HOW THE COACH PASSENGERS FARED: MANNERS AND CUSTOMS DOWN THE ROAD
There is no consensus of opinion to be found among travellers by coach
on the subject of the joys or sorrows of old-time travel. Everything
depended on the weather, the coach, the other passengers, and upon
the nature of the traveller himself. Sometimes a coach journey was a
misery; at others it was a joy to look back upon. Humourists of the
early and mid-eighteenth century found the subject of coach-travelling
very attractive, and returned again and again to the stock characters
of the braggart and domineering military man among the passengers, who
was really a coward, and the modest, unassuming young man who always
killed or dispersed the highwaymen while the captain, who by his own
account had fought at Ramilies with Marlborough, prostrated himself
on the floor and tried to crawl under the petticoats of the lady
passengers or cover himself with the straw that strewed the floor.
Those humourists could always get a laugh from such accounts, and sighs
of appreciation from the ladies, who all wished they numbered among
their acquaintance such proper young men as Roderick Random, who in
Smollett’s romance performs such prodigies of valour in the “Exeter
Fly” somewhere about the neighbourhood of Turnham Green.
“When I had taken my seat,” says Roderick, after an adventure of the
kind already hinted at, “Miss Snapper, who from the coach had seen
everything that had happened, made me a compliment on my behaviour;
and said she was glad to see me returned without having received any
injury; her mother, too, owned herself obliged to my resolution; and
the lawyer told me I was entitled by Act of Parliament to a reward of
forty pounds for having apprehended a highwayman. The soldier”--who
had behaved in the conventional style of poltroonery--“observed, with
a countenance in which impudence and shame, struggling, produced some
disorder, that if I had not been in such a d----d hurry to get out of
the coach, he would have secured the rogue effectually without all this
bustle and loss of time, by a scheme which my heat and precipitation
ruined. ‘For my part,’ continued he, ‘I am always extremely cool on
these occasions.’
“‘So it appeared by your trembling,’ said the young lady.
“‘Death and the deuce!’ cried he. ‘Your sex protects you, madam; if
any man on earth durst tell me so much, I’d send him to hell in an
instant.’
“So saying, he fixed his eyes upon me, and asked if I had seen him
tremble. I answered, without hesitation, ‘Yes.’
“‘Damme, sir,’ said he, ‘d’ye doubt my courage?’
“I replied, ‘Very much.’
“This declaration quite disconcerted him; he looked blank, and
pronounced in a faltering voice, ‘Oh! ’tis very well! I shall find a
time.’
“I signified my contempt for him by thrusting my tongue into my cheek,
which humbled him so much that he scarce swore another oath aloud
during the whole journey.”
These soldiers, or pretended soldiers--for it would not be fair to
those who warred under Marlborough to assume that such cowardly
ruffians were genuine military men--were found hectoring in every coach
in those picturesque times, threatening to run everyone through the
vitals, and rarely, it is to be feared, meeting with those modest and
self-possessed young demigods who wore all the lackadaisical airs of
an Apollo superimposed upon the brawn and biceps of a Hercules, and
with those biceps always at the service of the ladies at precisely the
psychological moment.
Ladies, strange to say, seem at a very early date to have travelled
unaccompanied by friends or relatives. The way was long, the
discomforts great, and so the politeness and attentions shown them
were proportionately increased. Thoresby, who in 1714 travelled to
London by the York stage with some ladies of sorts, speaks of the
well-established custom of paying for their refreshments on the road,
and mentions, between Grantham and Stamford, that they were “more
chargeable with wine and brandy than the former part of the journey,
wherein we had neither; but the next day we gave them leave to treat
themselves.” So the line was drawn somewhere.
Shergold, who in the coaching era was proprietor of the “Castle
Hotel,” Brighton, and had every reason to know what life on the road
was like, declared, in a very readable pamphlet he wrote, that “a
woman was a creature to be looked at, admired, courted, and beloved
in a stage-coach”; but let the rash modern traveller presume to look
admiringly at the lady occupant of a railway carriage, and it is not at
all unlikely that she will be horribly frightened, and take the next
opportunity of changing into another compartment.
