DOWN THE ROAD IN DAYS OF YORE
II.--FROM LONDON TO NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE IN 1830
We also will make a tour down the road. It shall not be, in the
strictly accurate sense of the word, a “journey,” for we shall travel
continuously by night as well as day--a thing quite unknown when that
word was first brought into use, and unknown to coaching until about
1780, when coaches first began to go both day and night, instead of
inning at sundown at some convenient hostelry on the road.
It matters little what road we take, but as Mr. Murray came to town
from Newcastle, we may as well pay a return visit along that same
highway--the Great North Road. He does not explain how he came through
Highgate, but for our part, the first sixty miles or so go along the
Old North Road, and we do not touch Highgate at all.
Now, since we are setting out merely for the purpose of seeing
something of what life is like on a great highway, there is no need to
mortify the flesh by arising early in the blushing hours of dawn, to
the tune of the watchman’s cry of “five o’clock and a fine morning!”
and so we will e’en, like Christians and Britons able to call their
souls their own, go by the afternoon coach. Let the “Lord Nelson” in
this year 1830 go if it will from the “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill,
at half-past six in the morning. For ourselves, we will wait until a
quarter to three in the afternoon, and take the “Lord Wellington” from
the “Bull and Mouth.” We can do no better, for the “Lord Wellington”
goes the 274 miles in 30 hours, which a simple calculation resolves
into 9 miles an hour, including stops. The fare to Newcastle is £5 15s.
inside, or about 5d. a mile. Outside, it is £3 10s., or a fraction
over 3d. a mile. As our trip is taken in summer-time, we will go
outside; and so, although a good deal of the journey will have to be
through the night, we, at least, shall not have the disadvantage of
being stewed during the daytime in the intolerable atmosphere of the
inside of a stage-coach on a July day. Why, indeed, coach-proprietors
do not themselves observe that in summer-time the outside is the most
desirable place, and charge accordingly, is not easily understood; nor,
indeed, to be understood at all. That clever fellow De Quincey notices
this, and points out that, although the roof is generally regarded by
passengers and everyone else connected with coaching as the attic, and
the inside as the drawing-room, only to be tenanted by gentlefolk, the
inside is really the coal-cellar in disguise.
We recollect, being old travellers, that the fares to Newcastle used to
be much cheaper. Time was when they were only four guineas inside and
£2 10s. outside, but prices went up during the late wars with France,
and they have stayed up ever since. The travelling, however, is better
by some five hours than it was fifteen years ago.
Here we are at the “Bull and Mouth,” in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, now
newly rebuilt by Sherman, and named the “Queen’s.” It is a handsome
building of red brick, with Portland stone dressings, but the old
stables are still to be seen at the side, in Bull-and-Mouth Street.
A strong and penetrating aroma of horses and straw pervades the
neighbourhood.
Wonderful building, the new General Post Office, opened last year,
nearly opposite. They say the Government has got something very
like a white elephant in that vast pile. A great deal too big for
present needs, or, indeed, for any possible extension of Post Office
business. Here’s the “Lord Wellington.” What’s that the yard-porter
says?--He says “they don’t call it nothin’ but the ‘Vellington’
now.”--Smart, turn-out, is it not, with its yellow wheels and body
to match? You can tell Sherman’s coaches anywhere by that colouring.
What a d----d nuisance those boys are, pestering one to buy things one
doesn’t want! No; be off with you, we don’t want any braces or pocket
looking-glasses, nor the “Life and Portrait of His Late Majesty,”
nor any “Sure Cure for Fleas”--use it on yourselves, you dirty-looking
devils!
[Illustration: THE “QUEEN’S HOTEL” AND GENERAL POST OFFICE.
_After T. Allom._
]
Thank goodness! we’re off, and the sooner we’re out of this traffic and
off the stones at Kingsland Turnpike the better. These paved streets
are so noisy, one can scarcely hear oneself talk, and the rattling
sends a jar up one’s spine. How London grows! we shall soon see the
houses stretching past Kingsland and swallowing up the country lanes of
Dalston and Stoke Newington.
