Writing to my father on 25 June 1843, my grandfather says:--“Our post is
altered. There is a horse-post direct from Chudley to Moreton: the bag
is merely dropt at the office locked: he takes no letters on the road.
Now in future we shall be obliged to send to Bovey with and for
letters.” They had hitherto sent out to Kelly Cross upon the Moreton
road; but Bovey was two miles further off. Several people here gave
sixpence a week each to an old woman for bringing their letters out from
Bovey and taking letters back; and he writes on 12 July 1845:--“The
postwoman calls as regularly on Sunday mornings as on other mornings.”
But on 15 February 1852 he writes:--“We have now a government appointed
letter-carrier here: so the old woman, greatly to her discomfort, is out
of a berth.... This man delivers free, and carries free.... He delivers
from Bovey town on to Wooly, Knowle, here, and on to Lustleigh town, and
so far as Rudge: all others, Parsonage, Kelly, etc., to fetch their
letters from Lustleigh town.”
* * * * *
In the last years of coaching there were half-a-dozen daily services
from London to Exeter and Plymouth, all serving different places on the
way. Thus, one coach came down to Exeter by Shaftesbury and went on by
Ashburton, while another came down by Dorchester and went on by Totnes.
For coming here the best plan was to take a coach that passed through
Chudleigh.
On 19 March 1841 my father started from Piccadilly in the Defiance coach
at half past four, stopped at Andover for supper and at Ilminster for
breakfast, and reached Exeter at half past ten. Allowing for stops, this
meant travelling about ten miles an hour all the way, the distance being
about 170 miles. He went on by coach to Chudleigh and drove from there,
arriving here at half past one, twenty-one hours after leaving London.
This was the last time that he came down all the way by road.
On 10 October 1842 he started from Paddington by the mail train at 8.55
p.m., reached Taunton at 2.55 a.m., and came on by the mail coach,
stopping at Exeter from 6.15 to 7.0, and reaching Chudleigh at 8.0; and
he was here soon after 9.0, “being only 12¼ hours from London to
Wreyland.” Coming by the same train on 20 March 1845, he reached Exeter
at 4.5 by rail instead of 6.15 by coach, and he was here soon after 7.0.
On 8 August 1846 he came from Paddington to Exeter by the express train
in only 4½ hours, 9.45 a.m. to 2.15 p.m. He came by rail as far as
Teignmouth on 26 November 1846, and as far as Newton on 2 April 1847.
But the line from Exeter to Newton did not much improve the journey, as
it added twenty miles by rail, and saved only seven miles by road.
He notes on 7 October 1847:--“Went from Dawlish to Teignmouth by railway
on the atmospheric plan, and to Newton by locomotive.” Brunel was the
engineer of the line, and he had come round to the opinion that
locomotives were wrong in principle--there was needless wear and tear
and loss of power with engines dragging themselves along: the engine
should be stationary, and the power transmitted. And he induced the
company to build the line with stationary engines, which pumped the air
out from a pipe between the metals, and thus drew the train along by
suction. But the leakage was so great that the system was abandoned.
Coming down by the Defiance coach the fare from London to Exeter was £3
for a seat inside, and by some of the other coaches it was £3. 10_s._
0_d._ When the railway had reached Taunton, the fare was £2. 18_s._
0_d._ for first class on the train and inside on the coach. After it
reached Exeter, the fare was £2. 4_s._ 6_d._, first class, and £2.
10_s._ 0_d._ by the express. It now is £1. 8_s._ 6_d._, first class by
any train.
Writing to my father on 1 March 1840, my grandfather concludes:--“I have
to request you do take an inside place in the coach. By no means go
outside.” He had a notion that most people’s maladies could be traced to
their travelling on the outside of a coach. He was himself a little deaf
in one ear; and he always put this down to going across Salisbury Plain
outside the coach on a freezing winter night.
In 1841 there was an innovation; and he writes to my father on 22
June:--“Moreton, they say, is all alive: there are three vehicles which
they call Omnibusses. Wills goes from Exeter [through Moreton] to
Plymouth, Waldron and Croot to Exeter and Newton.... All grades appear
to go by this means, even the farmers go instead of horseback.”
