WHAT BECAME OF THE COACHMEN
“Steam, James Watt, and George Stephenson have a great deal to
answer for. They will ruin the breed of horses, as they have
already ruined the innkeepers and the coachmen, many of whom have
already been obliged to seek relief at the poor-house, or have died
in penury and want.”--_The Times_, 1839.
“Where,” asked Thackeray in _Vanity Fair_, “where is the road now,
and its merry incidents of life? Is there no Chelsea or Greenwich for
the honest, pimple-nosed coachmen?” No, there was not. The action of
Parliament in sanctioning so many railways in so short a space of time,
without making any legislative restriction or provision in favour of
the coachmen whose careers were ruined by railways, seems strange to
the present generation, but in no single instance were they considered.
The greatest and swiftest revolution ever brought about in the methods
and habits of travelling took place in the short period of time between
1837, when the effect of railways first began to be felt, and 1848,
when most of the great main lines were opened. Eleven years is no great
space in which to effect so sweeping a change, and it is not surprising
that ruin and misery were wrought by it, not among coachmen alone, but
dealt out impartially to every one of the many people and interests
whose prosperity was bound up with the continuance of the old order
of things. Coachmen were by no means the greatest sufferers: others
felt the blow as severely, but in this chapter we have no concern with
the great army of innkeepers, ostlers, post-boys and stable-helpers
who so suddenly found their occupation taken away and no new means of
livelihood provided.
[Illustration: THE COACHMAN, 1832.
_After H. Alken._
]
What became of the coachmen? In the vast majority of cases we do not,
and cannot, know; for if one thing be more certain than another, it is
that we are better informed in classic and mediæval lore than in the
story of our forbears of two or three generations ago, and that most of
the papers and documents necessary to a full and particular history of
coaching have been destroyed.
Many among those not born in the age of coaches have marvelled at what
they consider the wealth of reminiscences about the old coachmen. The
truth is that there exists no such wealth. There were certainly no
fewer than three thousand coachmen throughout the country in the days
just before railways. What do we know of them? Very little. Even their
names have been forgotten, except in some (comparatively few) special
cases. No one can give us a complete list of the coachmen of the
Edinburgh Mail, of the Exeter “Telegraph,” or Devonport “Quicksilver,”
or of any of the crack day coaches. Nearly complete in some cases,
but never quite, because the reminiscent travellers by famous mail
or stage have never troubled to detail such things; caring only to
narrate the peculiarly bad or good coachmanship, as the case might be,
or the eccentricities in manner or dress, of the men who drove them.
The merely efficient coachman, with no salient characteristics to be
described enthusiastically or spitefully caricatured, stood little
chance of notice in print. He drove until the natural end of his career
came, or until it was cut short by the railway; and in either case
ended obscurely.
On the other hand, the noted masters of the art of driving a coach,
who taught the young bloods that accomplishment, or who were excellent
companions with joke and song to while the hours away, have found
abundant notice; and they are the chronicles of these men that make
that apparent wealth of reminiscence.
The coachmen ended, as may be supposed, very variously. A generation
ago, many of the city and suburban omnibuses were driven by gloomy,
purple-faced men, confirmed misanthropes, who viewed the world with
jaundiced eyes, and, living in vivid recollection of the past, despised
themselves, their omnibuses, and the people they drove. Those were the
old coachmen. The Richmond Conveyance Company, whose omnibuses in the
’sixties conveyed many Londoners between the “Goose and Gridiron,” St.
Paul’s Churchyard, and that famous riverside town, employed a number of
old-time coachmen, who wore tall hats with a gold band, and were never
tired of telling their box-seat passengers about the open-handedness
of the passengers of old, and incidentally that travellers by ’bus were
“not worth a d----n”; not, perhaps, a tactful or ingratiating manner,
but “out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh.”
[Illustration: THE DRIVER, 1852.
