“A dirty way leads you to Hockley, alias Hockley-in-the-Hole,” said Ogilby, in 1675; and it seems to have gradually become worse during the next few years, for Celia Fiennes, confiding her adventures to her diary, about 1695, tells of “seven mile over a sad road. Called Hockley in y^e Hole, as full of deep slows in y^e winter it must be Empasable.” It received, in fact, all the surface-water draining from Dunstable Downs to the south and Brickhills to the north. It is not, however, until he has left Hockliffe behind and started to climb out of it that, the amateur of roads discovers how deeply in a hole Hockliffe is, for it is approached from the Dunstable side by a level stretch that dims the memory of the downs, and makes all those old tales of sloughs appear like fantastic inventions. It is at this time perhaps the most perfectly preserved example of Telford’s road-making. Surface, cross-drains, ditches, and hedges are maintained in as good condition as when first made. And why so more than in other places? For this very reason; that it is in a hole, and if not properly drained, would again become as “empasable” as it was over two hundred years ago.

Hockliffe, originally a very small village, grew to great importance in coaching times, for here is the junction of the Holyhead and Manchester and Liverpool roads, both in those times of the greatest vogue and highest importance. An after-glow of those radiant glories of the road is seen in the long street. Hockliffe was in Pennant’s time, when coaching had grown enormously in importance, “a long range of houses, mostly inns.” It is so now, with the difference that the houses mostly have been inns, and are so no longer. In his day he observed “the English rage for novelty” to be “strongly tempted by one sagacious publican, who informs us, on his sign, of newspapers being to be seen at his house every day in the week.”

At which of the two principal inns, the “White Hart” or the “White Horse,” this enterprising publican carried on business he does not tell us. Perhaps it was the “White Horse”; now certainly one of the most interesting of inns, and then the chiefest in Hockliffe. Before its hospitable door the “Holyhead Mail,” the Shrewsbury “Greyhound,” the Manchester “Telegraph,” the Liverpool “Royal Umpire,” and many another drew up, together with some of the many “Tally-Hoes” that spread a fierce rivalry down the road. It was probably at Hockliffe and at the hospitable door of the “White Horse,” that the “Birmingham Tally-Ho” conveying Tom Brown to Rugby drew up at dawn “at the end of the fourth stage.” We need not look for exact coaching data in that story; else, among other things, we might cavil at the description of it as a “little” roadside inn.

A bright fire gleaming through the red curtains of the bar window gave promise of good refreshment, and so while the horses were changed, the guard took Tom in to give him “a drop of something to keep the cold out,” or rather to drive it out, for poor Tom’s feet were already so cold that they might have been in the next world, for all he could feel of them, and the guard had to pick him off the coach-top and set him in the road. “Early purl” set that right, and warmed the cockles of his heart.

