THE EARLY MAIL-COACHES
Long before the last quarter of the eighteenth century dawned, the time
was ripe for Post Office reform in the carrying of the mails; but, as a
matter of course, no one within that department saw any necessity for
change, and although the Post Office revenue was suffering severely
from correspondence being sent in a clandestine manner by stage-coach,
the slow and uncertain old methods had been retained. Reform had, as
always, to come from without, just as when Ralph Allen of Bath planned
his service of postboys in 1719. He had, against much opposition,
introduced his system of messengers riding with the mails at a speed of
“not less than five miles an hour,” then considered great expedition,
and comparing very favourably with the average stage-coach speed of
something less than four miles, including stops. Allen’s postboys were
at that time the fastest travellers on the road, with the exception of
the highwaymen, whose blood mares, according to tradition, were faster
still. No one could grumble at the course of post in those days on the
score of comparison with the journeys made by other travellers; but,
like many other reforms, Allen’s postboys, excellent at the beginning,
did not wholly succeed in keeping abreast of the times. Roads improved:
everyone and everything went at a much greater rate of progression,
save the Post Office postboys, who for forty-six years continued to
go at the same speed as that of their predecessors of an earlier
generation. They were, indeed, sent out more frequently on certain
routes on which business had increased, and on the more frequented
roads the mails were, from June 1741, despatched six days in the week,
instead of twice and thrice, as had formerly been the case; but up to
the time of Allen’s death, in 1764, speed remained what it had always
been, and it was not until the following year that the postboys’
regulation rate of travelling was raised by Act of Parliament from
five to six miles an hour, inclusive of stops. The post-horses were,
however, of the same inferior kind as of old. The best animals were,
very naturally, kept back by the postmasters--who were generally the
innkeepers also--for their customers, and for the Post Office the worst
nags in the stable were invariably reserved. An Act of Parliament,
backed by the power of the executive, is a very dread thing, but it
has not the power of compelling a horse incapable of going more than a
certain number of miles an hour to add another mile to his speed. The
improvement could thus have been only nominal.
The Post Office officials in Lombard Street, where the General Post
Office was then situated, were very well content for the public service
to be continued as of old. It would be idle to speculate how long the
department would have lagged behind the times and seen the Post Office
revenues being gradually eaten away by the growing practice of secretly
sending letters by the stage-coaches, which had by this time attained
a speed of about seven miles an hour, and in addition set out more
frequently and at more convenient hours than the postboys. It would
be idle thus to speculate, because, when the scandal was growing to
noticeable proportions--when it was asserted that the Post Office lost
not less than £80,000 a year by letters being conveyed by unauthorised
persons, and when people grew indignant that “every common traveller
passed the King’s Mail”--there came to the front a man with a plan to
remedy what surely was the very absurd paradox that the Government
strenuously reserved to itself the monopoly of letter-carrying, and yet
provided no reasonable facilities for those letters to be conveyed,
and idly watched thousands of pounds of that cherished revenue being
annually diverted from their proper destination. This man with a
well-matured scheme of reform was John Palmer, a native of Bath, born
at No. 1, Galloway’s Buildings (now North Parade Buildings), in 1742.
His father was a brewer and spermaceti-merchant, and proprietor of two
highly prosperous theatres at Bath and another at Bristol. Intended by
his father for the Church, his own inclinations were for the Army; but
he was not suffered to follow his bent, and so was taken from school
and placed in the counting-house of his father’s brewery. Wearying
of that commercial routine, and still without success disputing the
question of entering the Army, he set about learning the practical side
of brewing, and worked among the vats and mash-tubs of his father’s
establishment. Then his health gave way, and signs of consumption
rendered a rest and change of air necessary. Recovering at last
and returning to Bath, he entered into the conduct of his father’s
theatrical enterprises, and at the time when he conceived his plan was
the very busy and successful manager of all these theatres, for which
his energy had secured Royal patents--a license then necessary for the
presentation of stage-plays. These patents were then the only ones
enjoyed by theatres out of London.
[Illustration: JOHN PALMER AT THE AGE OF 17.