An amusing tale, declared to be true, has been told of the
possibilities of a coach in the love-making sort. It was about 1780
that a young gentleman, anxious to win the good graces of a lady, and
lacking other opportunities, engaged all the remaining inside seats
of the coach between Glasgow and Edinburgh by which he knew she would
travel. He succeeded so well in his enterprise that the lady consented
on the journey to be his bride; but candour compels the admission that
the marriage thus romantically agreed upon turned out a particularly
unhappy one.
The final test of a gentleman in those days was his behaviour at a
stage-coach dinner. It was, if you consider it, a very severe and
unfair test, for it is allowed that politeness generally leaves
starving people at an early stage; and the appetites that coach
passengers brought with them into the dining-room of an inn were
usually very keen. An acquaintance of Constable, the painter, could
find no more striking climax to a list of his virtues than to declare
that he was “a gentleman at a stage-coach dinner.” “Then,” said his
companion, “he must have been a gentleman indeed!”
What, then, did it mean, this gentlemanly conduct? It meant, in short,
that one who could fairly lay claim to it must take some lady of the
party into his care, escort her from the coach into the inn, see to
it that she was provided with dinner, and pay her reckoning, he must
not first attempt to satisfy his own hunger, although perhaps he
was up at five o’clock in the morning, and had only taken a hurried
coach-breakfast at the first stage out.
The gentleman who fulfilled the canons of this time could rarely
hope to get any dinner for himself. On the later coaches, time was
so strictly kept that the coachmen were off to the minute; and the
landlords, who, of course, knew that, were generally suspected of
delaying the appearance of the food so long that not one of the party
could have time to do justice to it. Our gentleman, therefore, often
had the mortification of paying both for the lady’s dinner and for
his own, of which he had not tasted a mouthful. He returned to the
coach as hungry as he had left it, and kept his gentility as warm as
it was possible to do on an empty stomach. A very little of this was
sufficient to wear the nap off the politeness of a Chesterfield, and it
must not infrequently have happened that the person who had been all
courtliness at dinner became selfishness incarnate at tea.
Those who did not come up to the high standard that Constable
attained--and they were in the majority--hurried out of the coach
without the slightest consideration for any one else, and flinging
themselves into the inn, roared out for “dinner, d----d quick”;
or--older travellers and more wary--filled their spirit flasks at the
bar, and made sure of having a meal of sorts by demanding cold ham
or beef, or any of those dishes which the hostelries of that time
possessed in abundance.
Many writers have attempted to describe those coach-dinners, and one
endeavoured to vividly picture them by declaring that they reminded him
more of hounds feeding at a trough than human beings; but none have
equalled the anonymous account quoted here.
“First of all, you had, in winter, to be called before daylight; then
you had to proceed in a rattling hackney-coach (your teeth rattling
to match with the cold) to the office from which the ‘Wonder,’
‘Telegraph,’ ‘Regulator,’ ‘Highflyer,’ or ‘Independent’ started; then
you were hurried over your meals, as the following account will show:--
“‘Twenty minutes allowed here, gentlemen, for dinner,’ exclaims the
coachman, as we drive up to the ‘Bull’ at Smallborough.
“What a scene of confusion ensued! Bells rang, ostlers halloed, waiters
ran, or rather broke into that shambling shuffle whose secret seems
to be known only to those who ‘stand and wait’--at least, no other
creature practises it.
“‘Please to alight, ladies and gentlemen,’ exclaims the landlord,
addressing the four insides; while the ostler, bringing a somewhat
crazy ladder, makes a similar request to the eleven outsides.
“The day has been a miserable specimen: incessant rain, with a
biting easterly wind, giving an inappropriately jocose gentleman the
opportunity of offering facetious remarks upon ‘heavy wet,’ and ‘cold
without.’ You enter the best parlour of the inn, anticipating a warm
welcome and a share in those creature comforts looked forward to in
such circumstances by all. But here the legal axiom, that ‘possession
is nine points of the law,’ is realised to your horror and dismay in a
sight of the first-comers on an earlier coach occupying every seat near
the fire; while a tablecloth covered with fragments, and a disarray
of empty glasses tell a tale of another dinner having recently been
‘polished off.’
