyford and Hare Hatch. He did in the next hour 12
miles and upwards, and got the horses' mouths cleaned at Slough. He
had 5½ miles to do in the last forty minutes, and performed it easily
with eleven minutes to spare.'
The cult of the trotting horse stood high in those days when so much
travelling was done in the saddle: there are innumerable records of
trotters doing their fifteen and sixteen miles on the road within
the hour, sometimes under very heavy weights. Mr. Charles Herbert's
horse, in 1791, trotted 17 miles in 58 minutes 40 seconds on the
Highgate Road, starting from St. Giles' Church. The road is by no
means a level one, and the only advantage the horse had was the hour
selected--between six and seven in the morning, when the traffic was
not heavy.
A famous whip of the 'thirties was Mr. Burke of Hereford--he was also
an amateur pugilist of renown, but that does not concern us here. In
June 1839 he made his thirty-fifth trotting match, whereby he undertook
to drive tandem forty-five miles in three hours. The course was from
the Staines end of Sinebury Common to the fifth milestone towards
Hampton: he did it with four and a half minutes to spare. The horses
used in this match were both extraordinary trotters: the wheeler,
Tommy, had covered 20 miles in 1 hour 18 minutes two months earlier,
and the leader, Gustavus, twenty-four years old, had done his 20 miles
in 1 hour 14 minutes.
Though not a tandem performance in the strict sense of the term, Mr.
Thanes' feat on 12th July 1819 is worth mention. He undertook 'to drive
three horses in a gig, tandem fashion, eleven miles within the hour
on the trot, and to turn if either horse broke.' Fortunately none of
the three did break, and he did the eleven miles, on the road near
Maidenhead, with three minutes to spare.
Tandem driving seems to have gone out of fashion to a certain extent
about 1840, though some young men 'still delighted in it.' The
re-establishment of the Tandem Club, soon after the close of the
Crimean War, marked a revival which made itself felt at Cambridge;
for on 22nd February 1866 the Senate passed another edict, this
time forbidding livery-stable keepers to let out on hire tandems or
four-in-hands to undergraduates. This was confirmed in 1870.
* * * * * *
Transcriber's note:
The illustrations which were plates in the book have been moved near
to the text they illustrate.
Footnotes in the Coaching chapter have been moved to the end of the
chapter.
This book contains inconsistent hyphenations. No spellings have been
changed, but apparent printers' errors have been corrected.
Changes that have been made are:
Footnote 11
"s peks" changed to "speaks",
"robaery" changed to "robbery".
Page 33
Quotation mark added at start of "and take care of yourselves".