_After H. Alken._
]
When the London and South-Western Railway was opened to Richmond,
in 1843, the first station-master was a former coachman and
coach-proprietor, and a very notable one: no less a man, indeed, than
Thomas Cooper, who had in his time run a service of coaches between
London, Bath and Bristol, and had been landlord of that very fine old
inn, the “Castle,” at Marlborough, now and for many years past a part
of Marlborough College. Cooper’s varied enterprises on the Bath Road
at last led him direct into the Bankruptcy Court. When he emerged from
the official whitewashing process, Chaplin had acquired his line of
coaches, and to that highly successful man he became a local manager.
It was Chaplin who obtained him the position of station-master, as
doubtless he had, in his influential position of director and chairman
of the L. & S.W.R., already found many posts on that line for coachmen,
guards, and others.
Jo Walton, the famous whip of the “Star of Cambridge,” became a
messenger at Foster’s Bank in that town, after the railway had run him
off. At an earlier date Dick Vaughan, of the Cambridge “Telegraph,” had
been killed by being thrown out of a gig; but of him we know little. Of
Thomas Cross, who was intimately connected with Cambridge, we know a
good deal. He drove the Lynn “Union” for many years. Born in 1791, he
died in 1877, in his eighty-sixth year. His occupancy of the box-seat
lasted from 1821 to 1847, when his coaching career was brought to a
close by the opening of the length of railway between Cambridge, Ely,
and King’s Lynn, His was a remarkable history. His father, John Cross,
from being a highly prosperous coach-proprietor, with large estates
and considerable social standing in the district between Petersfield
and Portsmouth, was gradually brought low by misfortune and reckless
speculations. John Cross, with the wealth and status of a country
squire, had given his son Thomas an excellent education, and had
destined him for the Navy; but serious attacks of epilepsy, and the
results of an accident caused from falling in one of these fits on a
number of wine-bottles, cut his career in the Service short. He was
a midshipman when these distressing circumstances entirely altered
his future. He then started farming, but misfortune dogged his steps.
As owners of horses, himself and his father fared no better, for the
terrible disease of glanders broke out and quickly carried off 120
animals. Eventually ruin faced the family, and Thomas Cross at last was
reduced to seeking employment as a whip in the very yard once owned
by his father. At the age of thirty, then, married and with a family
of his own to support, we perceive him pretty thoroughly graduated in
the school of life, and already familiar with the worst blows that
adversity could give. In the beginning of his coaching career he drove
the “Union” between London and Cambridge, but at different periods had
the middle and the lower ground.
[Illustration: “A VIEW OF THE TELEGRAPH”: DICK VAUGHAN OF THE CAMBRIDGE
“TELEGRAPH.”
_From an etching by Robert Dighton, 1809._
]
He was not altogether a genial coachman, and held little intercourse
with his brethren of the bench, to whom he considered himself, as
indeed he was, superior. It was not, however, a judicious attitude
to adopt, and those who drove the “Star” and “Telegraph” Cambridge
coaches--Jo Walton, James Reynolds, and others--retorted by describing
him as an indifferent whip. Perhaps, in fact, he was, but the “Lynn
Union” was never a dashing coach, and gave no opportunity of displaying
the skill demanded on others.
Tommy Cross was never so pleased as when he could pick up a box-seat
passenger well grounded in the classics, or interested in poetry--for
poetry first, and the classics afterwards, engaged his thoughts. He
drove four-in-hand all day, and when his day’s work was done retired
to some solitary chamber and mounted Pegasus, who carried him on the
wings of the wind to the unearthly regions where dwell the spirits
of Homer and Virgil. In short, he seems altogether to have lived a
fine confused unpractical life, reflected to some degree in his book,
_The Autobiography of a Stage-Coachman_, an interesting but formless
work, so lacking in arrangement that it is difficult from its pages
to gain any very clear view of his career, and actually impossible
from it to discover what was the name of the Lynn coach he drove and
so constantly mentions. That it was the “Union” only independent
inquiries disclose. The name “Union” must in later years have taken
an equivocal and prophetic meaning to poor Thomas, for, like many
another coachman, he saw with apprehension railways building all over
the country and running the coaches off successive roads. He knew his
own turn must come, and was early seized with fears for the future.