There is no nonsense of the plate-glass and electric-bell kind about the “White Horse.” If the old coachmen were to come back, and the passengers they drove, they would find the old house much the same—the stables docked perhaps of some of their old extent and a trifle ruinous, and the house in these less palmy days crying out for some fresh paint and a few minor repairs; but still the same well-remembered place. Even the windows in the gables, blocked up over a century ago to escape Mr. Pitt’s window-tax, have not been re-opened. There are low-browed old rooms at the inn, with a cosy kitchen that is as much parlour; with undisguised oaken beams running overhead, rich in pendant hams that by due hanging have acquired artistic old-masterish tones, like mellow Morlands and rich Gainsboroughs. There is a capacious hearth, there are settles to sit easily in, and warming pans that have warmed many a bed for old-time travellers; and there are memories, too, for them that care to summon them. Will they come? Yes, I warrant you. They are memories chiefly of moving accidents by flood and fell, for Hockliffe has had more than its due share of coaching accidents. They happened chiefly on the hills a mile out, where Battlesden Park skirts the road, and where, although Telford did some embanking of the hollows and cutting of the crests, they remain formidable to this day. Battlesden became an ominous name in those days, and the “White Horse” and many another Hockliffe inn very like hospitals. The year 1835 was an especially disastrous one. In May, the “Hope” Halifax coach, on the way to London, was being driven down hill at a furious pace, when the horses became unmanageable, and the coach, overloaded with luggage piled up on the roof, after reeling in several directions, fell on the off side. All the passengers were injured more or less severely. The next happening was when the Shrewsbury “Greyhound,” coming towards London, was overturned at a point almost opposite Battlesden House. Again most of the passengers were seriously injured, and the coachman had a leg broken. Two of the horses suffered similar injuries. This accident was caused by the near-side wheeler kicking over the pole and thus upsetting the coach while it was running at high speed down hill. Of course, when the great Christmas snowstorm of 1836 blocked nearly all the roads in England, Hockliffe was a very special place for drifts, and the Birmingham, Manchester, Holyhead, Chester and Holyhead, and Halifax mails were all snowed up. An attempt made to drag the Chester mail out resulted in the fore-axle giving way and the coach being abandoned. The boys went forward on horseback. The Holyhead mail, with the Irish bags, was more fortunate. When the horses suddenly floundered up to their necks in the snow, the coachman dived off headlong, and was nearly suffocated; but with the aid of the guard and the passengers he was pulled out by the legs, and, a team of cart-horses being requisitioned, the coach itself dragged through. These are examples of the perils His Majesty’s Mails encountered in those times, and of the discomforts endured by the men who carried them for little wage.

The Post Office has never been generous to the rank and file of its staff. The secretarial staff, whose business it is to receive complaints and to scientifically fob off the public with tardy promises of enquiries never intended to be made, draw handsome salaries, but those who do the actual work have always been paid something less than they could obtain from other walks of life. The guards in Post Office employment received half a guinea a week salary in the old mail-coach days—as, in fact, a retaining fee—it being estimated by the Department that they could make a good thing of it by the “tips” they would be receiving from passengers. That they did make a good thing of it we know, but the principle was a shabby one for a Government Department to adopt, and really created a kind of indirect taxation. No traveller could refuse to “tip” the guard as well as the coachman, unless very hard-hearted or possessed of a moral courage quite beyond the ordinary.

Beyond his half-guinea a week, an annual suit of clothes, and a superannuation allowance of seven shillings a week, a mail guard had no official prospects. Occasionally some crusty passenger, whom the guard, being extra busy with his letters and parcels, had perhaps no time to humour, would refuse to tip, and would write to the Post Office to complain; whereupon the Secretary would indite some humbug of this kind:—

“Sir,—I have the honour of your letter of the ——, to which I beg leave to observe that neither coachman nor guard should claim anything of ‘vails’ as a right, having ten and sixpence per week each; but the custom too much prevails of giving generally a shilling each at the end of the ground, but as a courtesy, not a right; and it is the absolute order of the office that they shall not use a word beyond solicitation. This is particularly strong in respect of the guard—for, indeed, over the coachman we have not much power; but if he drives less than thirty miles, as your first did, they should think themselves well content with sixpence from each passenger.”

In those times sixpence might have been enough, but when, in later days, the coachman or the guard at the end of their respective journeys would come round with the significant remark, “I leaves you here, gentlemen!” he who offered sixpence would have been as daring as one who gave nothing at all. The sixpence would have been returned with a sarcastic courtesy, and a shilling not received with any remarks of gratitude. This custom was known as “kicking the passengers.”

Very occasionally, and under pressure, the Post Office doled out an extra half-guinea in seasons of extraordinary severity, when passengers were few and tips scarce, and on occasions when the mails were so heavy that the seats generally occupied by passengers were given up to the bags, the guards had an allowance made them. Their zeal under difficulties also received rare and grudging recognition, as when Thomas Sweatman, guard of the Chester mail in the early part of 1795, was awarded half a guinea for his labours at Hockliffe, where, in the middle of the night and up to his waist in water, he helped to put on new traces, travelling to town on his box with his wet clothes freezing to him.