_Attributed to Gainsborough, R.A._
]
Palmer was, therefore, no impecunious adventurer, but a theatrical
proprietor and manager, accustomed to secure the highest talent for his
houses in this resort of fashion. His native energy, that brought him
success in beating up for talented actors and actresses all over the
country, stood him in good stead when the idea of entirely remodelling
the carrying of the mails occurred to his active mind. Nothing, indeed,
short of the utmost persistence and determination could have surmounted
the obstacles to reform that were placed in his way by the Post Office
officials.
The mails he had perceived to be the slowest travelling in the kingdom,
and he decided that they ought to be, and should be, the quickest.
His own frequent journeys had shown him the possibilities, and long
observation at Bath had displayed how far short of these the postboys’
journeys always fell. Thirty-eight hours were generally taken to
perform the 109 miles between the General Post Office and Bath, at a
time when travellers posted down in post-chaises in one day.
Other objections to postboys existed than on the score of insufficient
speed. It was, he declared, in the last degree hazardous to entrust
the mail-bags--as inevitably was often done--to some idle boy, without
character, and mounted on a worn-out hack, who, so far from being able
to defend himself against a robber, was more likely to be in league
with one.
Post Office postboys, it should here be said, were, like the postboys
who drove the post-chaises, by no means necessarily boys or youths.
They included, it is true, in their ranks all ages, but the great
majority of them were grown-up, not to say aged, men. Some people,
indeed, recognising the absurdity of calling a decrepit old man a
“postboy,” preferred to give him the title of “mailman,” by which
name a postal servant who got drunk and delayed the Bath mail in 1770
is styled in a contemporary newspaper, which says, “The mail did not
arrive so soon by several hours as usual on Monday, owing to the
mailman getting a little intoxicated on his way between Newbury and
Marlborough and falling from his horse into a hedge, where he was found
asleep by means of his dog.”
[Illustration: JOHN PALMER.
_From the painting by Gainsborough, R.A._
]
Instead of exposing letters to these and other risks, Palmer
proposed that a service of mail-coaches should be established on every
great road.
It was a bold scheme, and seemed to most of those to whom it was
unfolded rash and unworkable. To quite understand this attitude of
mind on the part of Palmer’s contemporaries, both inside and outside
the Post Office, it is essential to project ourselves mentally into
those closing years of the eighteenth century, when no one travelled
save under direful compulsion, when correspondence between sundered
friends and relatives was fitful and infrequent, and when even business
relations between the newly-risen industries of the great towns and the
rural districts were carried on in what we now consider to have been
a most leisurely and somnolent manner. The world went very well then
for the indolent, and they resented any quickening of the pace; and
that the average acute business men of that age considered the course
of post reasonable seems evident when we consider that it was not from
their ranks that this reforming project came, and that they are not
found supporting it until the first mails had been put on the road and
proved successful. _Then_ that imagination which had been altogether
lacking or dormant in business minds was aroused, and the great towns
and cities not at first provided with these new facilities eagerly
petitioned the Post Office authorities for mail-coaches.
Palmer contended that mail-coaches could be established at no
greater expense than that of the postboys and horses, who cost
threepence a mile. At a time, he continued, when stage-coaches cost
their proprietors about twopence a mile, it was quite certain that
adventurers could be found to establish mail-coaches if the Government
would consent to pay them at the same rate as the postboys, to exempt
them from the heavy tolls to which ordinary traffic was liable, and to
permit passengers to be carried to enable these speculative persons to
earn a profit on their enterprise. The proposed exemption from toll
was very reasonable when we consider how onerous were the turnpike
charges on the Bath Road, typical as it was of others. The charges for
a carriage and four horses between London and Bath were not less than
18s., or about twopence a mile.
These mail-coaches, he considered, should travel at about eight or nine
miles an hour. They should carry no outside passengers, but were to be
provided with a guard, who, for the better protection of the mails,
should be armed with two short guns or blunderbusses. The coachman,
too, should be armed, but his equipment was to be two pistols, for with
his reins to hold with one hand he could not, like the guard, bring his
weapon to the shoulder. The journey, for example, between London and
Bath, it was thought, could be performed in sixteen hours, including
stoppages; and this unusual expedition, together with the assured
safety, would result in the projected coaches being well patronised by
the public.