My grandfather liked travelling in a leisurely way, “the time my own,”
and had no patience with my father’s way of travelling about the world,
“packing and unpacking, from steam carriage to steam vessel, all bustle
and hurry,” as he puts it when writing him upon the subject on 19 August
1844. On going up the Rhine with him, he writes, 23 July 1855:--“Two
days more on the journey would have avoided the unpleasant part of it.”
But my father went his own way, and my mother kept to it after his
decease. She went up the pyramids at Gizeh and Sakkarah, when she was
sixty-three, and down a sulphur mine in Sicily, when she was sixty-six.
The foreign diligences were heavier and bigger than the English coaches,
and did not travel so fast. On 9 October 1842 my father arrived at
Boulogne by diligence from Paris, “having been only 21¾ hours on the
journey--140 miles--whereas in 1839 I was 27 hours.” Going to
Switzerland and Italy in September 1840, he went by steamer from London
to Havre in 22 hours, and by diligence in 16 hours from Havre to Paris
and 75 hours from Paris to Geneva. Then in 9 hours from Martigny to
Brieg--“tolerably good travelling, altho’ for a coach that takes the
mail the delays are shameful”--and in 11 hours across the Simplon from
Brieg to Domodossola. This took me 10 hours in September 1899, which was
the last time that I crossed the Alps by diligence. Since then I have
been through the Simplon tunnel half-a-dozen times, going from Brieg to
Domodossola in 50 minutes.
I crossed the Alps for the first time in August 1869, going by the
Splügen. I was with my father, mother, brother and sister; and we
engaged a Vetturino--a man who owned the carriage and horses that he
drove. We came back by the St Gothard in a carriage with post-horses. In
travelling with a Vetturino, one had to wait at various places, while
his horses rested; but in posting one sometimes had to wait still longer
for fresh horses. In September 1873 we came over the Arlberg in a
carriage with post-horses--there is a railway-tunnel underneath it
now--and one day we did only nineteen miles. When the postmaster was
innkeeper as well, it was not his interest to speed the parting guest.
In driving across the Splügen, we started from Coire, and halted for the
nights at Thusis, Chiavenna and Varenna. There was rail to Thusis, and
on from Chiavenna, when I came that way again; and diligences went from
Thusis to Chiavenna in about ten hours.
Posting across the St Gothard, we started from Como, stayed a night at
Lugano and another at Airolo, and took the steamer at Fluelen for
Lucerne. The tunnel had not been begun then. It was finished in 1882;
and I came through it for the first time in October 1883, reaching
Lucerne in about seven hours from Como.
Coming through by railway, one misses some of the excitements of the
older style of travelling. When we went over in 1869, the diligence had
been attacked by brigands the night before in the narrow gorge below
Airolo. It was twilight when we reached the gorge; and suddenly we heard
men galloping towards us. My sister made up her mind at once that they
were brigands; but they turned out to be an escort coming down to see us
through, and they rode on with us, their carbines in their hands.
We came from Basle to London in 1869 in six-and-twenty hours, and in
1913 I came in fourteen hours. There were neither dining-cars nor
sleeping-cars in 1869, nor were there any corridor-carriages, but only
the old style of carriage that jolted one abominably. Yet my father kept
talking of the speed and comfort of the train, for he was thinking of
the journey in the diligence. I got little sympathy from him, when I
felt tired in a train; and I have little sympathy with people who
complain of travelling now. In fact, I sometimes feel a little jealous
of their seeing things so easily that I saw only with trouble and
discomfort. They have railways and hotels all over Greece; and, when I
went there first in 1880, there were no hotels except at Athens, and no
railways except from Athens to Peiræus, a distance of about five miles.
But there was a pleasant way of travelling that is unknown to them. When
I first went to Holland in 1872, we travelled along the canals in a
Trekschuit, a light barge drawn by two or three horses, tandem, that
went along the tow-path at a trot. The seats were put up high enough to
clear the banks of the canal; and you saw the country comfortably, as
you went gliding through. They have only motors now.
These barges were formerly in use in Belgium also; and I found these
entries in one of the old diaries here:--“25 July 1833. Dunkirk. By
barge to Bruges.... Changed barges at Furnes, the Belgian frontier....
Changed barges again at Nieuport.... 27 July 1833. Bruges. Embarked in a
superb barge, called the Lion, and drawn by five horses. It had carried
Napoleon.... Arrived at Ghent in the evening.”
