SNOW AND FLOODS
Severe weather, in the shape of frosts, thunderstorms, or hurricanes,
was powerless to stop the coach-service, but exceptionally heavy
snowfalls occasionally did succeed in doing so for very brief
intervals; and floods, although they never were or could be so general
as to wholly suspend coaching, often brought individual coaches to
grief.
In the severe winter of 1798–9, when snow fell heavily and continuously
at the end of January and during the first week of February, several
mails, missing on February 1st, were still to seek on April 27th, and
St. Martin’s-le-Grand mourned them as wholly lost. By May Day, however,
they did succeed in running again!
Very few details survive of that exceptional season, or of that other,
in 1806, when Nevill, a guard on the Bristol Mail, was frozen to death;
but the records of the great snowstorm that began on the Christmas
night of 1836 are very full.
Christmas Day, 1836, fell on a Sunday, and it is worth notice, as
a singular coincidence in this country of only occasional heavy
snowfalls, that the Christmas night of 1886, also a Sunday night,
exactly half a century later, was marked by that well-remembered
snowstorm which disorganised the railway service quite as effectually
as that of 1836 did the coaches, and broke down and destroyed nearly
every telegraph-post and wire in the land.
The famous snowstorm of 1836 affected all parts of the country, and
only on two mail routes were communications kept open. Fourteen
mail-coaches were abandoned on the various roads, and for periods
ranging from two to ten days the travels of others ceased. The
snowstorm itself continued for nearly a week. The two routes remaining
unconquered during this extraordinary time were those to Portsmouth
and Poole, but precisely why or how they were thus distinguished is
not made clear. There is no doubt that the coachmen and guards on
the Portsmouth and Poole Mails were strenuous men, but that quality
was common to many of those engaged upon the mails. Nor can we find
any favouring circumstance of physical geography to account for this
unusual good fortune. On the contrary, those roads are in places
exceptionally bleak and exposed to high winds; and the strong wind
that on this occasion bared the heights and buried the hollows twenty
and thirty feet deep in snow-wreaths was an especial feature of the
visitation. Fortunately for all upon the roads--for those who laboured
along them, and for those who were brought to a standstill in the
drifts--the cold was not remarkably severe.
But never before, within living recollection, had the London mails
been stopped for a whole night within a few miles from London, and
never before had the intercourse between the South Coast and the
Metropolis been interrupted for two whole days. On Chatham Lines the
snow lay from thirty to forty feet deep, and everywhere, except on the
hilltops, it was higher than the roofs of the coaches. Nay, according
to a contemporary newspaper account, “The snow has drifted to such an
extent between Leicester and Northampton as to occasion considerable
difficulty and danger. In some parts of the road passages have been cut
where the snow had drifted to the depth of thirty, forty, and in some
places fifty feet.”
The great difficulty with which the coaches had on this occasion to
contend was not merely the getting along the roads, but, as with these
extraordinary depths of snow the natural features of the country were
mostly obscured, of keeping on or anywhere near the road. Hedgerows
were blotted out of existence: many trees had fallen under their snowy
burdens, and it was not unusual, when at last the snowed-up mails were
recovered, to find them strayed far from their course, and in the
middle of pastures and ploughlands.
Snowstorms produced curious travelling experiences. It was this great
occasion that effectually blocked all the up night coaches for two
days at Dunchurch, on the Holyhead Road, and so succeeded in bringing
together a party not unlike those weatherbound travellers who in
Dickens’ Christmas stories gather round the hearth, and, comforting
themselves with many jorums of punch, tell dramatic stories. One party
crowded the “Dun Cow,” another the “Green Man.” Among the coaches were
the Manchester “Beehive” and the “Red Rover.” The first morning of
their enforced leisure they--coachmen, guards and passengers--made up
a poaching party, with two guns among sixteen of them. Jack Goodwin,
guard of the “Beehive,” was the only fortunate sportsman, and shot a
hare. In the evening a dancing party was held at the “Dun Cow” at the
suggestion of the landlord, who invited some friends, and the next
morning Goodwin turned wandering minstrel, taking with him a chosen
few to help in chorus. Wandering along the Rugby Road, they were
entertained at the farmhouses with elderberry wine and pork pies.
Another pleasant evening, and they were off the next morning for London.