“‘Waiter, waiter!’ shriek half a dozen voices in as many keys, and in
accents ranging from the imperious to the imploring. Enters then a
slipshod, soiled being, with watery eyes and apologetic mien. ‘Here,
you, where’s the dinner?’ chorus the starving, half-drenched passengers.
“‘Dinner?’--scratching his head; ’er--well--er: beg pardon, gents, but
the “Independent” was rather late like to-day, and the “Highflyer,” she
were down early, and--er----’ Well, the gist of all these apologetics
was that the company had to wait while the next joint was being dished
up.
“Meanwhile the ‘Independents’ absorbing all the fire are bustled off by
a portly man in a low-crowned hat and a huge caped box-coat, or ‘upper
Benjamin,’ as it used to be called. ‘Gentlemen,’ he roars, ‘time’s up!’
With great to-do of cloaking, shawling, greatcoating, and paying, they
are outside, and we, in the twinkling of an eye, in their fireside
seats, listening to the curses levelled at the ostler by the outsides
for letting the seats get wet. With a precautionary ‘Sit tight,’ they
lurch violently off, and we are left anxiously awaiting the arrival of
that dinner.
“At last it comes: a procession of three--the landlady, parlourmaid,
and waiter--bearing dishes with tin covers. These battered relics
removed, a coarse fat leg of mutton, roasted to a cinder, is unveiled,
together with a huge joint of boiled beef, very much underdone;
potatoes, hot without and hard within, and some gritty cabbage.
“‘Slice of mutton for a lady,’ says the waiter, approaching a stout
gentleman in the act of helping himself to that part of the joint so
highly prized by epicures, called the ‘Pope’s eye.’ The direction of
the knife is instantly changed, and the lady’s plate filled with a
somewhat less desirable ration. ‘Please, sir, a little fat,’ continues
the assiduous waiter, ‘and a little gravy,’ he adds, anxious to earn a
tip from the old stager of the male sex, who thus invariably forwarded
his demands, as coming from a lady. Numerous other applications are
made to the carver, who, disgusted with his place, helps himself to his
coveted delicacy, and requests the waiter, with emphasis, to attend to
the other passengers himself.
“Time flies fast, and especially time devoted to pleasure, and none of
the party are aware how fast the glass has run, until the entrance of
the coachman, informing all concerned that the coach is ready.
“Up starts the stout gentleman. ‘Coachman, the time can’t be up; I’ve
not eaten a morsel.’
“‘Full twenty minutes, sir,’ replies that Jehu.
“‘Abominable,’ continues the first speaker.
“‘Who riseth from a feast with that keen appetite that he sits down?’
quotes a stage-struck attorney’s clerk.
“‘I have,’ mutters the Daniel Lambert of the party; ‘and if Shakespeare
wrote that--well, coach-dinners were not known in his time.’
“Now we do as we saw the ‘Independents’ do before us, and fee the
coachman, scramble for greatcoats, cloaks, shawls and umbrellas, in
addition to ringing for the waiters to bring that brandy-and-water
ordered ten minutes before, but not yet forthcoming.
“Half-crowns and shillings are tendered in payment to the waiter,
who of course has no change: what waiter ever had, when you were in
a hurry? It is a mere additional annoyance that the stage-struck
youth finds this an opportunity of quoting from _Pizarro_, ‘We want
no change, and, least of all, such change as you would give us,’
concluding with the lines of one of Haynes Bayley’s popular ballads:--
And were I in a foreign land,
You’d find no change in me.
“Now, at the ultimate moment, the waiter appears with a tray containing
‘one cold, without,’ ‘four hots, with,’ ‘two hots, sugar and no fruit,’
and ‘three with the chill off’--the ‘with’ and ‘without’ referring
to sugar, the ‘no fruit’ applying to lemon. Fortunate now are the
owners of cold beverages, for none but a fire-eater could swallow the
scalding potations that are now left as perquisites to the waiter.
Amid the babel of departure may be distinguished, ‘Please remember the
waiter, sir!’ ‘Didn’t take for your dinner, sir.’ ‘Glass of brandy,
ma’am.’ ‘A basin of soup and a pint of ale gone away without paying!’