A steamboat was nicer than a diligence; and that really was the reason
why people were always going up the Rhine. It was much the easiest way
of getting to Switzerland and Italy. Going by the Rhine in 1855, my
father notes that it was the seventeenth time that he had gone that way,
either up or down the stream. That time he had his father with him, and
chafed a little at the leisurely movements of the previous generation.
But he never wished for anything more rapid than the steamboat on the
Rhine, whereas I have found it tedious, and gone up by the train.
* * * * *
Looking at old diaries, I see that the cost of travelling on the
Continent has varied very little in the last seventy or eighty years.
There has been a decrease in the cost of transit; but this is
counterbalanced by an increase in the charge for bedrooms. It used to be
absurdly low; but the rooms were often very poor and sparsely furnished
even at the best hotels. The charge for meals at table d’hôte remains
about the same.
My own experience of foreign tables d’hôte now goes back fifty years,
having begun at Paris, 15 September 1867, with a table d’hôte of four
hundred people at the Louvre Hotel--then in the old building on the
other side of the street. So far as I can judge, the meals used
generally to be better than they are, and they certainly were more
abundant. The decline had begun before my time. After dining at the
table d’hôte at Meurice’s, my father notes in his diary, 3 September
1863:--“Not so good a dinner as they used to give there five-and-twenty
years ago.” At the table d’hôte at Blinzler’s at Godesberg, 25 August
1852, the courses were:--“1, soup; 2, roast beef and potatoes; 3,
mutton cutlets and vegetables; 4, fish and sauces; 5, ducks and salads;
6, hare and stewed fruits; 7, roast veal and salads; 8, shell-fish and
puddings; 9, fruits, sweetmeats and cheese.”
Innkeepers have changed their policy. They used to make their profit on
the table d’hôte, and they find they can do better now with people
dining à la carte. In those days it literally was table d’hôte, mine
host sitting at the head of the table, and being helped first to make
quite sure that everything was good. I saw this done at the Cloche at
Dijon so recently as 9 August 1912; but it was a long while since I had
seen this anywhere else.
The queerest table d’hôte I ever saw, was at the Singe d’Or at Tournai,
26 March 1875. That was Good Friday; and it was a first-rate
fish-dinner, lasting close upon three hours. There were eighty people
there, mostly from the town, as there were few travellers about, and we
were the only English. The citizens went steadily through the fifteen
courses, and drank dozens of champagne, and then went home with a good
conscience, feeling they had carried out the precepts of the Church in
having a meatless day.
In ordering wine at small hotels my father had a rule, which I have
followed with success:--Always order the wine of the country. You will
get the wine of the country in any event, whatever you may have ordered;
and, if you order it under its own name, you may get it unadulterated.
* * * * *
In travelling in Italy in 1851, my father took a chimney-pot hat to wear
in the large towns, and he writes home on 9 September that another must
be brought down to meet him on his reaching London, as he had given this
away on going to the mountains. “It had become such an incumbrance that
I gave it away to-day to a poor old man at Ala: he had a crowd soon
around to see him in his new covering, for which he was very grateful.”
He no longer took a chimney-pot, when I began to go abroad with
him--1867--but I have seen chimney-pots since then in most unlikely
places. On 20 March 1882 I met an American near Jericho with
chimney-pot and black frock-coat and everything to match: he said it was
the best costume God ever made. On 28 December 1909 I met a Hindu on the
cone of Mount Vesuvius; and he wore a chimney-pot and a very loud check
suit.
Writing from Interlaken on 17 August 1849, my father says, “You would be
amused at seeing what monkies the fashionable gentlemen do make of
themselves in dress: perhaps one dressed like a mountaineer, or William
Tell, will wear white kid gloves, or thin patent boots, or some other
incongruity equally ridiculous.” People do things better now: even
invalids are fully dressed for climbing.
Accidents in travelling were commoner then than now, and people took
them more as matters of course. In an old diary here one page reads as
follows, July 1850:--“17, Schaffhausen. 18, Zurich. 19, Lucerne. 20, do.
