THE EARLY COACHMEN
When stage-coachmen are mentioned, the mind at once flies to Mr. Tony
Weller, a stout man with a red face and a hoarse voice proceeding
from the depths of capacious shawls in which his throat is muffled.
Such was the typical coachman at any time between the introduction of
coaches and 1820, when a leaven of smartness and gentility began to be
noticeable, and the time-honoured type to fade away.
Coachmen were generally fat for the same reason that postboys were
thin: it was a necessity of their occupation. The postboys bumped their
flesh away on horseback, but the coachman’s sedentary occupation, and
still more a tremendous capacity for drinking induced by the open-air
life, caused him to accumulate fat to an immoderate degree. The typical
coachman is pictured in Hood’s ballad of John Day, who was
the biggest man,
Of all the coachman kind,
With back too broad to be conceived
By any narrow mind.
But while it would probably be safe to declare, without fear of
contradiction, that there never was such a thing as a fat postboy,
it would be the very height of rashness to say that a lean coachman
was unknown. There were many such, but the traditional coachman was
a bulky person, helped up to his seat by the combined efforts of the
stable-helpers; and Dickens, in picturing Tony Weller, fell in with the
public humour, although already the type was become somewhat out of
date.
The stage and mail coachmen were no exotics, but, like every one
else, the product of their country and their times; and as those
times changed, so did they. The evolution of the smart coachmen of
the ’thirties can be followed, step by step, until progress, in the
shape of railways, extinguished the species. The original floggers of
six horses, who could only get along by dint of severely punishing
those unhappy animals throughout the day, were not really coachmen
in the later sense. They understood little of the art of coaching,
and were merely drivers. From early morn to sundown they lashed the
same horses along the rutted ways, with intervals for mending the
harness--generally, according to the testimony of the time, the “rotten
harness”; but those would have been wonderfully strong traces that
could long have withstood the strain they were subjected to, and so
they were probably not always so decayed as contemporary accounts would
have us believe. Under these circumstances, and the generally hard and
rough life they led, it is not to be wondered at that coachmen were
originally a rough and brutal class of men. They cannot be paralleled
nowadays, and the difference between them and the later ornaments of
the box can only be understood by comparing a modern van-driver with
the coachman of an aristocratic carriage--and then we should be doing
injustice to the van-man.
[Illustration: “MY DEAR, YOU’RE A PLUMPER”; COACHMAN AND BARMAID.
_After Rowlandson._
]
As coaching progressed and twenty-mile stages replaced the day-long
toil of the horses, not only did the six-horse give place to four-horse
teams, but coachmen improved. There was need for such improvement, and
all the science and resource of which they were capable were put to
the proof. Mud, stones, ruts, sandy places to plough through, steep
hills to lash his horses up to, and dangerous descents to hold them in,
were the commonplaces of the coachman’s career up to the dawning of
the nineteenth century. The coaches, too, were heavy and clumsy, and
harness now really was rotten, and had every now and again to be mended
while the passengers waited with what patience they could command.
Happily, time was not “of the essence of the contract,” as the lawyers
say, and half a day late was no matter at that period. But all these
difficulties made the coachman of those times an expert in many things.
He was not of that later kind, finicking in manner and dandies upon the
box, but a great, weather-beaten, bluff and gruff creature, mummified
in wraps; an expert in getting the last ounce out of his cattle, and
ready with his whip, not always because he was brutal by nature, but
because he had to thrash the wretched animals to get his coach along
at all. The coachmen of those days wore their whips out frequently,
and a usual detail of their equipment was the dozen or more of whipcord
points in the button-hole, ready to be spliced on--an operation they
could perform with ease and efficiency with their teeth while driving.
When even the double-thonged whip failed to rouse the poor brutes
to super-equine exertions, the “apprentice”--a kind of cat o’ nine
tails--was brought into use, and the wheelers thrashed with it. This
engine of torture was in later years known familiarly as the “short
Tommy,” and was kept in reserve on many provincial coaches. Among those
familiar with coaching in its last years, some have asserted the use of
this instrument up to the time when coaches themselves disappeared, and
others deny it. Both were right and both wrong: on some roads it was on
occasion brought forth, while on others it was unknown.
There were no smart coachmen before the introduction of mail-coaches.