‘Chambermaid, ma’am.’ ‘Ostler, sir! I got you some nice dry straw.’
“Away, away. ‘Now, gentlemen, sit fast. Let ’em go, Jem--I’ve got
’em!’ and off goes the ‘Highflyer.’”
Here is another such scene, observed with another pair of eyes, or
imagined by another brain:--
“‘Put the joints opposite the women,’ says the landlord to the waiter
taking in the dinner; ‘they’re slow carvers.’
“Meanwhile, passengers are busy, taking off coats, one, two and three
in succession (those were the days of _bonâ-fide_ ‘great-coats,’
nowadays become lessened, and merely overcoats). Chins appear out of
their many wrappages of silk, and fur caps are bundled into pockets.
Inside passengers eye outsiders with suspicion, while a deaf gentleman
who has left his trumpet in the coach meets an acquaintance whom he
has not seen for seven years, and in consequence of not having that
instrument with him can only shake hands and grimace in return to the
speaker’s greetings:
“‘You find it very warm inside, I should think, sir, don’t you?’ says
the acquaintance.
“‘Thank ye, my good friend; I am rather deaf, but I suppose you are
inquiring after my wife and daughters: they are quite well, thank you.’
“‘Where will you sit at dinner?’ rejoins the acquaintance.
“‘It is two years since I was there,’ replies he.
“‘No: where will you sit, sir? I said.’
“‘Oh! John: he is still in Jamaica with his regiment.’...
“‘Come, waiter, d--n it all, why was not the dinner on the table when
we arrived?’ demands a superfine inside passenger. ‘This is always the
way with your confounded coach-dinners. And what have you got under
there,--goose, eh?’
“‘No; pork, sir.’
“‘What is under that cover?’
“‘Pork too, sir.”
“‘Great heavens! pork again! the country is deluged with pork: who the
devil do you think can dine off pork?’
“‘A couple of ducks coming, sir,’ says the waiter.
“‘Confound your ducks! What with your pork and ducks, you’ll make the
whole inside of the coach reek with onions and vulgarity.’
“‘There’s a cold collation on the side-table, sir, if you prefer cold
meat.’
“‘Hang your cold collation! have you got any real Devonshire cider in
the house?’
“‘Yes, sir; some very excellent.’
“‘Then bring me a bottle, and a toothpick.’
“‘Now, look here, waiter,’ says one of the diners, ‘there are the
horses out already, and we have not half done yet: blow me if I go
before the half-hour’s up.’
“‘Take any cheese, sir?’ asks the waiter.
“‘No, to be sure, not yet; have you no tarts?’
“‘Why, none, I am afraid, that we can recommend, sir; but there’s some
very nice cold plum-pudding you can have.’
“Enter coachman: ‘I leaves you here, if you please, sir.’
“‘Just as you please; I have no objection,’ says a satirical passenger.
“‘Please to remember the coachman--driven you forty-five miles.’
“‘Yes, but you will recollect you were very impertinent about my wife’s
bandbox;--there’s a shilling, between us, for you.’
“‘Oh! sir, I’m sure I didn’t mean no unperliteness--I hopes you von’t
think nothink about it; it were wery aggravising that the box was
forgot, but I hopes you’ll give me a trifle more--forty-five miles.’
“‘No, no more--so be off.’...
“‘Please to remember the coachman, ma’am--forty-five miles. Leave
you here, sir, if you please--go no further, sir--forty-five miles,
ma’am.’...
“‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, the coach is quite ready: time’s up,’ says
the guard, entering the room....
“‘What’s dinner, waiter?’
“‘Two-and-three, and eighteenpence--one-and-eightpence--is
three-and-eleven, sir,’ says the cunning waiter, whose artful
arithmetic is decidedly not ‘according to Cocker.’ ‘Yours is
three-and-sixpence, ma’am--two glasses brandy and water. Yours is four
shillings, sir--a bottle of real Devonshire cider, sir.’...
“‘Now, sir, coach is ready--time up; can’t wait,’ roars out the guard.
