GOING BY COACH: BOOKING OFFICES
Journeys by coach were entered upon by our grandfathers with much
deliberation. It was not then a matter of suddenly making up one’s
mind to go somewhere, and going accordingly, with only a few minutes’
preparation. The first step was to book one’s seat, a formality then
absolutely necessary, and in most cases some days before the journey
was proposed to be taken. Only by doing so could one be sure of finding
a place. The nearest modern parallel to this custom is the booking
of passages on ocean steamers; and a relic of it may be observed
every day at every railway station where the name of “Booking Office”
instead of Ticket Office is a survival--like that of the official
railway designation of carriages and passenger returns as “coaches” and
“coaching traffic”--of customs gone, never to return.
The passengers by coach were actually, as the term implies, “booked.”
The booking clerk did not merely give one a ticket in exchange for the
fare. He entered the passenger’s name and all necessary particulars
in a huge ledger, and in this identical manner the first railway
passengers secured their places, until the mere work of entering these
details became too great.
The booking-clerks in coach-offices had their responsibilities, and
were kept up to the highest mark of efficiency by the knowledge that if
they fell into such an error as overbooking a coach on any particular
journey, not only would the proprietors be bound in law to by some
means convey those passengers for whom there was no room, but that the
extra cost of so doing would infallibly be deducted from their wages.
The loss in such cases would inevitably be heavy, but dependent upon
the length of the journey. Mistakes of this kind generally meant that
the extra passengers were conveyed by post-chaise, at anything from
ninepence to a shilling a mile; and it was the difference between these
rates and the coach-fares of from twopence to fivepence a mile that
the clerks had to make good, unless the overbooked passengers were
sufficiently good-natured to wait for another coach.
The usual practice on securing a place was to pay a
proportion--generally one-half of the fare--down, and the other half
on taking one’s seat, as noted in the contemporary doggerel, which
declared:--
When to York per mail you start,
Four-caped, like other men,
To the book-keeper so smart
You pay three pounds, in part:
Two pounds ten before you start:
Sum total, five-pound-ten.
If you did not put in an appearance, the deposit was, of course,
forfeited.
Dickens, who as a reporter in his early years was very intimately
acquainted with coach travelling and all the manners and customs
connected with it, has left a very picturesque description of a coach
booking-office and its occupants. The first impression received by
the prospective traveller was of his own unimportance. One entered a
mouldy-looking room, ornamented with large posting-bills, the greater
part of the place enclosed behind a huge lumbering rough counter, and
fitted up with recesses like the dens of the smaller animals in a
travelling menagerie, without the bars. At these booking-offices, in
fact, one booked parcels as well as passengers, and into these recesses
the parcels were flung, with an air of recklessness at which the
passenger who might have chanced to buy a new carpet-bag that morning
would feel considerably annoyed.
The booking-office to which Dickens here refers was at the “Golden
Cross,” Charing Cross; but booking-offices were all very much alike,
and were exceedingly dreary and uncomfortable places, resembling modern
offices for the reception of parcels:--
“Porters, like so many Atlases, keep rushing in and out, with large
packages on their shoulders; and while you are waiting to make the
necessary inquiries, you wonder what on earth the booking-office clerks
can have been before they were booking-office clerks; one of them,
with his pen behind his ear, and his hands behind him, is standing
in front of the fire like a full-length portrait of Napoleon; the
other, with his hat half off his head, enters the passengers’ names in
the books with a coolness which is inexpressibly provoking; and the
villain whistles--actually whistles--while a man asks him what the
fare is outside--all the way to Holyhead!--in frosty weather too! They
are clearly an isolated race, evidently possessing no sympathies or
feelings in common with the rest of mankind. Your turn comes at last,
and, having paid the fare, you tremblingly inquire--‘What time will it
be necessary for me to be here in the morning?’ ‘Six o’clock,’ replies
the whistler, carelessly pitching the sovereign you have just parted
with into a wooden bowl on the desk. ‘Rather before than arter,’ adds
the man with the semi-roasted unmentionables, with just as much ease
and complacency as if the whole world got out of bed at five. You turn
into the street, ruminating, as you bend your steps homewards, on the
extent to which men become hardened in cruelty by custom.”
The long-distance coaches--divided into the “day” and “night”
varieties--started very early in the morning, or late in the afternoon.