This plan was matured in 1782, and Palmer lost no time in securing the
good offices of an influential friend to bring it to the notice of
the “Heaven-born Minister,” Pitt, then Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The time, however, was not propitious, for the ministry soon went out
of office, and it was not until 1784, when he was again in power, that
Palmer’s plan obtained a trial. Pitt was heartily in favour of it, and
carried it into effect against the unanimously adverse opinions of the
Post Office surveyors, who resented one outside their own sanctified
and anointed caste daring to suggest that the methods of the department
were capable of improvement. One was, or affected to be, unable to see
why the post should be the swiftest conveyance in the kingdom; and to
another it appeared that for guards and coachmen to carry arms would be
to encourage the highwaymen--who assuredly would continue to attack the
mail--to a greater use than before of pistols, so that murder would be
added to robbery and the country run with blood. In conclusion, they
were all amazed that any dissatisfaction or desire for change should
exist, and from that amazement proceeded to argue that they really
did not exist. If (they said) the mails were not frequent enough or
swift enough, there were always the expresses ready to be specially
hired. Now, as at that time a letter going a hundred miles by mail
would cost fourpence, and the cost of an express--at threepence a mile
and a two-and-sixpenny fee--would for the same distance be 27s. 6d.,
this surprise was not altogether unlike that of Marie Antoinette, who,
hearing that the people were starving for lack of bread, wondered why
they did not eat cakes instead.
These official objections having been brushed aside at a Treasury
conference held on June 21st, arrangements were made for a coach
to run on the road from Bristol, through Bath, to London, pursuant
to an order issued on July 24th, which stated that “His Majesty’s
Postmasters-General, being inclined to make an experiment for the more
expeditious conveyance of mails of letters by stage-coaches, machines,
etc., have been pleased to order that a trial shall be made upon the
road between London and Bristol, to commence at each place on Monday
the 2nd August next.”
On July 31st, 1784, five innholders--one in London, one at Thatcham,
one at Marlborough, and two in Bath--entered into an agreement to horse
the coach down that ancient turnpike. They received threepence a mile
for their services.
A conflict of testimony as to whether the first mail-coach started on
August 2nd, 1784, or on August 8th, seems to be disposed of by the
advertisement in _Bonner & Middleton’s Bristol Journal_ of July 31st
in that year, although there is nothing in succeeding issues of that
journal to show whether the service actually did or did not begin on
the date announced:--
MAIL DILIGENCE.
_To commence Monday, August 2nd._
The Proprietors of the above Carriage having agreed to convey the
Mail to and from London and Bristol in Sixteen Hours, with a Guard
for its Protection, respectfully inform the Public, that it is
constructed so as to accommodate Four Inside Passengers in the most
convenient Manner;--that it well (_sic_) set off every Night at
Eight o’Clock, from the Swan with Two Necks, Lad-Lane, London, and
arrive at the Three Tuns Inn, Bath, before Ten the next Morning,
and at the Rummer-Tavern, near the Exchange, Bristol, at Twelve,
... Will set off from the said Tavern at Bristol at Four o’Clock
every Afternoon, and arrive at London at Eight o’Clock the next
Morning.
The Price to and from Bristol, Bath, and London, 28s. for each
Passenger ... No Outside allowed.
Both the Guards and Coachmen (who will be likewise armed) have
given ample Security for their Conduct to the Proprietors, so that
those Ladies and Gentlemen who may please to honour them with their
Encouragement, may depend on every Respect and Attention.
Parcels will be forwarded agreeable to the Directions immediately
on their Arrival at London, etc. etc., and the Price of the
Porterage as well as the Carriage, on the most reasonable Terms,
will be charged on the Outside to prevent Imposition.
Any person having reason to complain of the Porter’s Delay, will
oblige the Proprietors by sending a Letter of the Times of Delivery
of their Parcels to any of the different Inns the Diligence puts up
at.
Performed by
WILSON & CO., London.
WILLIAMS & CO., Bath.
N.B. The London, Bath, and Bristol Coaches from the above Inns as
usual.