Hal-lo! That was a near shave. Confound those brewers’ drays;
Shoreditch is always full of ’em; might have sent us slap over. Why
don’t you keep your eyes open, fool?
The drayman offers to fight us all, one after the other, with one hand
tied behind his back, for sixpence a head, money down; but though we
have some of “the Fancy” aboard, the “Wellington” can’t stop for a mill
in the middle of Shoreditch High Street.
Now at last we’re fairly in the country. If you look back you’ll be
able to see St. Paul’s. This is Stamford Hill, where the rich City
indigo and East and West India merchants live. Warm men, all of them.
There, ahead of us, on the right, goes the river Lea: as pretty fishing
there as you’d find even in the famous trout streams of Hampshire. What
a quaint, quiet rural place this is at Tottenham! And Edmonton, with
its tea-gardens; why, London might be fifty miles away!
Here we are, already at Waltham Cross, and at our first change. This
is something like traveling! We change horses at the “Falcon” in little
more than two minutes, and so are off again, on the ten-mile stage to
Ware, through the long narrow street of Cheshunt, past the New River
at Broxbourne, and along the broad thoroughfare of Hoddesdon. At Ware
we change teams at the “Saracen’s Head,” and four fine strong-limbed
chestnuts are put in, to take us the rather hilly stage on to
Buntingford. At this sleepy little town they take care to give us as
strong a team as you will find in any coach on any road, for the way
rises steadily for some miles over Royston Downs. A good thing for the
horses that the stage on to Royston town is not more than seven miles.
“I believe you, sir,” says the coachman; “vy, I’ve heerd my father say,
vot driv’ over this ’ere road thirty year ago, that he vore out many a
good ’orse on this stage; an’ ’e vere a careful man too, as you might
say, and turned out every blessed one, _h_inside to _h_out, to valk
up-hill for two mile, wet or fine; strike me blue if he didn’t.”
“They talk of lowering the road through the top of Reed Hill, don’t
they, coachman?”
“Oh! yes; they torks, and that’s about all they does do. Lot o’ good
torking does my ’orses. Vot _I_ vants to know is, v’y does we pay the
turnpikes?”
We change at the “Red Lion,” Royston, and then come on to the galloping
ground that brings us smartly, along a level road, to Arrington Bridge,
the spelling of whose name is a matter of divergent opinions among the
compilers of road-books. But whether called Arrington or Harrington, it
is a pretty, retired spot, with a handsome inn and an equally handsome
row of houses opposite.
“Will you please to alight?” asks the stately landlady of the
“Hardwicke Arms” inn and posting-house, with perhaps a little too
much air of condescension towards us, as coach-passengers. We of the
stage-coaches--nay, even those of the mails--occupy only a second
place in the consideration of mine host and hostess of this, one of
the finest inns on the road. Their posting business brings them some
very free-handed customers, and their position, hard by my lord of
Hardwicke’s grand seat of Wimpole, spoils them for mere ordinary
everyday folks.
However, it is now more than half-past seven o’clock, and we have
had no bite nor sup since two. Therefore we alight at the landlady’s
bidding and hasten into the inn, to make as good a supper as possible
in the twenty minutes allowed.
Half a crown each, in all conscience, for two cups of tea, and some
bread and butter, cold ham and eggs! We climb up to our places,
dissatisfied. Soon the quiet spot falls away behind, as our horses
get into their stride; and as we leave, so does a yellow po’shay
dash up, and convert the apparently sleepy knot of smocked post-boys
and shirt-sleeved ostlers, who have been lounging about the stable
entrance, into a very alert and wide-awake throng.
Caxton, a busy thoroughfare village, where the great “George” inn does
a very large business, is passed, and soon, along this flattest of
flat roads, that grim relic, Caxton Gibbet, rises dark and forbidding
against the translucent evening sky. Does the troubled ghost of young
Gatward, gibbeted here eighty years ago for robbing the mail on this
lonely spot, ever revisit the scene, we wonder?
The wise, inscrutable stars hang trembling in the sky, and the sickle
moon is shining softly, as, having passed Papworth St. Everard, we drop
gently down through Godmanchester and draw up in front of the “George”
at Huntingdon, 58½ miles from London, at ten o’clock.