Floods were infinitely more dangerous than snowstorms, and the
Great North Road, between Newark-on-Trent and Scarthing Moor, was
particularly subject to them, the Trent often, and on the very
slightest provocation of rain, flooding many miles of surrounding
country. It was here, and on these occasions, that the outsides had the
better bargain of the two classes of travelling, for they kept their
seats without fear of being drowned, while the insides went in constant
terror of a watery death, and often only escaped it by the pitiful
expedient of standing on their seats and so--keeping the doubled-up
attitude this necessity and the lowness of the roof imperatively
demanded--remaining until the levels were passed and the dry uplands
reached again.
[Illustration: WINTER: GOING NORTH.
_After H. Alken._
]
In August 1829, when extraordinary floods devastated a great part of
Scotland, a stirring episode occurred in connection with them and the
mail-coach running through Banff. The tradition that his Majesty’s
mails were to be stopped for nobody and hindered by nothing on the
road was a very fine and fearless one, but it was occasionally pushed
to absurd lengths, and hideous dangers provoked without reasonable
cause. This episode of the Banff and Inverness Mail is a case in point.
The mail of the preceding day had found it impracticable to go by its
usual route, and so took another course, by the Bridge of Alva. It
was therefore supposed that the mail following would adopt the same
plan; but what was the astonishment of the good folk of Banff when
they perceived the coach arrive, within a few minutes of its usual
time, at the farther end of the bridge that crosses the River Dovern.
The people, watching the eddying floods from the safe vantage-point
of their windows, strongly dissuaded the guard and coachman from
attempting to pass, the danger being so great; but, scouting the idea
of perils to be encountered in the very streets of the town, those
foolhardy persons drove straight along the bridge and into a street
that had been converted by the bursting of the river-bank into the
semblance of a mountain torrent. When the furious current caught the
coach, it was instantly dashed against the corner of Gillan’s Inn, and
the four animals swept off their legs. They rose again, plunging and
struggling for their lives, and a boat was pushed off, with men eager
to free the poor animals from their harness, to enable them to swim
away; but it was not possible to save more than one. The other three
were drowned.
By this time the coach, with coachman and guard, had been flung upon
the pavement, where the depth of water was less; and there the guard
was seen, clinging to the top, and the coachman hanging by his hands
from a lamp-post, regretting too late the official ardour and slavery
to tradition that had wrought such havoc. When, for humanity’s sake,
as well as to secure the mail-bags, a boat came and rescued them, they
were not suffered to depart without much Aberdonian plain-speaking on
the folly that had nearly cost them their lives and endangered the
correspondence of the good folks of the ancient burgh of Banff.
[Illustration: MAIL-COACH IN A SNOW-DRIFT.
_After J. Pollard._
]
There were no passengers on this occasion, but we are not to suppose
that, had there been any, they would have received much consideration.
The mail would probably have been driven on, just the same. The
official attitude of mind towards them may be judged from the wintry
horrors encountered by the Edinburgh to Glasgow Mail in March 1827.
It became embedded in the snow near Kirkliston, and the guard, riding
one horse and leading another loaded with the bags, set off for
Glasgow; while the coachman, with the other horses, set off in the
opposite direction to secure a fresh team, pursued by the entreaties
of the four terrified passengers, beseeching him to use all diligence
and return soon. There, on a lonely road, immovably stuck in huge
snowdrifts, they remained throughout a bitter night, made additionally
miserable by one of the windows being broken. It was not until nine
o’clock the next morning that the coachman returned, with another man,
but only two horses. Having loaded them with some luggage and parcels,
he was, with a joke upon his lips, leaving the passengers to shift
for themselves, but was compelled to take one who had fallen ill. The
remaining three extricated themselves as best they could.
On September 11th, 1829, a month later than the watery adventures at
Banff, the Birmingham and Liverpool Mail had an unfortunate experience
at Smallwood Bridge, near Church Lawton, a point where the road is
crossed by an affluent of the River Weaver. Unknown to those on the
mail, the flooded stream had burst the arch of the bridge, and when
the coach came to the spot, along a road almost axle-deep in water, it
fell into the hole and was violently overturned. Of the three inside
passengers, only one escaped. He was an agile young man, who broke the
window and so extricated himself. The horses were drowned, but the
coachman was fortunate enough to be washed against a tree-stump as
the river hurried him along at six miles an hour. The force of this
happy meeting nearly stunned him, but he held on, and eventually found
his way ashore. The guard was saved in a similar manner. Accidents
almost forming parallels with this were of frequent occurrence, and a
seasoned traveller exclaimed: “Give me a collision, a broken axle and
an overturn, a runaway team, a drunken coachman, snowstorms, howling
tempests; but Heaven preserve us from floods!”
[Illustration: MAIL-COACH IN A FLOOD.
_After J. Pollard._
]