In 1843 he published, at Cambridge, in pamphlet form, some verses in
imitation of Gray’s _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_. He called it
_The Lament and Anticipation of a Stage-Coachman_. It was, indeed, a
very doleful production, describing what was already happening on other
roads and was presently to befall on this. It is not proposed to quote
the sixteen pages of this poetical effort. Let two verses suffice to
show at once how, if his Muse did limp unmistakably, she was not wholly
destitute of descriptive force:--
[Illustration: THE GUARD, 1832.
_After H. Alken._
]
The smiling chambermaid, she too forlorn,
The boots’ gruff voice, the waiter’s busy zest,
The ostler’s whistle, or the guard’s loud horn,
No more shall call them from their place of rest.
Then comes the final catastrophe:--
The next we heard, some new-invented plan
Had in a Union lodged our ancient friend.
Come here and see, for thou shalt see the man
Doom’d by the railroad to so sad an end.
The end was not yet, but the Lynn “Union” was off the road in 1847,
and Cross could not obtain any form of employment on the railway. He
had already, in 1846, petitioned Parliament, but without avail; and
now entered upon those unhappy years in which he eked out a precarious
existence on the occasional aid given him by such men as Henry
Villebois, the good-hearted Norfolk sporting squire, and others who had
often been passengers on the box-seat of the “Union.” In those years
he published several pieces in verse, generally cast in the ambitious
epic form. Unfortunately, he was not the poet he thought himself, and
they are rather turgid and bombastic specimens of blank verse. He
planned and wrote a _History of Coaching_, but in the bankruptcy of
his printers the manuscript disappeared, and so what might have proved
a really valuable work was lost. At last, in 1865, he found a home
in Huggens’ College, a charitable institution at Northfleet, founded
and endowed some twenty years earlier by a wealthy City merchant for
gentlemen reduced to poor circumstances. This testimony to his social
superiority above other coachmen seems to have cheered and invigorated
him amazingly, for he was a collegian at Huggens’ beneficent
institution for twelve years, and lived to be nearly eighty-six years
of age.
Less fortunate was Jack Peer, or Peers, of the Southampton “Telegraph,”
famous in his day, but reduced to driving an omnibus, and thence, being
morose and quarrelsome in that position, by degrees to the workhouse.
His unhappy situation became known to a gentleman who had often
travelled by him in brighter times: a handsome subscription was raised,
and he was at least enabled to end his days in quiet retirement.
A great many ex-coachmen became innkeepers and publicans. Among
these was Ambrose Pickett, of the Brighton “Union” and “Item,” who
anticipated the end of Brighton coaching in 1841, by becoming landlord
of an inn in North Street, with the very appropriate sign of the “Coach
and Horses.”
A much more famous coachman than he--Sam Hayward, of the Shrewsbury
“Wonder”--followed Mr. Weller’s example, and married a widow, landlady
of the “Raven and Bell,” on Wyle Cop; but he did not long survive the
extinction of “the Road,” and the widow soon found herself again in
that situation. John Jobson, who for many years drove the “Prince of
Wales”--the “Old Prince,” as it was familiarly called--a London, Oxford
and Birmingham coach, continued on to Shrewsbury and Holyhead--became a
coach-proprietor, established at the “Talbot,” Shrewsbury, and a thorn
in the side of Isaac Taylor, of the neighbouring “Lion.” Coaching came
to an end at Shrewsbury in 1842, and the name of Jobson was heard no
more.
Many coachmen were killed off the box in the exercise of their
profession, as, in the chapter on accidents, has already been shown. A
considerable number, secure in the affection of the wealthy amateurs,
many of whom they had taught the art of driving, entered the service
of those noblemen and gentlemen, in some horsy or stable capacity.