We take the opportunity afforded by the change of filling our
pocket-flasks with some rich brown brandy of the right sort, and invest
in some of those very special veal-and-ham sandwiches for which good
Mrs. Ekin has been famous these years past. Our coachman “leaves us
here,” and we tip him eighteenpence apiece when he comes round to
inform us of the fact.
The new coachman, after some little conversation with the outgoing
incumbent of the bench, in which we catch the remark made to the
newcomer that some articles or some persons are “a pretty fair lot,
taking ’em all round”--a criticism that evidently sizes us up for the
benefit of his _confrère_--climbs into his seat, and giving us all a
comprehensive and impartial glance, settles himself down comfortably.
“All right, Tom?” he asks the guard over his shoulder. “Yes,” answers
that functionary. “Then give ’em their heads, Bill,” he says to the
ostler; and away we go into the moonlit night at a steady pace.
The box-seat passenger, who very successfully kept the original
coachman in conversation nearly all the way from London to Huntingdon,
does not seem to quite hit it off with our new whip, who is inclined to
be huffish, or, at the least of it, given to silence and keeping his
own counsel. “Have a weed, coachman?” he asks, after some ineffectual
attempts to get more than a grunt out of him. “Don’t mind if I do,”
is the ungracious reply, and he takes the proffered cigar and--puts
it into some pocket somewhere beneath the voluminous capes of his
greatcoat. After this, silence reigns supreme. For ourselves, we have
chatted throughout the day, and now begin to feel--not sleepy, but
meditative.
The moon now rides in unsullied glory through the azure sky. We top
Alconbury Hill at a few minutes to twelve, and come to the junction
of the Old North and the Great North Roads. Everything stands out as
clearly as if it were daylight, but with a certain ghost-like and
uncanny effect. “The obelisk,” as the coachmen have learned to call the
great milestone at the junction of the roads (it is really a square
pedestal) looks particularly spectral, but is not the airy nothing it
seems--as the coachman on the Edinburgh Mail discovered, a little while
ago. The guard tells us all about it. The usual thing. Too much to
drink at the hospitable bar of the “George,” at Huntingdon, and a doubt
as to which of the two milestones he saw, on coming up the road, was
the real one. The guard and all the outsides were in similar case--it
was Christmas, and men made merry--and so there was nothing for it but
to try their quality. Unfortunately, he drove into the real stone,
and not its spectral duplicate, conjured up by the effects of strong
liquors. We see the broken railings and the dismounted stone ball
that once capped the thing as we pass. The local surgeon mended the
resultant broken limbs at the “Wheatsheaf,” whose lighted windows fall
into our wake as we commence the descent of Stonegate Hill.
Stilton. By this time we are too drowsy to note whether we changed at
the “Bell” or at its rival, directly opposite, the “Angel.” At any
rate, nobody asks us if we would not like a nice real Stilton cheese to
take with us, as they usually do: it is midnight.
We now pass Norman Cross, and come in another eight miles to Wansford
turnpike, where the gate is closed and the pikeman gone to bed. “Blow
up for the gate,” said the coachman, when we were drawing near, to the
guard, who blew his horn accordingly; but it does not seem to have
disturbed the dreams of the janitor. “Gate, gate!” cry the guard and
coachman in stentorian chorus. The guard himself descends, and blows a
furious series of blasts in the doorway, while the coachman lashes the
casement windows.
[Illustration: THE TURNPIKE GATE.
_From a contemporary lithograph._
]
At last a shuffling and fumbling are heard within, and the door is
opened. The pikeman has not been to bed after all; he was, and is, only
drunk, and had fallen into a sottish sleep. He now opens the gate, in
the midst of much disinterested advice from both our officials--the
guard advising him to stick to Old Tom and leave brandy alone, and the
coachman pointing out that the Mail will be down presently and that
he had better leave the gate open if he does not wish to present the
Postmaster-General with forty shillings, that being the penalty to
which a pike-keeper is liable who does not leave a clear passage for
His Majesty’s Mails.
We now cross Wansford Bridge, a very long and narrow stone structure
over the river Nene. Having done so, slowly and with caution, we know
no more: sleep descends insensibly upon us.