Immediately beneath this advertisement it is amusing to see a
counterblast, in the form of an announcement by Pickwick, Weeks, and
other “Proprietors of the Coaches from Bristol, Bath, and London,” who
“respectfully beg leave to inform the Public that they continue to run
their Coaches from the Bush Tavern in Corn Street, Bristol,” and from
other inns in that city and at Bath, “with equal Expedition to any
Coaches that travel the Road.” Stage-coach proprietors in general were,
not unnaturally, alarmed and angered by the inauguration of a swift
service of subsidised mail-coaches, not only claiming to perform their
journeys in a specified time, but actually doing so under contracts
providing for penalties when the official time-table was not kept.
_They_ were under no such obligations, and continually claimed to do
things impossible to be performed, secure from penalties. “What time
do you get to London?” asked a passenger of a stage-coachman. “Six
o’clock, sir, is the proper time, but I have been every hour of the
four-and-twenty after it,” was the reply.
The first mail-coaches were merely ordinary light post coaches or
diligences pressed into the service; but, unlike those of other and
unofficial coaches, whose stages ranged from ten to fifteen miles or
more, the horses were changed at stages varying from six to eight
miles. In this way it was possible to attain a running speed of eight
miles an hour, to destroy the old reproach that the mail was the
slowest service in the kingdom, and to set the pace to everything
else on the road. Thus once again the Post Office commanded the utmost
expedition, and to the mail-coaches those travellers flocked who
desired the quickest, the most dignified, and the safest method of
progression in that age.
The first results of the mail-coach system were of a very mixed nature.
The course of post was, it is true, greatly accelerated, but the rates
of postage were immediately raised, and although the added convenience
was well worth the extra charge--which, after all, was much less than
the surreptitious sending of letters by stage-coach had been--people
grumbled. By the ordinary postboys the charge for a single letter had
been a penny for one stage, twopence for two stages, and threepence
for any higher distance up to eighty miles. Over that distance the
charge was fourpence. The postboys’ stages ranged from ten to as many
as fourteen miles. Under the new dispensation the postage was raised at
once to twopence the first stage, and the stages themselves were rarely
more than seven or eight miles, and often shorter. Correspondence going
longer distances enjoyed, it is true, a reduction; for two stages cost
threepence and distances exceeding two stages and not more than eighty
miles were rated at fourpence.
The short-distance correspondence therefore paid from three to four
times as much as under the old order of things, and long-distance
letters a penny more; but all alike shared the advantage of the
mail-coaches’ comparative immunity from attack and their going every
day, including even Sundays. One class of correspondents, indeed,
suffered inconvenience for a time while reorganisation was in progress.
These were the residents on the bye-roads and in the smaller towns not
situated on the great mail routes. It is obvious that the coaches could
not be made to go along the secondary and very ill-kept roads, and
that, even could that have been done, it would not have been possible,
in the lack of passenger traffic along them, to have found contractors
prepared to horse the coaches at the price they gladly accepted on the
main arteries of travelling. The postboys had, on the other hand, gone
everywhere, and the complex system of bye- and cross-posts established
by Allen and maintained by these riders was really, for that time,
a wonderful achievement. Residents off the mail routes now began to
miss the postboy’s horn, and found their letters lying for days at the
post-offices until they were called for. Instead of the post coming to
the smaller towns and villages, those minor places had to send to the
nearest post-office on the mail-coach road. These inconveniences only
gradually disappeared on the organisation of a service of mail-carts
from the post-towns to rural post-offices, collecting and delivering
the cross-posts; and it was not until another ten years had passed that
the bye-mails became, as well as the direct ones, what they should
always have been, quicker than any other public conveyance on the
roads. With this at length accomplished, the leakage of Post Office
revenues automatically disappeared, for it is not to be supposed that,
when the mails were more; frequent, cheaper, and more speedy than other
methods, the public would resort to slow and more expensive ways of
sending their letters.