‘Here, Joe, set the ladder for the lady’; and the passengers are
hurried into their places.”
Not so hurried was that gentleman who on one of these quick-change and
pantomime-rally occasions remained calmly drinking his tea while his
fellow-passengers were jostling each other in their anxiety to regain
their seats.
“You’ll miss the coach, sir!” shouted the landlord in his ear, under
the impression that he was deaf and had not heard the stampeding feet.
“I want a spoon to stir my tea,” said this last-remaining guest: “why
didn’t we have any?”
The landlord glanced hurriedly round--not one spoon of all those that
had been on the table remained. He rushed out to the coach to find who
among the passengers had stolen them; and by the time he had delayed
the coach and insulted everyone, the last passenger, having finished
his breakfast at leisure, came out with the information that they had
been found in the teapot, where, as will by now have been suspected, he
had himself placed them.
There is no generalising on the subject of coach-breakfasts or dinners.
Some inns were famous for good fare, others were notorious for bad
provisioning and worse service; and all were liable to change from
good to ill, or the reverse, according to how they changed hands from
time to time. Sidney Smith, who was under no illusions, and lived well
into the railway age, did not lament the days when he travelled post
from Combe Florey to London--“living for three days on veal-cutlets
and waiters”; but, on the other hand, travellers equally familiar with
the roads were heard lamenting the good and varied fare they had been
used to find, and sought in vain in later days. Lord William Lennox
wrote regretfully of the “plain and perfect” English dinners down the
road, generally consisting, he said, of mutton-broth, rich in meat and
herbs, fresh-water fish in every form, eels--stewed, fried, boiled,
baked, spitchcocked, and water-souché; salmon, the purest butter, green
gooseberries, the earliest cucumbers, saddle of Southdown mutton,
kept to a moment and done to a turn, mutton chops, hot and hot, Irish
stews, rump-steaks tender and juicy, chicken and ham, plum-pudding,
fruit-tarts, and trifle and gooseberry-fool.
Then the produce of the grape! No thin, washy claret, at 18s. a dozen,
no fiery port, one day in bottle, no sherry at 25s. the cask; but fine,
sound vintages, fit for any private cellar.
Other travellers tell less roseate tales. Often they had the sole
choice between ham and eggs, ill cooked, and nothing at all; or, if
the choice was there, the mutton was half-done and stringy, the chops
greasy and cold, and the rump-steaks tough and dry, with everything
else in accordance. If we like to take Thomas Hughes, in _Tom Brown_,
as an authority, however, the breakfasts were really noble meals; for
Tom, going to Rugby, is represented at a table spread with the whitest
of cloths, and rich in cold pigeon-pie, a Yorkshire ham, a round of
cold boiled beef, and a loaf of household bread. On these the guests
made a beginning, but the waiter entered “in an instant” (paragon of
waiters!) with kidneys, steak, rashers of bacon, poached eggs, and
buttered toast and muffins. Tom fell-to with a will, and put away
kidneys and pigeon-pie and coffee until his little skin was as tight as
a drum--little pig!
It is a coach-breakfast that is so well pictured by James Pollard in
the accompanying illustration. The company, with an indescribable air
of having been up all night, are just finishing their meal, and the
polite gentleman in the ample overcoat is trying to induce the two
ladies under his charge to take a little more. It is quite evident
that this has been a more leisured affair than usual, for the yawning
travellers by the fireplace have finished their meal long ago, and a
stout person is being shaved by a barber in knee-breeches, with legs
of a distinctly Lowther-Arcadian type, suggestive of bran and sawdust
instead of bone and muscle. The coachman, appearing hat in hand and
touching his forehead, has come to the end of his stage: he “goes no
further, gents,” and is here to claim his dues. Meanwhile, the guard
outside is lustily blowing his horn, and the empty coach is seen
waiting.
The scene, in fact, here pictured is the last halt on a long journey;
an opportunity seized by the passengers, not only for a meal, but
for a shave and a general brush-up preparatory to alighting at their
destination. Such scenes were the commonplace incidents to be observed
at Highgate, Barnet, Hounslow, and other stages near London in the
coaching age.