The eighth Duke of Beaufort, one of the Sir Watkin Williams Wynns,
and others, thus found employment for these refugees of the road, and
continually aided many more; but something in the long overlordship
they had exercised over four horses, and a good deal more perhaps in
that hero-worship down the road, of which Washington Irving writes, had
spoiled them. Their lives would not run sweetly in fresh grooves. They
could not, or would not, take to new employments, and even, subsisting
upon charity, were often absurdly haughty, insolent, and insufferable.
Like horses, good living, coupled with little exercise, rendered them
unmanageable, and they not infrequently quarrelled with the hand that
fed them. “What do _you_ know about throat-lashings and head-terrets?”
contemptuously asked Harry Simpson, ex-coachman of the Devonport
“Quicksilver,” of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, who, before him, had been
holding forth to some of his guests upon the respective merits of those
harnessing methods in the old coaching days. “Nothing practically,”
answered the good-humoured baronet; “my ideas are only ideas. But you
know all about the subject: let us have the benefit of a professional
view.”
At this time Harry Simpson--“Little Harry,” as he was called,
undersized and “looking like a tomtit on a round of beef when on
the driving-box”--was stud-groom to that Welsh landowner, who, from
compassion, had taken him into his employ when coaching failed. “Little
Harry,” domineering and wilful as he was, remained in his service for
thirty years, and died in 1886.
Some of the undoubted veterans of the old order lived to patriarchal
ages, and when they died their obituary notices confounded many a
writer who had lightly declared, years before, that the last of the
coachmen was dead.
[Illustration: THE GUARD, 1852.
_After H. Alken._
]
Matthew Marsh, who for many years drove the Maidstone “Times,” had
been a private soldier in the 14th Foot, and fought and was wounded at
Waterloo. He was generally averse from mentioning that fact, but one
day, hearing from his box a dispute about the battlefield in which both
disputants were in error, he corrected them, simply adding, “I happened
to be there.” He died in 1887, aged ninety-four years, aided in his
declining days by the Earl of Albemarle, who had fought in the same
campaign.
William Clements, of Canterbury, who had driven the “Tally-Ho” and
“Eagle” coaches between Canterbury and London before the nineteenth
century had grown out of its teens, died in 1891, aged ninety-one. He
was “the last of the coachmen,” yet, two years later, in the early part
of 1893, we find the death recorded of Philip (commonly called “Tim”)
Carter, aged eighty-eight. He it was who drove the “Red Rover” on June
19th, 1831, from the “Elephant and Castle” to Brighton in 4 hours 21
minutes--a pace then greatly in excess of anything before accomplished
on that road. The occasion was the opening of William IV.’s first
Parliament, and the haste was for the double purpose of speedily
carrying the King’s Speech to Brighton and of advertising the “Red
Rover” itself, then a newly-established coach. He did not run light, as
many of the record-making coaches used, but carried fourteen passengers
on that trip.
A year after Carter’s death Harry Ward passed away, August 4th, 1894,
aged eighty-one. He was one of a family of ten, and the last, except
his elder brother Charles, of whom mention will presently be made.
Their father had himself been a coachman on the Exeter Road, and lived
at Overton at the time Charles was born. He afterwards became landlord
of the “White Hart,” Hartford Bridge, on the same great highway,
eighteen miles nearer London. Harry Ward’s career is partly told on
page 247, Vol. I. In after years he drove coaches started in the
revival on the Brighton Road and elsewhere.