Before coaches carried the mails and the drivers became, in a sense,
officials and persons of importance, wreathed around with a vague
atmosphere of authority, your average driver took no sort of pride
in himself. Nor, supposing the existence of one who fared the roads
in smart attire, could he for long have kept so gay and debonair an
appearance. The meagreness and uncertainty of his livelihood forbade
it, and if those factors had been eliminated, there still remained the
unutterable badness of the roads to discourage him, together with the
longer spells of driving that these earlier men knew, which wearied
them and rendered them careless of details. Thus the stage-drivers of
the era that preceded the classic age of the road wore clumsy hay-bands
round their legs to protect them from the cold, and, together with
their many layers of clothing, their top-boots encrusted with the
mud of a month’s journeys, and their general air of untidiness, were
figures of fun, in sharp contrast with their brethren of a later day,
who were certain of their employment, of their liberal and frequent
tips, of good roads exceedingly well kept, and of their coaches and
cattle being maintained in the pink of condition by a small army of
stable-hands and helpers. The poor old fellows of a bygone age wore
perhaps nothing but fold upon fold of “comforters” round their necks,
while their linen did not bear inspection. The flower of the coaching
age, on the other hand--the coachmen of the first quarter of the
nineteenth century--wore the gayest and the neatest neckties as a
finish to a neat and striking professional costume. They were artists
alike in the management of their horses and in the folding of a tie.
Never a journey but they had a posy in their buttonhole, and never an
occasion when they were not spotlessly clean, in linen, top-boots, and
costume generally. It was an unmistakable costume, and one familiar to
us nowadays in its revival by modern coaching enthusiasts. Box-cloth
coats, fearfully and wonderfully stitched in five or six rows, and
decorated with buttons of an enormous size, together with white beaver
hats, were the most outstanding items of this marvellous costume.
A reminiscent traveller, writing in 1831, lets some light into dark
places. He said he was old enough to remember a certain West-country
coach, which he took to be representative of others at that period.
It always took ten, and sometimes twelve hours to do fifty-seven
miles. “Now,” he said, marvelling at the progress of the age, “it
takes only six hours.” Joe Emmens, the driver of this slow coach,
was famous for never at any time turning away a would-be passenger,
no matter how crowded his conveyance, which was often observed to be
carrying seventeen out and nine in, with parcels and hampers tied to
and suspended from all kinds of hazardous places. This did not, we
sorrowfully acknowledge, argue zeal for his employers’ interests, but
only an inordinate appetite for those “short fares” which by ancient
use and wont the coachman pocketed. The custom was as old as that of
“tipping.”
Tipping the coachman, a practice already mentioned, was early
introduced. It originated, there can scarce be any reasonable doubt,
with the very first stage-coach journey, and flourished exceedingly to
the very last, when the guard as well came in for his share. The custom
was originally known as “capping,” from the coachman coming with hat
or cap in hand for these contributions: a humble and beggarly method
to which the later artists of the coachbox were wholly strangers.
The later generation, it is true, removed their hats as a matter of
courtesy when they “left you here,” but their fee was no longer chucked
negligently into that headgear, as of old, but discreetly inserted
into an extended palm, and received as of right.
The earliest stages of tipping showed the practice in a very logical
and commonsense light, for although the later coachmen could be very
surly and disobliging if they were not “remembered,” they had not a
tithe of those opportunities of being actively offensive which the
older race of drivers enjoyed. The later generations of coachmen were
more directly responsible. They worked to a time-table, on good roads,
with fine cattle and perfect coaches; the older men stopped when and
where they liked, and altogether had the comfort or discomfort of
their passengers very largely in their hands. Thus they were to be
conciliated and kept in good humour by a reasonable expectancy of
vails. We first hear of tipping in 1665, in _The Committee_, Sir Robert
Howard’s comedy, where the vulgar committeeman’s wife gives Toby,
the coachman, something less than he expected. “By my whip,” he says
aside, “’tis a groat of more than ordinary thinness. Plague on this new
gentry,” he adds, with a sneer, “how liberal they are!”
“Tipping” grew and flourished extravagantly in after ages. The wealthy
and the free-handed set the standard then, as they do now in these
otherwise altered times, with the result that those who could not
afford the outlay in which the richer indulged were generally insulted
or neglected.
It was not often that the coachmen were so outspoken as the hero of the
following tale. “What do you expect?” asked a passenger new to the road
of him when collecting the customary tips at the end of his stage. That
ornament of the box was blunt and frank: “Gents generally gives me a
shilling; fools with more money than brains gives me half a crown,” he
said. What, in that case, could the passenger do but proclaim himself,
in the amount of his gratuity, a “gent” with a superfluity of brains
over cash, even though the coachman-philosopher was a loser to the
extent of one-and-sixpence?