The next mail-coach to be put on the road was the Norwich Mail, in
March 1785; and in May of that same year the first of the cross-road
mails was established. This was the Bristol and Portsmouth. It was
followed in rapid succession by the long services from London: the
Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool, on July 25th; the London, Gloucester
and Swansea; the Hereford, Carmarthen and Milford Haven, by Glasbury;
the Worcester and Ludlow; the Birmingham and Shrewsbury; the Chester
and Holyhead; the Exeter; the Portsmouth; and--on October 16th, 1786,
in answer to the petition for a mail-coach along the Great North Road
sent up by the cities and towns on that highway--by the York and
Edinburgh Mail.
Palmer was not content with merely reorganising the inland mails; he
was eager to see his plan adopted in France, and to this end opened up
negotiations with Baron D’Ogny, the French Minister of Posts, in 1787.
Correspondence between them, and between his secretary, Andrew Todd,
and M. de Richebourg, was still proceeding in 1791, when the French
Revolution put an end to all such things.
The success of his plan in England was no sooner assured than his
position came up for discussion. We must by no means regard Palmer as
a mere sentimental reformer. Nothing could be wider of the truth. He
thought he saw, in thus being of service to the public, an excellent
opportunity of furthering his own fortunes. He had observed how great a
fortune Allen had made by the posts being farmed to him, and although
by this time the business of the Post Office was grown too huge to be
let out at a rent, his acute mind, as we have seen, devised a plan
that brought him little financial risk or outlay. His were the brains;
the Post Office, and the contractors who horsed the coaches, took the
responsibility and the risk, if any.
It was now only to be expected that he should be rewarded for his idea
and for the way in which he had brought the plan into being. He was
accordingly, but not until October 1786, appointed Comptroller-General,
with a yearly salary of £1,500, and 2½ per cent. on the net revenue
in excess of £250,000; which sum represented the former Post Office
revenue of £150,000 plus the £90,000 the newly-raised rates of postage
had added to the year’s takings.
It is not the purpose of these pages to enter into the long and pitiful
story of the hatreds and jealousies that Palmer’s appearance at the
Post Office excited, nor does the subject in hand admit any extended
study of Palmer’s own character. When he went to the Post Office as
Comptroller-General, he went with a determination to be unfettered in
his actions, and expected to be supreme in fact, although nominally
responsible to the Postmasters-General. At this period the Post Office,
which had staggered on from job to job from its very inception,
and had been purged from time to time only to settle down on every
occasion into a new era of corruption and theft of every degree,
from the most pettifogging pilfering up to malversation of funds on
a monumental scale, was riddled through and through with scandals.
There had long been a succession of joint Postmasters-General from
1690, when Sir Robert Cotton and Mr. Thomas Frankland were appointed;
and that double-barrelled office, although conducted by those first
incumbents in an efficient and altogether praiseworthy manner, had long
degenerated into a political appointment. Cotton and Frankland had been
more than official figureheads. They had resided at the General Post
Office, and were hard-working and conscientious servants of the public.
Their successors degenerated into impracticable officers of State, who
usually only took part in Post Office work to the extent of signing
official documents they never read, and never actively interfered
but to perpetrate some new job, or--for they commonly were violently
jealous of one another--for the purpose of undoing some already
existent scandal set agoing by their fellow Postmaster-General.
It was Palmer’s misfortune to go to the Post Office at a time when
these gilded figureheads were not perhaps more efficient, but certainly
more interfering, than the generality, and, being himself hot-headed
and impatient of control, he very soon came to disagreement from them.
Their suggestions he at first haughtily ignored, as in his opinion
likely to injure his plans, and when those suggestions became commands,
he entirely disobeyed them. The chiefs with whom he thus came into
bitter conflict were at first Lords Carteret and Walsingham: the
former a “job-master,” as Palmer satirically styled him, of peculiar
shamelessness and audacity; his colleague a man of probity, but with
something of the formal prig in his constitution that irritated Palmer
at last beyond endurance. Walsingham made a point of investigating
everything. He may not have been a better man of business than Palmer,
but he was a man of orderly methods, which Palmer was not. Palmer did
things well, but in an unbusinesslike way; Walsingham must for ever be
seeking precedents, calling for vouchers, and insisting upon official
etiquette. All this was very poisonous to the new Comptroller-General,
who found himself largely controlled instead of controlling. Carteret,
being convicted by his colleague of a job, Palmer hotly thought his own
honesty questioned when careless and unreported appointments solely on
his own initiative were resented by his official superior. Thus affairs
continued through six years of changes, in which Postmasters-General
succeeded one another and returned like the changes of a kaleidoscope.