The midday aspect of such yards as Sherman’s “Bull and Mouth,”
Chaplin’s “Swan with Two Necks,” the “Belle Sauvage,” the “Cross Keys,”
the “Golden Cross,” and others was one of repose, but from unearthly
hours in the forenoon until nine or ten, or from three o’clock in
the afternoon until nine at night, they were the scenes of bustling
activity. Any reference to old coaching time-bills will show that the
majority of the day stage-coaches to places distant a hundred miles or
more from London started about 6 a.m. Thus in 1824, among the coaches
from London to Birmingham, eight are found timed from London between
five and a quarter to eight in the morning; leaving the rest of the day
blank until 3 p.m., when the earliest of the night coaches set out. The
“Sovereign” went in 1824 from the “Bull,” Whitechapel, at 5 a.m. Half
an hour later went the “Crown Prince” from the “Belle Sauvage,” and the
“Aurora,” from the “Bull and Mouth”; followed by the “Courier,” from
the “Swan with Two Necks,” and the “Light Coach” from the “Cross Keys”
and “Golden Cross” at 6. At 6.30 went the “Oxonian Express” from the
“Bull and Mouth”; the “Independent Tally-Ho,” from the “Golden Cross,”
while “Mountain’s Tally-Ho,” from the “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill,
left at 7.45. In the same year the three early coaches for Bath left
London at 5, 5.45, and 6.15 a.m. These hours, which we should nowadays
regard as extravagantly early, were necessary if those coaches were to
properly serve the roads they travelled, for even a fast coach, doing
its 9 or 9½ miles an hour, including stoppages, would not reach Bath or
Birmingham before the day had nearly closed.
These unseasonable hours meant, of course, very early rising indeed
for would-be passengers, and not even that hardy generation endured the
infliction without a very great deal of grumbling. But there was no
remedy. It was only a choice of ills, whether you had to be called at
a little after three o’clock on perhaps a winter’s morning for a day’s
journey, or whether you elected to wait until the afternoon, and so,
travelling through the night, were deposited at your journey’s end on
the pavements of Bath or Birmingham, or some other strange place, at
the inhospitable hours between midnight and six a.m.; in which latter
case you would be in that extremely unpleasant position of wanting to
go to bed when the rest of the world was considering the expediency of
getting out of it.
Some, difficult to arouse in the early morn, adopted the heroic
expedient of sitting up all night. Others, like Leigh Hunt and James
Payn, taught by long experience, engaged a bedroom overnight at the inn
whence the coach started, so that they might be on the spot and lie two
hours longer. Even then, as Payn confessed, he often slept too long,
and so, without breakfast, often carrying his boots in his hand, and
in other ways not completely dressed, would dash into the coach at the
very moment of its moving away.
“We have often wondered,” wrote Dickens, “how many months’ incessant
travelling in a post-chaise it would take to kill a man; and, wondering
by analogy, we should very much like to know how many months of
constant travelling in a succession of early coaches an unfortunate
mortal could endure. Breaking a man alive upon the wheel would be
nothing to breaking his rest, his peace, his heart--everything but
his fast--upon four; and the punishment of Ixion (the only practical
person, by-the-by, who has discovered the secret of the perpetual
motion) would sink into utter insignificance before the one we have
suggested. If we had been a powerful churchman in those good times when
blood was shed as freely as water, and men were mowed down like grass
in the sacred cause of religion, we would have lain by very quietly
till we got hold of some especially obstinate miscreant, who positively
refused to be converted to our faith, and then we would have booked him
for an inside place in a small coach, which travelled day and night;
and, securing the remainder of the places for stout men with a slight
tendency to coughing and spitting, we would have started him forth on
his last travels--leaving him mercilessly to all the tortures which the
waiters, landlords, coachmen, guards, boots, chambermaids, and other
familiars on his line of road might think proper to inflict.
“If,” he continued, “there be one thing in existence more miserable
than another, it most unquestionably is the being compelled to rise
by candle-light. If you ever doubted the fact, you are painfully
convinced of your error on the morning of your departure. You left
strict orders overnight to be called at half-past four, and you have
done nothing all night but doze for five minutes at a time, and start
up suddenly from a terrific dream of a large church clock with the
small hand running round, with astonishing rapidity, to every figure on
the dial-plate. At last, completely exhausted, you fall gradually into
a refreshing sleep--your thoughts grow confused--the stage-coaches,
which have been ‘going off’ before your eyes all night, become less
and less distinct, until they go off altogether; one moment you are
driving with all the skill and smartness of an experienced whip--the
next you are exhibiting _à la_ Ducrow on the off leader; anon you are
closely muffled up, inside, and have just recognised in the person of
the guard an old school-fellow whose funeral, even in your dream, you
remember to have attended eighteen years ago. At last you fall into a
state of complete oblivion, from which you are aroused, as if into a
new state of existence, by a singular illusion. You are apprenticed
to a trunk-maker; how, or why, or when, or wherefore, you don’t take
the trouble to inquire; but there you are, pasting the lining in the
lid of a portmanteau. Confound that other apprentice in the back-shop,
how he is hammering!--rap, rap, rap--what an industrious fellow he
must be! you have heard him at work for half an hour past, and he has
been hammering incessantly the whole time. Rap, rap, rap, again--he’s
talking now--what’s that he said? Five o’clock! You make a violent
exertion, and start up in bed. The vision is at once dispelled; the
trunk-maker’s shop is your own bedroom, and the other apprentice your
shivering servant, who has been vainly endeavouring to wake you for the
last quarter of an hour, at the imminent risk of breaking either his
own knuckles or the panels of the door.