“Last,” it was again said, of the coachmen who drove the famous
coaches up to the time when railways ran them off the road, was
Charles S. Ward, elder brother of the above. He was born in 1810,
and died in his eighty-ninth year, December 9th, 1899. His was an
interesting career. Son of one who had been a small proprietor as
well as coachman, and thus familiar from his birth with horses, he
was driving the Ipswich and Norwich Mail as far as Colchester at the
early age of seventeen, and was thus probably the youngest coachman
ever entrusted with the conduct of a mail on any road. But he drove it
for nearly five years without an accident, and was then promoted to
the Devonport “Quicksilver,” at that time the fastest out of London,
nightly driving the 29 miles to Bagshot, and then back, in the small
hours of the morning, with the up-coach. After nearly seven years of
this night-work, trying and monotonous even in summer, but extremely
hazardous in winter, he sought a change, and applied to Chaplin, who
was the proprietor of the “Quicksilver,” for day-work. The very fact
of his being so sure and safe a coachman on the night mail operated at
first against his being transferred to a coach not calling in so great
a degree for those qualities, but in 1838 he obtained the offer of the
Brighton Day Mail, which Chaplin was about to start, together with the
chance of horsing it a stage. Like many coachmen, ambitious of becoming
a proprietor, Ward closed with this offer, but the Day Mail did not
load well, and he soon gave up his share. He might have known that
Chaplin, so keen a business man, was not precisely the person to offer
any one else a share worth retaining.
Ward then left Chaplin, and went over to the Exeter “Telegraph,” the
fast day coach run by Mrs. Ann Nelson, in opposition to Chaplin’s
“Quicksilver Mail.” Mrs. Nelson was glad to get so steady a whip as
Ward, who for three years from this time drove the “Telegraph” daily
between Exeter and Ilminster, a double journey of 66 miles. In 1841
the Bristol and Exeter Railway, a continuation of the Great Western,
was opened as far as Bridgewater, and, by consequence, the “Telegraph”
was withdrawn by Mrs. Nelson and her co-partners. Ward, however, held
on, and, with the coachman on the other side of his stage and the two
guards, extended the journey at one end as the railway cut it short at
the other. From 1841 to April 30th, 1844, the “Telegraph” therefore ran
the 95 miles between Bridgewater and Devonport, taking up the railway
passengers at the former place. On May 1st, 1844, the railway was
opened to Exeter, and the journey of the poor old “Telegraph” was cut
down to 50 miles. But those were spirited times, and even then, driven
thus into the West, there were competing coaches. A “Nonpareil” Bristol
and Devonport coach had been running daily at the same hours as the
“Telegraph,” but was taken off, and a “Tally-Ho” put on the shorter
Exeter and Devonport trip. _Then_ the racing became furious. Up out
of Exeter, on to the breezy heights of Haldon, and by the skirts of
Dartmoor the two coaches sped--the “Telegraph,” as Ward tells us in his
reminiscences, always leading. Several times they did the 50 miles in 3
hours 20 minutes, and for months together never exceeded 4 hours!
That mad pace could not last; and so, as neither could run the other
off the road, they agreed to keep it amicably for so long as the
railway, pushing irresistibly onward, would suffer them to exist. On
May 1st, 1848, the South Devon Railway was opened to Plymouth, and it
seemed as though coaching in the West of England was quite killed;
but a number of Cornish gentlemen approaching Ward with the proposal
that he should start a fast coach into Cornwall, and promising to
support it, he put a “Tally-Ho” on the road between Plymouth, Truro
and Falmouth, a distance of 62 miles. He was so fortunate as to be
offered the contract for carrying the mail between those places, and
the “Tally-Ho” was converted into a mail, and ran for a number of years
until the railway was opened to Truro, in May 1859. Then, and then
only, did Ward’s career as a coachman end, for although for some years,
being proprietor, he had seldom driven, he had not hitherto deserted
the box-seat, despite the calls upon his time of the horse-mart and
driving-school business he had meanwhile established at Plymouth.
Charles Ward, more fortunate, more businesslike and far-seeing than the
majority of his fellows, ended as the prosperous proprietor of livery
stables in the Brompton Road, in whose yard he might be seen on sunny
days during his last years sitting on a bench against the warm brick
wall, and dozing the afternoons away.