... Immeasurable æons of time pass by. We are floating with rhythmic
wings in the pure ether of some unterrestrial paradise. Our gross
earthly integument (twelve stone and a few extra pounds avoirdupois
of flesh and blood and bone) has fallen away. We want nothing to eat,
for ever and ever, and have left everything gross and unspiritual far,
far below us, and ... a fearful crash! Convulsively, instinctively,
our arms are thrown out, and we awake, tenaciously grasping one
another. What is this that has brought us down to earth again and made
us unwillingly assume once more that corporeal hundredweight, or
thereabouts, we had left so gladly behind? Are we overturned?
No; it was nothing: nothing, that is to say, but the hunchbacked
bridge over the river Welland, that leads from Stamford Baron into
Stamford Town. It is only the customary bump and lurch, the guard
informs us. May all architects of hunchback bridges be converted from
straight-backed human beings into bowed and crooked likenesses of their
own abominable creations! We will keep awake, lest another such rude
awaking await us.
With this intent we gaze, wide-eyed, upon Stamford Town, its noble
buildings wrapped round in midnight quiet, the moon shining here
full upon the mullioned stone windows of some ancient mansion, there
casting impenetrable black shadows, making dark mysteries of grand
architectural doorways decorated with curious scutcheons and overhung
with heavy pediments, like beetling eyebrows. Grand churches whose
spires soar away, away far into the sky, astonish our newly-awakened
vision as the coachman carefully guides the coach through the narrow
and crooked streets, in which the shadows from cornices and roof-tops
lie so black and sharp that none but he who has driven here before
could surely bring this coach safely through. Once or twice we have
quailed as he has driven straight at some solid wall, and have breathed
again when it has proved to be only some oblique monstrous silhouetted
image cast athwart the way. Fear only leaves us when we are clear of
the town and once more on the unobstructed road; then only is there
leisure for the mind to dwell upon the beauties of that glorious old
stone-built town. We are thus ruminating when, between Great Casterton
and Stretton, where we enter Rutlandshire, the glaring lamps of a
swiftly approaching coach lurch forward out of the long perspective of
road, and, with a clatter of harness and a sharp crunching of wheels,
fall away, as in a vision. The guard, answering someone’s question,
says it is the Leeds “Rockingham,” due in London at something after ten
in the morning.
The determination to keep awake was heroic, but without avail. Even the
screaming and grumbling of the skid and the straining of the wheels
down Spitalgate Hill into Grantham did not suffice to quite waken us.
But what that noise and the jarring of the wheels failed to do, the
stoppage at the “George” at Grantham and the sudden quiet _do_ succeed
in. Our friend the moon has by now sunk to rest, and a pallid dawn has
come; someone remarks that it is past three o’clock in the morning, and
someone else is wakened and hauled forth from amid the snoring insides,
whose snores become gasps and gulps, and then resolve themselves into
the yawns and peevish exclamations of tired men. The person thus
awakened proves to be a passenger who had booked to Colsterworth,
which is a little village we have now left eight miles behind us. He
had been asleep, and as Colsterworth is not one of our stopping or
changing places, the guard forgot all about him until the change at
Grantham. The passenger and the guard are now waging a furious war of
words on the resounding pavements of the sleeping town. It seems that
the unfortunate inside, besides being himself carried so far beyond his
destination, has a heavy portmanteau in the like predicament. If he had
been a little bigger and the guard a little smaller, his fury would
perhaps make him fall upon that official and personally chastise him.
As it is, he resorts to abuse. Windows of surrounding houses now begin
to be thrown up, and nightcapped heads to inquire “what the d----l’s
the matter, and if it can’t be settled somewhere else or at some more
convenient season?” The guard says “This ’ere gent wot’s abusing of me
like a blooming pickpocket goes to sleep and gets kerried past where he
wants to get out, and when I pulls him out, ’stead of taking ’im him
on to Newark or York, ’e----” “Shut up,” exclaims a fierce voice from
above: “can’t a man get a wink of sleep for you fellows?”