21, Escholzmatt. 22, Interlaken. 23, Lauterbrunnen, here I had the
misfortune to fall over the Wengern Alp and break my leg, and was
confined to my bed at this place 11 days, and then at Interlaken till
Septr. 21. Expenses at hotels 730 francs, surgeon 330 do.--1060. 21,
left Interlaken for Berne. 22, Berne. 23, Soleure. 24, Basle.” Writing
to my father on 26 July “on my bed at Lauterbrunnen,” he takes it all
quite calmly, just adding, “I shall have seen enough of snow and
waterfalls.... How much more beautiful is the sweet vale of Lustleigh.”
Plenty of people went to Switzerland at the time when I first
went--1869--far more than when my father went there thirty years before,
but nothing like the crowds that go there now. They kept more to peaks
and passes then; and they were always talking of Hannibal’s passage of
the Alps. Junius was talked out: Tichborne and Dreyfus were yet to come;
and Hannibal filled the gap. I used to hear them at home as well as
there; and they all had their pet routes for Hannibal--Col d’Argentière,
Mont Genèvre, Mont Cenis, Little Mont Cenis, Little St Bernard and Great
St Bernard, and even Simplon and St Gothard. In 1871 I went looking for
traces of the vinegar on the Great St Bernard. My father upheld the
Cenis routes as the only passes from which you can look down upon the
plains of Italy. I doubt if Hannibal did look down. I think he may have
shown his men their line of march upon a map, just as Aristagoras used a
map to show the Spartans their line of march 282 years earlier.
At that date (1869) people used still to go round Venice with Byrons,
just as they go round with Ruskins now. It was Byron’s Venice that
attracted them--the Venice of Marino Faliero and the Foscari, not the
Venice of Carpaccio. As they could not conveniently Stand Upon The
Bridge Of Sighs, they used to stand upon the Ponte della Paglia, and
spout the famous lines at it from there. And they all went to see the
Armenian Monastery, because it was a place where Byron stayed. Hardly
anybody goes there now.
My father used always to take a Byron with him, when he went abroad, and
he used to write things in the margin. Thus, his comment on The Castled
Crag is “Drachenfels. 31 July 1839. Good description--very correct.” I
believe it was the usual thing to annotate your Byron as if it were a
guide-book.
From my father’s diary, Exeter, 23 October 1838:--“When did I dream that
the Ada of Childe Harold would ever appear to me as an ordinary,
unnoticed and unadorned woman. I am half vexed I should have seen her,
and yet would not have it otherwise.... I recollect, when I first saw
Brougham, and was standing opposite to him, I could not believe he was
the extraordinary man I had been accustomed to hear so much about. But,
now some years have passed away, my idea of him is very little lessened
by his actual presence at that time. So may it turn out here. I hope it
will: but, until it does, I shall read Byron with diminished
satisfaction.”
After a tour in Italy, my father writes home from Ragatz in Switzerland,
16 September 1851:--“From Italy one dared not write about the
Government, for the Austrians open the letters; but the Government is
the most despotic tyranny I ever heard of: an Italian cannot get a
passport, or leave the country; nor can any foreign paper reach him; nor
is he allowed to talk politics.
“Venice was placarded whilst I was there with a Government proclamation,
by way of warning to the people, that six persons had just been
sentenced to the galleys (some for ten years, and one of the persons a
lady) for daring to speak disrespectfully of the Government and the
Emperor. The prisons are full of prisoners for talking politics: that by
the Bridge of Sighs is crammed.
“An Englishman was sent out of Florence for saying he thought the
Government was right in having sentinels in the theatres. The Chief of
the Police told him that the Government tolerated no remarks upon its
acts, approving them or otherwise.
“One of my American acquaintance, a physician, says that Hell, as an
Institution, will wholly fail, if these tyrants don’t get their deserts
in the Pit hereafter. When an Englishman said at Milan he had seen,
among other relics at a church, what the priests asserted was the
veritable brazen serpent of Moses in the wilderness, the Doctor asked if
they showed at the same time the darkness that came over Israel. When he
said No, the Doctor said they might safely have offered to, as it
overshadowed the whole land in the shape of the Austrian despotism.
“Venice and Milan are both under martial law, and soldiers swarm in
them; and at Verona they were preparing for a review of the whole army
before the Emperor.... To induce the inhabitants to attend, there was to
be a lottery, and tickets _given_ to all who chose to come. But the
Italians will not be coaxed. At a previous review, not a single Italian
came upon the ground.”