“You proceed to dress yourself with all possible despatch. The flaring
flat candle with the long snuff gives light enough to show that the
things you want are not where they ought to be, and you undergo a
trifling delay in consequence of having carefully packed up one of your
boots in your over-anxiety of the preceding night. You soon complete
your toilet, however, for you are not particular on such an occasion,
and you shaved yesterday evening; so, mounting your Petersham greatcoat
and green travelling shawl, and grasping your carpet bag in your right
hand, you walk lightly downstairs, lest you should awaken any of the
family, and after pausing in the common sitting-room for one moment,
just to have a cup of coffee (the said common sitting-room looking
remarkably comfortable, with everything out of its place, and strewed
with the crumbs of last night’s supper), you undo the chain and bolts
of the street-door, and find yourself fairly in the street.
“A thaw, by all that is miserable! The frost is completely broken up.
You look down the long perspective of Oxford Street, the gas-lights
mournfully reflected on the wet pavement, and can discern no speck in
the road to encourage the belief that there is a cab or a coach to be
had--the very coachmen have gone home in despair. The cold sleet is
drizzling down with that gentle regularity which betokens a duration
of four-and-twenty hours at least; the damp hangs upon the housetops
and lamp-posts, and clings to you like an invisible cloak. The water
is ‘coming in’ in every area, the pipes have burst, the water-butts
are running over; the kennels seem to be doing matches against time,
pump-handles descend of their own accord, horses in market-carts fall
down, and there’s no one to help them up again; policemen look as
if they had been carefully sprinkled with powdered glass; here and
there a milk-woman trudges slowly along, with a bit of list round
each foot to keep her from slipping; boys who ‘don’t sleep in the
house,’ and are not allowed much sleep out of it, can’t wake their
masters by thundering at the shop-door, and cry with the cold--the
compound of ice, snow, and water on the pavement is a couple of inches
thick--nobody ventures to walk fast to keep himself warm, and nobody
could succeed in keeping himself warm if he did.
“It strikes a quarter past five as you trudge down Waterloo Place on
your way to the “Golden Cross,” and you discover, for the first time,
that you were called about an hour too early. You have not time to go
back, there is no place open to go into, and you have, therefore, no
resource but to go forward, which you do, feeling remarkably satisfied
with yourself and everything about you. You arrive at the office, and
look wistfully up the yard for the Birmingham Highflier, which, for
aught you can see, may have flown away altogether, for no preparations
appear to be on foot for the departure of any vehicle in the shape of a
coach. You wander into the booking-office, which, with the gas-lights
and blazing fire, looks quite comfortable by contrast--that is to say,
if any place _can_ look comfortable at half-past five on a winter’s
morning. There stands the identical book-keeper in the same position
as if he had not moved since you saw him yesterday. As he informs you
that the coach is up the yard, and will be brought round in about a
quarter of an hour, you leave your bag and repair to ‘the Tap’--not
with any absurd idea of warming yourself, because you feel such a
result to be utterly hopeless, but for the purpose of procuring some
hot brandy-and-water, which you do--when the kettle boils! an event
which occurs exactly two minutes and a half before the time fixed for
the starting of the coach.
“The first stroke of six peals from St. Martin’s Church steeple just
as you take the first sip of the boiling liquid. You find yourself at
the booking-office in two seconds, and the tap-waiter finds himself
much comforted by your brandy-and-water in about the same period.
The coach is out; the horses are in, and the guard and two or three
porters are stowing the luggage away, and running up the steps of
the booking-office and down the steps of the booking-office, with
breathless rapidity. The place, which a few minutes ago was so still
and quiet, is now all bustle; the early vendors of the morning
papers have arrived, and you are assailed on all sides with shouts
of ‘_Times_, gen’l’m’n, _Times_,’ ‘Here’s _Chron--Chron--Chron_,’
‘_Herald_, ma’am,’ ‘Highly interesting murder, gen’l’m’n,’ ‘Curious
case o’ breach o’ promise, ladies.’ The inside passengers are already
in their dens, and the outsides, with the exception of yourself,
are pacing up and down the pavement to keep themselves warm; they
consist of two young men with very long hair, to which the sleet has
communicated the appearance of crystallised rats’ tails; one thin young
woman, cold and peevish, one old gentleman ditto ditto, and something
in a cloak and cap, intended to represent a military officer; every
member of the party with a large stiff shawl over his chin, looking
exactly as if he were playing a set of Pan’s pipes.
“‘Take off the cloths, Bob,’ says the coachman, who now appears for
the first time, in a rough blue greatcoat, of which the buttons behind
are so far apart that you can’t see them both at the same time. ‘Now,
gen’l’m’n!’ cries the guard, with the waybill in his hand. ‘Five
minutes behind time already!’ Up jump the passengers--the two young
men smoking like limekilns, and the old gentleman grumbling audibly.
The thin young woman is got upon the roof by dint of a great deal of
pulling and pushing, and helping and trouble; and she repays it by
expressing her solemn conviction that she will never be able to get
down again.
“‘All right!’ sings out the guard at last, jumping up as the coach
starts, and blowing his horn directly afterwards, in proof of the
soundness of his wind. ‘Let ’em go, Harry; give ’em their heads!’ cries
the coachman--and off we start as briskly as if the morning were ‘all
right,’ as well as the coach.”