But while other Postmasters disappeared, Walsingham, the stickler
for form, remained. With others Palmer might have found some way
of compromise, but with Walsingham he could not do other than carry
on a struggle for mastery. The end came when that peer had for his
fellow the Earl of Chesterfield, who possessed sufficient humour by
himself to be amused with Palmer’s frettings against authority, but in
conjunction with Walsingham could only follow his lead. Annoyed beyond
his own powers of control (which, to be sure, were very limited) by
the action of the joint Postmasters in referring to the Treasury an
affair which he conceived to be a purely Post Office matter, concerning
the mileage to be paid for the Carlisle and Portpatrick mail, Palmer
forthwith suddenly stopped on his own authority the Falmouth, Bristol,
Portsmouth and Plymouth mail-coaches, which were all being paid for
at a higher rate than his superiors thought necessary, but which they
had not agreed to discontinue. Questioned about this action, that had
thrown the mails in the south-west of England into utter confusion,
he insolently declared that what their lordships objected to on one
road was surely objectionable on another; if they preferred mail-carts
to mail-coaches they could have them. A violent quarrel then blazed
up. Palmer charged the Postmasters-General with deliberately and
capriciously thwarting his best arrangements. He would appeal to the
Prime Minister against their interference.
The Postmasters desired nothing better; but Pitt, who had the
greatest confidence in Palmer, long evaded the interview they sought
with him to procure his dismissal, and when at length they did win
to his presence he made it quite clear that it was not in their
direction his sympathies extended. Indeed, it is quite possible that
the Comptroller-General would have seen his masters out of office
while he retained his own, had it not been for the extraordinary and
unexplained treachery of Palmer’s own friend, Charles Bonnor, whom he
had provided with a splendid post at the General Post Office. This man
suddenly launched a pamphlet in which he accused his benefactor of
delaying the London post in order to create popular demands for reforms
Palmer himself desired to introduce, reforms that would place him in
a position of higher authority. The Postmasters-General received the
publication of this pamphlet with a well-simulated amazement, but the
suspicion that they had themselves induced Bonnor to perform the part
of Judas is inevitable, and is deepened by their subsequent action.
Palmer, of course, suspended Bonnor, whereupon they asked the reason,
and on Palmer refusing to give an explanation that must have been
wholly unnecessary in fact, if not in actual form, they reinstated the
man. Nay, more, when Bonnor repaired to my lords with the news that
Palmer had refused to reinstate him, and had, in fact, ordered him with
threats off the premises, they consented to read and to show to Pitt
the private and confidential correspondence he had brought with him,
addressed by Palmer to his former friend during a series of years, and
containing not a little compromising matter, proving how Palmer had
been steadily bent on asserting his own authority and on denying that
of the Postmasters-General.
[Illustration: THE MAIL-COACH, 1803.
_From the engraving after George Robertson._
]
The whole pitiful story is at bottom an indictment of the figurehead in
public life; an exposure of the hoary custom of appointing political
and ornamental heads to the overlordship of executive departments
really ruled by permanent officials. My lords came and went as party
fortunes willed. Palmer had officially no politics; all he desired was
to perfect his already successful plan. Other Postmasters-General would
have been content with their figureheadship, and have danced like any
other Governmental puppets to the pulling of official strings; but
Palmer’s overlords declined to do anything of the sort, and if they
could not organise or originate, found it at least possible to meddle
and veto.
Palmer, ready at most times to do anything--to travel many
miles, to expend his highly nervous energies in any other way
than by letter-writing, made this one irretrievable blunder of a
generous-minded man. He was accustomed to unburden himself on paper
to the friend who already owed everything to him--and who by natural
consequence hated him for it--and by so doing was, as we perceive, in
the end undone.
The Postmasters-General were the sole eventual gainers by Bonnor’s
incredible perfidy, for that creature, by rare poetic justice, died at
last in misery and want.