[Illustration: A COACH-BREAKFAST.
_After J. Pollard._
]
Here at least--for there are twelve passengers present--the insides
and the outsides have foregathered, and for once the gulf socially
dividing them has been bridged. This generally impassable gulf was more
marked in the case of the mails than in that of the stage-coaches. The
very superior and exclusive travellers who went in their own chariots
or by post-chaise resorted to well-known hotels and posting-houses on
the roads, whose chaste halls were never profaned by coaches. Even the
superior persons who travelled inside the mails could not hope to win
to those expensive and select abiding-places; but they formed a caste
by themselves, who never willingly sat at meat with the outsides. De
Quincey, who often travelled outside, experienced something of this
contempt, and the recollection seems to have lent eloquence to his
remarks on the subject. It was, he tells us, “The fixed assumption
of the four inside people that they, the illustrious quaternion,
constituted a porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would
have been compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three
miserable delf-ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might
have been held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation, so that
perhaps it would have required an Act of Parliament to restore its
purity of blood. What words, then, could express the horror and the
sense of treason in that case, which _had_ happened, where all three
outsides (the trinity of Pariahs) made a vain attempt to sit down at
the same breakfast-table or dinner-table with the consecrated four? I
myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that occasion a benevolent old
gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy associates by suggesting
that if the outsides were indicted for this criminal attempt at the
next assizes, the court would regard it as a case of lunacy or delirium
tremens rather than that of treason. England owes much of her grandeur
to the depth of the aristocratic element in her social composition when
pulling against her own strong democracy. I am not the man to laugh at
it. But sometimes, undoubtedly, it expressed itself in comic shapes.
The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the particular
attempt which I have noticed, was that the waiter, beckoning them away
from the privileged _salle-à-manger_, sang out, ‘This way, my good
men,’ and then enticed these good men away to the kitchen. But that
plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though rarely, cases occurred
where the intruders, being stronger than usual, or more vicious than
usual, resolutely refused to budge, and so far carried their point as
to have a separate table arranged for themselves in a corner of the
general room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found ample enough
to plant them out from the very eyes of the high table or dais, it
then became possible to assume as a fiction of law that the three
delf fellows after all were not present. They could be ignored by the
porcelain men, under the maxim that objects not appearing and not
existing are governed by the same logical construction.”
Humour had a splendid field in coaching, and the literature of the road
is gemmed with twice a hundred good stories and mirth-provoking scenes.
Few things seem to have been more productive of funny stories than the
undue tendency to fatness on the part of a passenger. There is, for
example, the tale of the stupid servant who, having to book two seats
inside a coach for his master, a man of prodigious bulk, to whom one
seat would be useless, returned from the booking-office with the news
that he had secured the only two places to be had--one inside and one
out.
This bears comparison with that other story of the stout man’s revenge.
He, too, was accustomed to book two seats. On one occasion this amiable
eccentricity of his was observed overnight by two waggish fellows who
thought they would play a trick on the fat man. They accordingly booked
seats also, and took care to be seated in them before the man of much
avoirdupois came. They sat facing one another, one back and the other
in front, so that he had indeed two seats, but not, as they necessarily
should have been, together. He asked them very politely to change their
positions, but they refused, although he explained that he had booked
two seats, and his reason for doing so. There the seats were, they said.
But the outraged man of flesh determined to be revenged, and,
looking round at the next stage where the coach stopped, spied a
chimney-sweep, he beckoned.
“Chimley, yer honour?” queried Chummy.
“No: come here. Have you any objection to a ride this morning? I’ll pay
you for a day’s work, and your fare back again.”
“All right, yer honour; I’ll just run home and clean myself.”
“No, no! come as you are, and when in the coach give yourself a good
shake every now and then, to make the soot fly.”
They got in, Chummy acting his part very well, and greatly to the
annoyance and discomfort of the wags, who, however, said nothing. But
when the coach stopped at the next change, and for breakfast, they
asked the man who had been their butt, and was now their tormentor,
how far he was going to take the sweep, as he was not a very desirable
companion.