Even as this page is written, in January 1903, another old
coachman--again “the last”!--has died. This was Sampson Brewer, who,
living in his later years at Cedar Cottage, Vancouver, declared himself
to be the last survivor of the old coaching days. Born in 1809, he was,
therefore, ninety-four years of age at his death. He said he drove on
its final journey “the last regularly-running mail in England”: that
between Plymouth and Falmouth, by way of Liskeard and St. Austell. He
must thus have been in the employ of Charles Ward.
[Illustration:
WILLIAM SALTER
_Yarmouth Stage Coach Man_
Died October the 9th 1776
Aged 59 Years.
Here lies Will Salter honest man
Deny it Envy if you can
True to his Business and his trust
Always punctual always just
His horses coud they speak woud tell
They lov’d their good old master well
His up hill work is chiefly done.
His stage is ended Race is run
One journey is remaining still.
To climb up Sions holy hill
And now his faults are all forgiv’n,
Elija like drive up to heaven
Take the Reward of all his Pains
And leave to other hands the Reins.
A STAGE COACHMAN’S EPITAPH AT HADDISCOE.]
Two, at least, of the coachmen committed suicide. One of these was Dick
Vickers, who had driven the Holyhead Mail. In an evil hour he resigned
the ribbons to indulge a fancy he had nursed of becoming a farmer.
But farming was beyond him: he lost all his money at it, and hanged
himself in one of his own barns at Tynant, near Corwen. Charles Holmes,
for more than twenty years coachman and part-proprietor of the “Old
Blenheim” London, Oxford and Woodstock coach, and the recipient in 1835
of a handsome present of silver plate, subscribed for by Sir Henry
Peyton and many other gentlemen, committed suicide by throwing himself
off a steamer into the Thames.
The question, “What became of the coachmen?” is partly answered in the
subjoined collection of epitaphs and eulogies got together from far
and near. First comes the early and curious one at Haddiscoe, near
Lowestoft, to William Salter, said to have lost his life by falling
from his coach at the foot of the hill near the churchyard, shown on
the page opposite.
To this succeeds the highly interesting example in Over Wallop
churchyard, Hampshire, to Skinner, the coachman of the Auxiliary Mail,
upset at Middle Wallop, on the Exeter Road, by one of the wheels coming
off. Skinner was killed on the spot, and the passengers injured. The
inscription runs:--
Sacred
to the Memory of
HENRY SKINNER, a Coachman,
who was killed near this place
July 13th, 1814,
Aged 35 years.
With passengers of every age
With care I drove from Stage to Stage,
Till Death’s sad Hearse pass’d by unseen,
And stopt the course of my machine.
Then comes a Latin passage:--
Dum socios summa per vicos arte vehebam
Mors nigra præteriit--
Machina cassa mea est.
It may be translated:--
While I was conveying various passengers with the greatest skill,
Black Death intervened--
My machine is broken.
An epitaph is (or was, for most of the stones in late years have been
cleared away) in Winchester Cathedral yard to the last coachman of the
Winchester and Southampton stage, but no record of it has been found.
Far away, in South Shropshire, on the north side of St. Lawrence’s
churchyard, Ludlow, lies John Abingdon, who died in 1817, and who,
according to his epitaph, “for forty years drove the Ludlow coach to
London; a trusty servant, a careful driver, and an honest man.”
His labour done, no more to town
His onward course he bends;
His team’s unshut, his whip’s laid up,
And here his journey ends.
Death locked his wheels and gave him rest,
And never more to move,
Till Christ shall call him with the blest
To heavenly realms above.
In the same district, in the pretty churchyard of Stanton Lacy, may be
found a stone to the memory of John Wilkes, of the Worcester and Ludlow
Mail, killed in 1803 by its overturning in a flood. Some poetic friend
inscribed this tribute:--
Alas! poor Wilkes, swift down the winding hill
The horses plunged into the fatal rill.
The quiv’ring bridge broke down beneath the weight,
And Wilkes was flung into the foaming spate.