When at length they succeeded in obtaining another interview with
Pitt and disclosed these letters, there was, of course, an end of
Palmer’s official career. But it was sorely against his will that the
Great Commoner left the Comptroller-General to his fate. He saw that
a great deal of the animus shown against him by my lords was due to
their sense of the enormity of a person of his rank withstanding not
merely Postmasters-General, but Postmasters-General who were also peers
of the realm. He saw, too, that a peer with the dignity of his caste
offended can descend to more despicable depths to avenge himself than a
mere untitled person would plumb. The pity is that even Pitt could not
ignore letters written in confidence and treacherously disclosed.
But, although Palmer was left to the mercy of his enemies, who
instantly dismissed him, he did not go without acknowledgment. His
salary and commission had by now reached £3,000 a year, and this sum
Pitt continued to him as a pension from 1792, the date of his dismissal.
Palmer was now fifty years of age, and in his prime. He naturally was
not content with this settlement, and moved the whole influential world
to aid him, petitioning the House of Commons, and at length securing a
committee to investigate his case. Sheridan, moving the appointment of
this body, urged Palmer’s claims with generous eloquence. He described
how the reformer had formed the plan of a mail-coach service, and
had introduced it to the notice of the Government, entering into an
agreement to receive a percentage in the event of success, and not
one shilling if it proved a failure. “None but an enthusiast,” he
declared, “could have formed such a plan; none but an enthusiast could
have carried it into execution; and I am confident that no man in this
country or any other could have done it but that very individual, John
Palmer.”
[Illustration: ONE OF THREE MAIL-COACH HALFPENNIES STRUCK AT BATH,
1797.]
The report of this committee, recommending an increased pension or a
grant, was not adopted; but in 1801 Palmer himself entered Parliament
and fought his own battles. He printed and circulated among the members
and in other circles a statement of his case, and in the course
of eight years expended no less a sum than £13,000 in appeals for
justice--in vain, and it was left for his eldest son, Colonel Charles
Palmer, who succeeded him in the representation of Bath in 1808, to at
last fight the question to a victorious issue. In 1813 he secured for
his father an award of £50,000, and the continuance during his life of
the commission on Post Office receipts originally agreed upon.
In the meantime, Palmer had been variously honoured. Gainsborough,
his neighbour at Royal Circus, Bath, painted his portrait; Glasgow
merchants, members of the Chamber of Commerce in that city, had
as early as 1789 presented him with a silver loving-cup, “as an
acknowledgment of the benefits resulting from his plan to the trade and
commerce of this kingdom”; and in 1797 three “mail-coach halfpennies”
were struck by some now unknown admirer. They bear on the obverse a
mail-coach, and on the reverse an inscription to him “as a token of
gratitude for benefits received” from his system. A third tribute
was the painting by George Robertson, engraved by James Fittler, and
inscribed, curiously, to him as Comptroller-General, in 1803, eleven
years after he had ceased to hold that position. He also received the
freedom of eighteen cities and towns in recognition of his public
services, was Mayor of Bath in 1796 and 1801, and represented that
city in the four Parliaments of 1801, 1802, 1806, and 1807. He died
at Brighton in 1818, in his seventy-sixth year. His body was conveyed
to Bath and laid in the Abbey Church; but no monument marks the spot,
and it is only recently that his residence at Royal Circus, and his
birthplace in his native city, have been identified to the wayfarer by
inscribed tablets.
[Illustration: JOHN PALMER IN HIS 75TH YEAR.
_From an etching by the Hon. Martha Jervis._
]
The very earliest mail-coaches were ill made, and were continually
breaking down. Although the coaches themselves were supplied by the
contractors, and the Post Office was not concerned in their cost, it
was very closely interested in their efficiency; and so, early in 1787,
Palmer had already represented to the contractors that the mails must
be conveyed by more reliable coaches.
“The Comptroller-General,” he wrote to one contractor, “has to complain
not only of the quality of the horses employed on the Bristol Mail, but
as well of their harness and the accoutrements in use, whose defects
have several times delayed the Bath and Bristol and London letters, and
have even led to the conveyance being overset, to the imminent peril of
the passengers. Instructions have been issued by the Comptroller for
new sets of harness to be supplied to the several coaches in use on
this road, for which accounts will be sent you by the harness-makers.