So, the change being put to, the altercation is concluded in
undertones, and we roll off; the irate passenger to bed at the
“George,” vowing he will get a legal remedy against the proprietors of
the “Wellington” for the unheard-of outrage.
At Newark, a hundred and twenty-five miles of our journey performed,
it is broad daylight as the coach rolls, making the echoes resound,
into the great market-square. Clock-faces--a little blanched and
debauched-looking to our fancy--proclaim the hour to be 5.30 a.m.
The change is waiting for us in front of the “Saracen’s Head,” and
so is our new coachman. The old one leaves us, but before doing so
“kicks us”--as the expressive phraseology of the road has it--for the
usual fees. He has been, so far as we remember him, a dour, silent,
unsociable man, but we think that, perhaps, as we have been asleep
during the best part of his reign on the box-seat, any qualities he
may possess have not had their due opportunity, and so he gets two
shillings from ourselves. A passenger behind us gives him a shilling,
which he promptly spits on and turns, “for luck” as he says, and “in
’opes it’ll grow.” The passenger who gave it him says, thereupon--in a
broad Scots accent--that he is “an impudent fellow, and desairves to
get nothing at all;” to which the jarvey rejoins that he has in his
time brought many a Scotchman from Scotland, but, “this is the fust
time, blow me, that _h_ever I see one agoin’ back!”--which is a very
dark and mysterious saying. What did he mean?
Our new coachman is a complete change from our late Jehu. He is
a spruce, cheerful fellow, neat and well brushed, youthful and
prepossessing. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he says cheerily: “another
fine day.” We had not noticed it. All we had observed was of each
other, and that as every other looked pale, wearied and heavy-eyed, so
we rightly judged must be our own condition.
“Chk!” says our youthful charioteer to his horses, and away they
bound. Newark market-square glides by, and we are crossing the Trent,
over a long bridge. “Newark Castle, gentlemen,” says our coachman,
jerking his whip to the left hand; and there we see, rising from
the banks of the broad river, the crumbling, time-stained towers
of a ruined mediæval fortress. Much he has to say of it, for he
is intelligent beyond the ordinary run. A good and graceful whip,
too--one of the new school: much persuasion and little punishment for
the horses, who certainly seem to put forward their best paces at his
merest suggestion. It is a good, flat, and fairly straight road, this
ten-mile stage to Scarthing Moor. We cross the Trent again, then a
low-lying tract of water-meadows, where the night mists still cling
in ghost-like wisps to the grass, and then several small villages.
“This”--says our coachman, pointing to a church beside the road, and
down the street of one of these little villages--“this is where Oliver
Cromwell came from.”
“What is the name of it?” we ask, knowing that, whatever its name, the
Protector came from quite a different place.
“Cromwell,” he says.
So this was probably the original seat of that family many centuries
before Oliver came into the world, which has since then been so greatly
exercised about him.
“Blow up for the change,” says the coachman to the guard, as, having
passed through Carlton-on-Trent, Sutton-on-Trent, and round the
awkward bend of the road at Weston, we approach Scarthing Moor and
the “Black Bull.” “They’re a sleepy lot at the ‘Bull,’” he says, in
explanation. The guard produces the “yard of tin” from the horn-basket,
and sounds a melodious tantara: quite unnecessarily, after all, it
seems, for, quite a distance off, the ostler, dressed after his kind
in trousers and shirt only, with braces dangling about him, is seen
standing in the road, with the change ready and waiting.
“Got up before you found yourself, this morning?” asks the coachman.
The ostler says he don’t take no sauce from no boys what ain’t been
breeched above a twelvemonth.
“All right, Sam,” replies the coachman; “your ’art’s all right, if you
_have_ got a ’ed full of wool. Shouldn’t wonder if you don’t make up
for this mistake of yourn by sleepin’ it out for a month of Sundays
after this. If so be you do, jest hang the keys of the stable outside,
and when we come down agen, Jim and me ’ll put ’em in ourselves, won’t
we, Jim?”
Jim says they will, and will petition Guv’ment to pension him off, and
retire him to the “R’yal ’Orsepital for Towheads.”