He replied: “I took two seats so that, although corpulent, I should
annoy no one. You prevented me occupying them, therefore I filled
the remaining seat with Chummy, and he goes as far as the end of my
journey. But I will dismiss him if you will agree to what I propose.
When I engaged him, I agreed to pay him for his time, and to pay his
fare home, with all other expenses incurred. He is now at breakfast. If
you agree to pay him, he goes no farther; if not, he proceeds.”
Having listened to this ultimatum, and being completely discomfited,
they accepted these terms, and the sweep was dismissed.
Among the most laughable of old-time skits on coaching miseries is the
following breathless account, in the style of the immortal Jingle. Its
humour is somewhat broad, and indeed all coaching humour was of the
smoking-room rather than of the drawing-room order:--
“STAGE-COACH ADVENTURES.
“INSIDE.--Crammed full of passengers--three fat fusty old men--a
young mother and sick child--a cross old maid--a poll parrot--a
bag of red herrings--double-barrelled gun (which you are afraid
is loaded)--and a snarling lapdog, in addition to yourself. Awake
out of a sound nap with the cramp in one leg and the other in
a lady’s bandbox--pay the damage (four or five shillings) for
gallantry’s sake--getting out in the dark at the half-way house,
in the hurry stepping into the return coach and finding yourself
next morning at the very spot you had started from the evening
before--not a breath of air--asthmatic old woman and child with
the measles--window closed in consequence--unpleasant smell--shoes
filled with warm water--look up and find it’s the child--obliged to
bear it--no appeal--shut your eyes and scold the dog--pretend sleep
and pinch the child--mistake--pinch the dog and get bit--execrate
the child in return--black looks--no gentleman--pay the coachman
and drop a piece of gold in the straw--not to be found--fell
through a crevice--coachman says ‘He’ll find it’--can’t--get out
yourself--gone--picked up by the ostler--no time for blowing
up--coach off for next stage--lose your money--get in--lose your
seat--stuck in the middle--get laughed at--lose your temper--turn
sulky--and turned over in a horse pond.
“OUTSIDE.--Your eye cut out by the lash of a clumsy coachman’s
whip--hat blown off into a pond by a sudden gust of wind--seated
between two apprehended murderers and a noted sheep-stealer in
irons, who are being conveyed to gaol--a drunken fellow half-asleep
falls off the coach--and in attempting to save himself drags
you along with him into the mud--musical guard, and driver horn
mad--turned over--one leg under a bale of cotton, the other under
the coach--hands in breeches pockets--head in hamper of wine--lots
of broken bottles _versus_ broken heads--cut and run--send for
surgeon--wounds dressed, lotion and lint, four dollars--take
post-chaise--get home--lie down--and laid up.”
A “humorous” story is told of a coach coming into Dover at night, and
the coachman, “feather-edging” a corner, running into a lamp-post. It
was the period just after Waterloo. A little French count, who occupied
the box-seat, was thrown off, and, falling on his side, had three ribs
fractured. The coachman pulled up and asked a passing sailor to pick
up the unhappy passenger. The half-drunken tar, seeing a heap of limp
clothes on the pavement, said, “There’s no gemman here--on’y a lot of
coats.” At that moment the Count groaned, “Oh! by gar! I brake tree
rib.” “Damn your eyes!” roared the sailor, “you’re a Frenchman, are
you? Lie there and be damned,” and so went on his way.
I think the brutality of this tale is even more noticeable than
its humour, but it is distinctly redolent of the age when people
only laughed on seeing others placed in a painful or uncomfortable
position. When no one was hurt there was no humour, according to the
notions of that time--a time when to crush a man’s hat over his eyes
was exquisitely funny, and for half a dozen lusty Toms and Jerrys to
overturn a decrepit old watchman was a screaming farce. It is, by the
way, significant that that was the era when screaming farces held the
theatrical stage, and the rough-and-tumble of the harlequinade was
at its zenith. The practical joker was then prominent, and the more
“practical” (_i.e._ the more wantonly cruel and injurious) the joke
the more it was applauded. If the victim ever thought of resenting
a witticism of this kind, he was, in the cant of that period, “no
sportsman,” and behind that formula the blackguard jokers screened
themselves. If they had not very carefully, for their own protection,
erected that obligation to “take a thing in good part” which stayed
the heavy hand of revenge, it is quite likely that some of these
humourists would have been very severely mauled. The amazing thing is
that the victims agreed to that convention, and allowed themselves to
be harassed with impunity.