* * * * *
Writing from Frankfort two days later, he says:--“Here I encountered
those evil spirits again, the Austrian soldiers. They are chiefly
Hungarians and Croats, and sent to keep the people of this ‘Free’ City
of the Empire from rising again.” He had gone from Darmstadt to Freiburg
by way of Radstadt on 7 August 1849, and noted in his diary
then:--“Baden abounds with Prussian troops: they were just shooting some
of the insurgent prisoners at Radstadt.” He wrote from Interlaken, 17
August 1849:--“I saw two Prussian officers at the Wengern Alp on leave
of absence from Baden. They told me their troops had now 15,000
prisoners in Baden, and every Prussian among them they were shooting. I
asked why, and they enquired if I could point out anything else they
could do with them: as if it were a case of no alternative.”
Having to wait a little while at Brescia station on 23 August 1869, I
went into a show that was going on just outside. There was such riotous
applause that I felt sure it must be something good, and I found it was
the visit of General von Haynau to the brewery of Messrs Barclay and
Perkins. Their brewery was one of the sights of London that all
foreigners went to see, and he went to see it. The men discovered who he
was, and nearly murdered him. And the Brescians were wild with joy at
seeing this in the show, remembering the old Hyæna’s brutality to them
in 1849.
That afternoon, in going across the field of Solferino, I heard a
curious story of the battle, 24 June 1859:--Nugent was a Field Marshal
in the Austrian army. He was past eighty, and was merely a spectator,
having no command; but he wore his uniform. He was watching the battle
from an outlying point, and the French either saw him or heard that he
was there. They argued that an officer of that rank would not be there,
unless there was a force behind him; and for a time this held them back
from attacking the Austrian left.
Ten years had removed all traces of the battle except the monuments and
graves; but on going over the field of Gravelotte on 7 August 1875, just
five years after the battle, 18 August 1870, I saw several patches of
barren ground, and I was told that these marked the position of the
ambulances, the surgeons having used things that afterwards sterilized
the soil. And thereupon my father said that he saw patches of wheat of
an unusual colour on the field of Waterloo five-and-twenty years after
the battle, and he was told that these were places where horses had been
killed in masses, when the cavalry charged the squares.
In a letter of 18 September 1851 my father says:--“I visited the scenes
of Bonaparte’s early victories in Italy: Rivoli, Roveredo, etc.... All
the towns on the Adige bear mementoes of him in the cannon balls yet
sticking into the houses, the inhabitants never having taken the trouble
to extract them.”
He notes in his diary, Liège, 30 July 1839:--“There was an old gentleman
in the diligence with me, whom I discovered to have known Napoleon. He
was returning from his house at Brussels to his country house, but lived
in Paris for many years in Napoleon’s reign, and left on his abdication.
He met him daily, and was Auditeur du Conseil d’État, at the meetings of
which Napoleon generally presided. He said the likenesses of Napoleon
were generally good, but it was impossible to give any idea by painting
of the expression of his eyes--they were piercing, and he said ‘you
could not look at him: his glance would read your very heart.’ He was
pleasant when in good humour, but that was not always the case. He would
always have an answer instantly on asking a question, and if a person
did not know what he was asked, he must answer and say so without a
moment’s delay.”
Napoleon was brought into Torbay on the Bellerophon in July 1815. There
were strict orders from the Admiralty that nobody should come on board;
but my grandfather managed it somehow, and there saw Napoleon walking up
and down the deck. My grandfather was not impressed by Napoleon’s
appearance, and used to tell me that “Boney was a poor-looking creature
after all.” I imagine that “Boney” was not looking quite his best just
then.
In a box here I found a portion of a human skull, and written on it “The
skull of a Turk, one of those put to death at Joppa by that fellow
Buonaparte.” That was when he shot the soldiers who had surrendered
there, 10 March 1799. This relic was brought home by George Renner
Hillier (born 1776, died 1865) who was then a lieutenant on the
Alliance, and took part in the defence of Acre, 18 March to 21 May 1799.
The box came to me as his executor’s executor; but I did not know what
it contained. In another box I found a note of his that Buonaparte had
sent a message to Jerusalem that he was coming there as soon as he had
taken Acre, and the first French soldier that fell in the attack should
be buried in the Holy Sepulchre.