Evidently some ancient feud between the ostler and the coach is in
progress, and still far from being settled. The ostler sulkily watches
us out of sight, as we make our next stage to Retford. The clocks in
the market-place of that busy little town mark half-past seven, and
the “White Hart,” where we drop a passenger for the Gainsborough
coach and another for Chesterfield, and take up another for York, is a
busy scene. Appetising aromas of early breakfasts being prepared put a
keener edge upon our already sharpened appetites, and we all devoutly
wish we were at Doncaster, where _our_ breakfast awaits the coming of
the coach. Across Barnby Moor, past the great “Bell” inn, we take our
way, and come to one more change, at the “Crown,” Bawtry; then hie away
for Doncaster, which we reach, past Rossington Bridge and the famous
St. Leger course, at half-past nine o’clock.
“Twenty minutes for breakfast, gentlemen,” announces the coachman as
we pull up in front of the “New Angel” inn; while the guard, who has
come with us all the way from London, now announces that he goes no
farther. We give him half a crown, and hasten, as well as stiffened
limbs allow, down the ladder placed for us outsides to alight by, to
the breakfast-room.
We catch a glimpse of ourselves in a mirror as we enter. Heavens! is
it possible an all-night journey can make so great a difference in a
man’s personal appearance? While here is a lady who has been an inside
passenger all the way from town, and yet looks as fresh and blooming
as though she had but just dressed for a walk. How do they manage it,
those delicate creatures?
Our friend, who says he is starving, refuses to discuss this question.
He remarks, with eye wildly roving o’er the well-laden table-cloth,
that something to eat and drink is more to the point. We cannot gainsay
the contention, and do not attempt it, but sink into a chair.
“Coffee, sir; tea, sir; ’ot roll; ’am and heggs. Yorkshire brawn,
tongue,” suggests the waiter, swiftly.
We select something and fall-to. After all, it is worth while to take a
long coach journey, even if it be only for the appetite it gives one.
Here we are, all of us, eating and drinking as though we had taken no
meals for a week past. Yes, another cup of coffee, please, and I’ll
thank you to pass the----
“Time’s up, gents; coach just agoin’ to start!”
“Oh! here, I say, you know. We’ve only just sat down.”
“Ain’t got more’n ’nother couple o’ minutes,” says the new guard; and
so, appetite not fully satisfied, we all troop out and resume our
places.
Our coach goes the hilly route, by Ferrybridge and Tadcaster, to
York. We change on the short stage out of Doncaster, at Robin Hood’s
Well, where the rival inns, the “New” and the “Robin Hood,” occupy
opposite sides of the road; and again at Ferrybridge, at the “Swan,”
where our smart coachman resigns his seat to an enormously fat man,
weighing nearly, if not quite, twenty stone. He is so unwieldy that
quite a number of the “Swan” postboys gather round him, and by dint of
much sustained effort, do at last succeed in pulling and pushing him
into his place, resembling in so doing the Liliputians manipulating
Gulliver; the coachman himself, breathing like a grampus, encouraging
them by calling out, “That’s it, lads; another heave like t’last does
it. All together again, and I’ll mak’ it a gallon!”
Across the river Aire to Brotherton, and thence through Sherburn to
Tadcaster, where, having changed at the “White Horse,” we come along a
level stage into York; the new guard, who rejoices in the possession
of a key-bugle and a good ear for music, signalising our entrance by
playing, in excellent style, “The Days when we went Gipsying, a Long
Time Ago.”
The coach dines at York. The “Black Swan,” to which we come, is a house
historic in the annals of coaching, for it was from its door that the
original York and London stage set forth; but it is a very plain and
heavy building. Half an hour is allowed for dining, and, unlike the
majority of houses down the road, the table-cloth and the knives and
forks and glasses are _not_ the only things in readiness.
“What have you got, waiter?”
“Hot roast beef, sir, just coming in; very prime.”
“Haven’t you any cold chicken for a lady here?”
“Yessir; cold chicken on the table, sir; in front of you, sir.”
“You call _that_ chicken, waiter! why, it’s only a skeleton. Take it
away and give it to the dog in the yard.”
“Very sorry, sir; ‘Royal Sovereigns’ very hungry to-day; very good
appetites they had, sir; wonder they left even the bones.”