Practical joking affected every class. One of the old borough members
of Parliament--Francis Fane, who began his long Parliamentary career in
1790--was a practical joker of the most desolating kind. Travelling by
coach to London along the Exeter Road on one occasion, he saw, from his
seat inside, the coat-tails of one of the outside passengers--a barber,
of Dorchester--hanging down. This gave him the pleasing notion of
cutting open the pocket and extracting its contents, which happened to
be a bulky parcel of banknotes the unfortunate shaver had had given in
his charge. The extraordinary cruelty of the practical jokers who made
existence a burden to their victims a hundred years ago promised Fane
to gloat over the barber’s terror when he found the notes gone, and
only to restore them when his enjoyment could be carried no farther.
As some amends, he entertained his victim at the White Horse Cellar on
the eve of the barber’s return to Dorchester; but his practical joking
was not yet complete, for, taking excellent care that his victim should
be fully charged with liquor, he hustled him into the night coach for
quite another Dorchester--Dorchester, Oxfordshire--where he was duly
set down the following morning.
APPENDIX
Some detailed notice of the Palmer family will have interest here.
Mischance long ago destroyed many genealogical documents relating
to John Palmer’s ancestors, but family tradition still points to
the “John Palmere” who, in 1384, represented Bath in Parliament,
as a distinguished forbear. Of ancient and honourable origin, the
matrimonial alliances of the Palmers are found among the old county
families of Somerset and Wilts. The postal reformer’s mother was one
of the Longs, to this day seated in the latter county. She and her
husband, John Palmer the elder, lie at Weston, two miles from Bath, and
in the village church their memorial tablets may yet be seen.
A tradition tells how the reformer himself might have become a Long,
had he desired. His kinsman, Walter Long, who died unmarried at the
age of ninety-five, proposed to make him heir to extensive estates in
Wilts, on condition that he assumed the name; but, with the pardonable
arrogance of one who owned an ancient and honourable ancestry, Palmer
declined, and satisfied his pride even though he relinquished a
rent-roll.
He received his education at Colerne, Wilts, and at Marlborough Grammar
School. Of his three sons, John proceeded to Cambridge and took holy
orders; Charles and Edmund, educated at Eton, went respectively
into the Army and Navy. It is curious to note how strong has been
the military tradition in the family. Charles became Colonel of
the 10th (Prince of Wales’s) Hussars, following upon the scandal
which discredited the former Colonel of that regiment, many of whose
officers, charged with cowardice before the enemy in the Peninsula,
were transferred to other regiments, and became known as the “Elegant
Extracts.” Their places were filled by officers from other sources, and
the 10th Hussars thereupon acquired the title of “Prince’s Mixture.”
Colonel Palmer subsequently rose to the rank of general officer.
Edmund was that distinguished captain in the Navy who, when in command
of H.M.S. _Hebrus_ in 1814, captured the French frigate, _L’Etoile_,
the last of the enemy’s ships to be taken at the end of the long war.
His son, Colonel Edmund Palmer, R.A., has himself carried on the
tradition, and given sons of his own to the service of his country.
His son Edmund fell to the bullet of an Afghan hillman, after he had
captured a tower in one of the passes of that distant country whose
sun-baked rocks have been stained with the blood of many a gallant
Englishman. John Jervis Palmer, his brother, captain in the Egyptian
Army, died of pneumonia at the frontier post of Wady Halfa, looking out
across the parching sands of the Soudan.
_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced
quotation marks retained. Typographical errors in posters have been
transcribed as-is.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained; occurrences of
inconsistent hyphenation have not been changed.
Superscripted letters, including the abbreviations for shilling and
pence, are shown here as normal letters, preceded by a circumflex: ^s.
Some of them were printed in italics, but for readability, that is
not shown here.
Volume II is available at Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org)
as eBook number 58668 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/58668). It
contains an Index to both volumes.