The coaching and waggoning history of the road to Brighthelmstone (as it then was called) emerges dimly out of the formless ooze of tradition in 1681. In De Laune’s “Present State of Great Britain,” published in that year, in the course of a list of carriers, coaches, and stage-waggons in and out of London, we find Thomas Blewman, carrier, coming from “Bredhempstone” to the “Queen’s Head,” Southwark, on Wednesdays, and, setting forth again on Thursdays, reaching Shoreham the same day: which was remarkably good travelling for a carrier’s waggon in the seventeenth century. Here, then, we have the Father Adam, the great original, so far as records can tell us, of all the after charioteers of the Brighton Road. It is not until 1732, that, from the pages of “New Remarks on London,” published by the Company of Parish Clerks, we hear anything further. At that date a coach set out on Thursdays from the “Talbot,” in the Borough High Street, and a van on Tuesdays from the “Talbot” and the “George.” In the summer of 1745 the “Flying Machine” left the “Old Ship,” Brighthelmstone at 5.30 a.m., and reached Southwark in the evening.

But the first extended and authoritative notice is found in 1746, when the widow of the Lewes carrier advertised in The Lewes Journal of December 8th that she was continuing the business:

We may perceive by these early records that the real original way down to the Sussex coast was by the Croydon, Godstone, East Grinstead and Lewes route, and that its outlet must have been Newhaven, which, despite its name, is so very ancient a place, and was a port and harbour when Brighthelmstone was but a fisher-village.

STAGE WAGGON, 1808.
From a contemporary drawing.

That is the only glimpse we get of the widow Smith and her waggon; but the “George Inn, in the Borough,” that she “got into,” is still in the Borough High Street. It is a fine and flourishing remnant of an ancient galleried hostelry of the time of Chaucer, and it is characteristic of the continuity of English social, as well as political history that, although waggons and coaches no longer come to or set out from the “George,” its spacious yard is now a railway receiving-office for goods, where the railway vans, those descendants of the stage-waggon, thunderously come and go all day.

It will be observed that the traffic in those days went to and from Southwark, which was then the great business centre for the carriers. Not yet was the Brighton road measured from Westminster Bridge, for the adequate reason that there was no bridge at Westminster until 1749: only the ferry from the Horseferry Road to Lambeth.

Widow Smith’s waggon halted at Lewes, and it is not until ten years later than the date of her advertisement that we hear of the Brighthelmstone conveyance. The first was that announced by the pioneer, James Batchelor, in The Sussex Weekly Advertiser, May 12th, 1756:

The “Talbot” inn, which stood on the site of the ancient “Tabard,” of Chaucerian renown, disappeared from the Borough High Street in 1870. What its picturesque yard was like in 1815, with the waggons of the Sussex carriers, let the illustration tell.

Let us halt awhile, to admire the courage of those coaching and waggoning pioneers who, in the days before “the sea-side” had been invented, and few people travelled, dared the awful roads for what must then have been a precarious business. Sussex roads in especial had a most unenviable name for miriness, and wheeled traffic was so difficult that for many years after this period the farmers and others continued to take their womenkind about in the pillion fashion here caricatured by Henry Bunbury.

Horace Walpole, indeed, travelling in Sussex in 1749, visiting Arundel and Cowdray, acquired a too intimate acquaintance with their phenomenal depth of mud and ruts, inasmuch as he—finicking little gentleman—was compelled to alight precipitately from his overturned chaise, and to foot it like any common fellow. One quite pities his daintiness in the narration of his sorrows, picturesquely set forth by that accomplished letter-writer arrived home to the safe seclusion of Strawberry Hill. He writes to George Montagu, and dates August 26th, 1749:

“Mr. Chute and I returned from our expedition miraculously well, considering all our distresses. If you love good roads, conveniences, good inns, plenty of postilions and horses, be so kind as never to go into Sussex. We thought ourselves in the northest part of England; the whole county has a Saxon air, and the inhabitants are savage, as if King George the Second was the first monarch of the East Angles. Coaches grow there no more than balm and spices: we were forced to drop our post-chaise, that resembled nothing so much as harlequin’s calash, which was occasionally a chaise or a baker’s cart. We journeyed over alpine mountains” (Walpole, you will observe, was, equally with the evening journalist of these happy times, not unaccustomed to exaggerate) “drenched in clouds, and thought of harlequin again, when he was driving the chariot of the sun through the morning clouds, and was so glad to hear the aqua vitÆ man crying a dram.... I have set up my staff, and finished my pilgrimages for this year. Sussex is a great damper of curiosity.”

Thus he prattles on, delightfully describing the peculiarities of the several places he visited with this Mr. Chute, “whom,” says he, “I have created Strawberry King-at-Arms.” One wonders what that mute, inglorious Chute thought of it all; if he was as disgusted with Sussex sloughs and moist unpleasant “mountains” as his garrulous companion. Chute suffered in silence, for the sight of pen, ink, and paper did not induce in him a fury of composition; and so we shall never know what he endured.

Then the pedantic Doctor John Burton, who journeyed into Sussex in 1751, had no less unfortunate acquaintance with these miry ways than our dilettante of Strawberry Hill. To those who have small Latin and less Greek, this traveller’s tale must ever remain a sealed book; for it is in those languages that he records his views upon ways and means, and men and manners, in Sussex. As thus, for example:

“I fell immediately upon all that was most bad, upon a land desolate and muddy, whether inhabited by men or beasts a stranger could not easily distinguish, and upon roads which were, to explain concisely what is most abominable, Sussexian. No one would imagine them to be intended for the people and the public, but rather the byways of individuals, or, more truly, the tracks of cattle-drivers; for everywhere the usual footmarks of oxen appeared, and we too, who were on horseback, going along zigzag, almost like oxen at plough, advanced as if we were turning back, while we followed out all the twists of the roads.... My friend, I will set before you a kind of problem in the manner of Aristotle:—Why comes it that the oxen, the swine, the women, and all other animals(!) are so long-legged in Sussex? Can it be from the difficulty of pulling the feet out of so much mud by the strength of the ankle, so that the muscles become stretched, as it were, and the bones lengthened?”

A doleful tale. Presently he arrives at the conclusion that the peasantry “do not concern themselves with literature or philosophy, for they consider the pursuit of such things to be only idling,” which is not so very remarkable a trait, after all, in the character of an agricultural people.