“You’re laughing at me, you rascal; bring another chicken!”
“No more chickens, sir; roast lamb, would the lady like? hot or cold;
green peas, new potatoes?” ...
“Your apple tart, sir. Ale, sir. Claret, ma’am.” ...
Dinner disposed of, the coach is ready, but one of our passengers
is missing. Has any one seen him? He went off, it seems, to see the
cathedral, instead of having dinner. Fortunately for himself he comes
hurrying up just as we are starting, and the guard hauls him up to his
outside place by main force.
“Tip us a tune,” says the coachman to the guard, who, rendered
sentimental by the steak and the bottle of stout he had for dinner in
the bar, in company with the buxom barmaid, responds with “Believe me,
if all those Endearing Young Charms,” as we pass the frowning portal
of Bootham Bar and bump along the very rough street of Clifton, York’s
modern suburb.
This is a thirteen-and-a-half mile stage from York to Easingwold; but
although long, it is an easy one for the horses, if the coachman does
not demand pace of them, on account of the dead level of the road. He
very wisely lets them take their own speed, only now and then shaking
the reins when they seem inclined to slacken from their steady trot.
It is a lonely stretch of country, treeless, flat, melancholy; and
the appearance of Easingwold is welcomed. At the “Rose and Crown” the
new team is put in, and off we go again, the ten miles to Thirsk. At
Northallerton the horses are changed for a fresh team at the “Golden
Lion,” and the fat coachman, assisted down with almost as much trouble
as he was hoisted up, resigns the ribbons into the hands of another.
The usual knot of sightseers of the little town are gathered about
the inn to witness the one event of the day, the arrival of the
London coach. Among them one perceives the coachman out of a place; a
beggar out at elbows; three recruits with ribbons in their hats, not
quite recovered from last night’s drink, and stupidly wondering how
the ribbons got there; the “coachman wot is to take the next stage”;
several errand boys wasting their masters’ time; and a horsey youth
with small fortune but large expectations, who is the idler of the
place--the local man about town. There is absolutely nothing else for
the inhabitants of Northallerton to do for amusement but to watch the
coaches, the post-chaises and the chariots as they pass along the one
long and empty street.
Our box-seat passenger leaves us here. Although he has, all the
way down, shown himself anxious to be intimate with the successive
coachmen, and has paid pretty heavily for the privilege of occupying
that seat of honour, it has been of no sporting advantage to him, for
he is only a Cockney tradesman, who has never even driven a trap, let
alone four-in-hand. So when each whip in turn asked him the questions,
conventional among whips, “whether he had his driving-gloves on, and
would like to take the ribbons for the next few miles,” he evaded the
offer by “not being in form,” or not knowing the road, or something
else equally annoying to the coachman, who, in not having an amateur of
driving on the box, thereby missed the canonical tip of anything from
seven shillings to half a sovereign which the handling of the reins for
twenty miles or so was worth to the ordinary sportsman.
Our new coachman, on our starting from Northallerton, keeps the seat
beside him vacant. He says he has a passenger for it down the road.
Tom Layfield, for that is the name of our present charioteer, works
the “Wellington” up and down between this and Newcastle on alternate
days, Ralph Soulsby being the coachman on the other. Tom Layfield is a
very prim-looking, tall and spare man, tutor in coachmanship to many
gentlemen on these last fifty-five miles; and it does not surprise some
of us when, passing Great Smeaton, we are hailed by a very “down the
road” looking young man, whose hat is cocked at a knowing angle, and
whose entire get-up, from the gigantic mother-o’-pearl buttons on his
light overcoat to the big scarf-pin in the semblance of a galloping
coach and horses, proclaims “amateur coachman.” It is the young squire
of Hornby Grange, on the right hand, we are told, who is anxious to
graduate in coaching honours, and to be mentioned in the pages of the
_Sporting Magazine_ by Nimrod, in company with Sir St. Vincent Cotton,
the Brackenburys, and other distinguished ornaments of the bench.