Mr. Palmer has also under consideration, for the contractors’ use, a
new-invented coach.”
This was a truly imperial way of remedying gross dereliction on the
contractors’ part, but it had its effect in this and other instances,
for it may be presumed that the harness-makers thus officially selected
to replace the contractors’ ancient assortments of worm-eaten leather
and cord were not the cheapest in the trade, and that those contractors
very soon awoke to the fact that it would be more economical in future
to provide new harness of their own free will, and from their own
harness-makers, than under compulsion.
In respect of the type of coaches, as well as of their equipment
in minor details, Palmer sternly resolved to impose thorough
efficiency. As he was very well assured that their defects arose
from the cheese-paring policy of the contractors themselves, he
decided that the Post Office must have a voice in the selection of
the coaches, and, having discovered what he considered a suitable
build, made it a condition of the service that it should be used. This
officially-approved new type was a “patent coach” by one Besant. The
contractors had no choice in the matter. Palmer, the autocrat, had
seen that Besant’s coaches were good, and willed it that they should
use none others, and so to that fortunate patentee they were obliged
to resort. He entered into partnership with Vidler, a practical
coachbuilder; and thus at Millbank, Westminster, was established
that mail-coach manufactory which for forty years supplied the
mail-coaches to the mail-contractors. Besant and Vidler’s terms were
twopence-halfpenny a double mile. For this price the coaches were
hired out to the contractors and kept in repair. The practice was for
Vidler’s men to take over the mail-coaches after they had entered the
General Post Office in the morning, on the completion of their up
journeys, and to drive them to Millbank, where they were cleaned and
greased, and delivered to the various contractors’ coach-yards in the
afternoon.
On December 2nd, 1791, Besant died. He was, we are told, “an honest,
worthy man, and the mechanical world sustains a great loss by his
death. His ingenuity was in various instances sanctioned by the
Society of Arts, many of whose premiums were awarded to him.”
However that may have been, and although to Palmer the patent coach
of Besant may have seemed altogether admirable, there were many who
condemned it and its patent springs. It is apparently one of this type
that is pictured by Dalgety in his print of St. George’s Circus, dated
1797. It is curious and interesting, as showing a transition between
the old type of coach and a style yet to come. The fore boot is of the
old detached type, but the wickerwork basket behind is discarded, and
a hind boot may be observed, framed to the body. The coach is hung
very high, and suspended at the back from iron or steel arms of the
pump-handle kind. This seems to be the type criticised so severely
by Matthew Boulton, himself an engineer, in 1798, when, describing a
mail-coach trip from London to Exeter, he roundly condemned the patent
springs:--
“I had the most disagreeable journey I ever experienced the night after
I left you, owing to the new improved patent coach, a vehicle loaded
with iron trappings and the greatest complication of unmechanical
contrivances jumbled together, that I have ever witnessed. The coach
swings sideways, with a sickly sway, without any vertical spring; the
point of suspense bearing upon an arch called a spring, though it is
nothing of the sort. The severity of the jolting occasioned me such
disorder that I was obliged to stop at Axminster and go to bed very
ill. However, I was able to proceed next day in a post-chaise. The
landlady in the ‘London Inn’ at Exeter assured me that the passengers
who arrived every night were in general so ill that they were obliged
to go supperless to bed; and unless they go back to the old-fashioned
coach, hung a little lower, the mail-coaches will lose all their
custom.”
Some debated points respecting the early mails are cleared up in a
series of replies by Palmer to questions put by the French Post Office
in 1791, respecting the English mail-coach system. “What,” asks M.
de Richebourg, “is a Mail-coach?” and among other details we learn
that “it is constructed to carry four Inside Passengers only, and One
Outside Passenger, who rides with the Coachman.” Here we perceive the
beginning of the outsides.
Then the question is asked: “When there are no Travellers on the
Mail-coaches, do they put-to the same number of Horses as when there
are?” To this the answer was: “They are all drove with four Horses,
sometimes, in Snow and very bad weather, with Six;--never less than
four, whether they have Passengers or not.” This disposes of the
statements made that the early mails were two-horsed.