On his prone form the coach then t ... (? toppled) o’er,
And he was crushed beneath, to rise no more.
No more to rise? No, no! Though here his work be ended,
To Heav’n we hope his spirit hath ascended.
Although on Earth his final drive be drove,
He’s entered on a longer Stage above,
Where, now his mortal days are past and gone--
He drives with Phœbus’ self the chariot of the Sun.
Then there is the epitaph on the driver of the coach that ran between
Aylesbury and London, written by the Rev. H. Bullen, vicar of Dunton,
in whose churchyard he is laid:--
Parker, farewell! thy journey now is ended,
Death has the whip-hand, and with dust thou’rt blended;
Thy way-bill is examined, and I trust
Thy last account may prove exact and just.
May He who drives the chariot of the day,
Where life is light, whose Word’s the living way;
Where travellers, like yourself, of every age
And every clime, have taken their last stage--
The God of mercy and the God of love
“Show you the road” to Paradise above.
The old whips had a whimsical way with them, and sometimes not a little
pathetic as well. The road was not only the profession whence they drew
their living, but it was their passion--their whole life. Thus, when
a noted chaise-driver at Lichfield, one Jack Lewton, died in 1796, he
was, at his last request, carried from the “Bald Buck” in that city by
six chaise-drivers in scarlet jackets and buckskin breeches--the pall
supported by six ostlers from the different inns. The funeral took
place on August 22nd, in St. Michael’s churchyard, as near the turnpike
road as possible; so that he might, as he said, enjoy the satisfaction
of hearing his brother whips pass and repass.
Similar directions are said to have been left by Luke Kent, reputed
to have been the first guard ever appointed to a mail-coach. The
story goes that he was buried at Farlington, near Portsmouth, on the
Chichester Road, and left an annual bequest to his successors on the
Chichester coach, on condition that they should always sound their
horns when passing the place of his interment. Diligent inquiry,
however, does not disclose the fact of any one of that name lying at
Farlington; but a Francis Faulkner, who died at Petersfield, May 18th,
1870, aged eighty-four years, lies in a vault in Farlington churchyard.
He was a guard on the “Rocket” London and Portsmouth coach, and local
gossip still tells that he left a request (perhaps also a bequest) that
if ever stage-coaches should pass his vault, their horns should be
sounded. Certainly, a few years ago, when a coach was run from Brighton
to Portsmouth, its horn was always sounded on passing the churchyard.
A conclusion shall be made with the eulogy of Robert Pointer, coachman
on the Lewes stage, which he is said to have driven thirty years
without an accident. It does not appear what relation he was to the
one-time famous “Bob Pointer,” of the Oxford Road, and in 1834 on the
Brighton “Quicksilver”--a favourite coaching tutor. _That_ Bob Pointer,
according to the Duke of Beaufort, could always be depended on to
start sober, but the horses had to be changed on the way anywhere but
at public-houses, if it was desired that he should end his journey in
the same condition:--
Those who excel, whatever line ’tis in,
Deserve applause, and ought applause to win.
Pointer in coachmanship superior shone;
His whip his sceptre, and his box his throne.
Not skilled alone the fiery steeds to guide,
For them in sickness and in health provide,
He, by a thousand nice _minutiæ_, knew
To win the restive, and the fierce subdue.
As man and master, punctual and approved;
By those who knew him best, the best beloved.
Many’s the time and oft, o’er Ashdown’s plain,
’Mid show’rs of driving snow and pelting rain;
When hurricanes bow’d down the lofty grove,
When all was slough beneath and storms above;
And oft, when glowing skies cheer’d all the scene
And threw o’er Sussex plains a joy serene;
When now the anecdote, and now the song
Beguil’d the moments as we roll’d along;
Snug at his elbow have I mark’d his skill
To rein the courser and to guide the wheel;
And had he Phaëton’s proud task begun,
To drive the rapid chariot of the sun,
Safe through its course the flaming car had run.