“‘Afternoon, squire,” says Layfield, as that young sportsman swings
into the seat beside him; and they talk guardedly about anything and
everything but coaches, until Layfield asks--as though it had just
occurred to him--if he would not like to “put ’em along” for a few
miles. He accepts, and is just about to take the reins over when the
voice of a hitherto silent gentleman is heard from behind.
“I earnestly protest, coachman,” he says, “against your giving the
reins into the hands of that young gentleman, and endangering our
lives. I appeal to the other passengers to support me,” he continues,
glancing round. “We read in the papers every day of the many serious,
and some fatal, accidents caused by control of the horses being given
to unqualified persons. If you are well advised, young gentleman, you
will relinquish the reins into their proper keeping; and you, coachman,
ought to know, and do know, that you would be liable to a fine of any
amount from £5 to £10, at the discretion of a magistrate, for allowing
an unauthorised person to drive.”
The coachman takes back the reins, and sulkily says he didn’t know he
had an informer up; to which the gentleman rejoins by saying that, so
long as the coachman drives and performs the duty for which he is paid
by his proprietors, he himself is not concerned to teach him proper
respect; but he cannot refrain from pointing out, to the coachman in
especial, and to the passengers generally, that it would have been the
policy of an informer to allow the illegal act to be committed and then
to lay an information. He was really protecting the coachman as well as
the passengers, because it was well known that the road swarmed with
informers, and continued infractions of the law could not always hope
to go unpunished.
Every one murmurs approval, except the coachman and his friend, and the
guard. The guard, as an official, is silent; the amateur coachman has
a hot flush upon his face. The coachman, however, clearly sees himself
to be in the wrong, and awkwardly apologises. Still, we all feel
somewhat constrained, and, passing Croft Spa and coming to Darlington,
experience an ungrateful relief when the champion of our necks and
limbs leaves us there.
He is no sooner gone than tongues are wagging about him. “Who is he?
What is he? Do you know him?”
“Talks like a Hact o’ Parlymint,” says the coachman to his friend.
“And a very good reason, too,” says a man with knowledge: “he is a
Justice of the Peace and Chairman of the Bench of Magistrates at
Stockton, which holds a higher jurisdiction than your bench, coachman.
I think you’ve had a very narrow escape of parting with £10 and costs.”
The guard has a few parcels to take out of the boot at the “King’s
Head,” and a few new ones to put in, and then we’re off for Rushyford
Bridge, where the coach takes tea, and where we leave the amateur
coachee at the “Wheatsheaf.”
Durham and the coal country open out on leaving secluded Rushyford.
Durham Cathedral, although itself standing on a height, has the
appearance of being in a profound hollow as the coach, with the skid
on, slowly creaks and groans down the long hill into the city. Changing
at the “Three Tuns,” the new team toils painfully up the atrociously
steep streets to Framwellgate Bridge, where the river Wear and the
stern grandeur of the Norman Cathedral, with the bold rocks and soft
woods around it, blend under the westering sun-rays of a July evening
into a lovely mellowed picture.
Chester-le-Street and Gateshead are ill exchanges for the
picturesqueness of Durham, but they serve to bring us nearer our
journey’s end, and, truth to tell, we are very weary; so that, coming
down the breakneck streets of Gateshead in the gathering darkness to
the coaly Tyne and dear dirty Newcastle, with the hum of its great
population and the hooting of its steamers in our ears, we are filled
with a great content. “Give ’em a tune,” says the coachman; and, the
guard sounding a fanfare, we are quickly over the old town bridge,
along the Side, and at the Turf Hotel, Collingwood Street. It is nearly
ten o’clock. The journey is done.
Let us tot up the expenses per head:--
£ s. d.
One outside place 3 10 0
Supper at Arrington Bridge 0 2 6
Brandy and sandwiches at Huntingdon 0 3 0
Coachman, Huntingdon 0 1 6
Coachman, Newark 0 2 0
Breakfast, Doncaster 0 2 3
Guard, Doncaster 0 2 6
Coachman, Ferrybridge 0 2 0
Dinner, York 0 3 6
Coachman, Northallerton 0 1 6
Tea, Rushyford Bridge 0 2 0
Coachman, Newcastle 0 2 0
Guard, Newcastle 0 2 6
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Total £4 17 3