THE COACHMEN

We cannot well leave the subject of coaching without some fleeting reminiscences of the coachmen and guards who worked up and down the road. Not all of them have earned a measure of fame. They formed, indeed, a very considerable body of men, and there were some generations of them; beginning with the poor old red-nosed and many-caped Tobys who, wrapped up in many wrappings and swathed about the feet and legs with hay-and-straw bands, sat on the box like partly animated mummies; and ending with coachmen who were in many attributes considered gentlemen. A love of strong spirits was common to the earlier and later generations, but those of the earlier were merely “drivers,” if you please, and the later were “coachmen.” The old Tobys drove chiefly through the night, and in times when speed did not exist and skill was not essential: the rather flashy “swell” coachmen of a later era cut a dash in the daytime, with a cigar between their teeth, and had extraordinary skill with the reins. These were the two chief classes, subdivided again and again by individual peculiarities; and then there were the guards.

Coaching experts were never tired of sounding the praises or noting the peculiarities of the fine coachmen on this road. Bob Snow, of the “Telegraph,” was, according to “Nimrod,” who took his position as a coaching critic very seriously indeed, “all right—a pink in his way, and as well dressed for the road as a gentleman ought to be for Almack’s.” Great, too, was his admiration for Harry Douglas, another coachman on the “Telegraph.” He was “about the size of two ordinary men.” Not only could he gallop a coach without it swinging, but he could drink as much as would scald a porker. As Dibdin sang of Tom Bowling, “his virtues were so rare.” He was, moreover, “a great favourite with the Manchester gentlemen, and an artist of the first order. His right arm”—for taking it out of the horses in tender places with the whip—“was terrible. Jovial, singing many excellent songs,” he appears to have been a prominent figure.

But Joe Wall was the unapproachable, the unsurpassed, at whose magnificence the road gaped with astonishment. In the height of his fame he drove the “Telegraph” the thirty-seven miles between London and Hockliffe. He was “a tremendous swell,” keeping one or two hunters at that place, and thus occupying the hours he passed there, waiting to take his seat on the up coach. On one occasion he had a fall in the hunting field, preventing him taking the “Telegraph” up to town that night. Fortunately an able and experienced amateur hand was on the coach, and took his place. None other less accomplished could have been trusted with so fast a coach, going at night through the crowded approach to town.

Meecher, on the other hand, although a competent whip on the “Telegraph,” was a satirical and gloomy person: a kind of masculine Gummidge. He was a reduced gentleman, and as such found the world out of joint. In revenge, he “took it out of” the commercials travelling on the coach, and lost much by refusing to allow any one who was not also a gentleman to treat him. Exactly how he arrived at his estimate of gentility or the want of it does not appear.

His humour was certainly of the sardonic kind, as appears by a story told of him. “Pity those women have nothing to do,” exclaimed a passenger on the box-seat, eyeing a gossiping group in the road.

“I’ll give them something,” said the saturnine Meecher; and, pulling up to them, he asked in his gloomiest tones if any of them missed any of their children; “for,” said he, “I’ve just run over and killed one, down the road.” They all flew off, agonised, and Meecher grinned.

He came at last, in the general ruin of coaching, to drive a one-horse railway omnibus; but he never ceased to consider himself a gentleman.

Another whip on the same coach, Samuel Inns, who—if names go for anything—should certainly have become an innkeeper, became, instead, a farmer, and grew prosperous; and yet another, Tom Davies, was discovered, years afterwards, as a rural postman.

William Jervis, of the “Defiance,” was almost as “gentlemanly” as Meecher, and a good deal more impudent, He would hold forth to the box-seat passenger unfortunate enough to travel by his coach upon the happy days when he had been in service with the Marquis of Exeter—although, to be sure, he had been nothing more than a stable-boy at Burghley House—and would affect to deplore those days, “when he associated with gentlemen.” “And now, sir,” he would bitterly remark, “I’ve got to drive d—d cotton-spinners and calico-printers.” It mattered not at all that it was probably a calico-printer or a cotton-manufacturer who was sitting by him at that moment. Indeed, there was that in his nature which led him to seize the opportunity to hurt the feelings of worthy Manchester men. It naturally followed that the tips he received suffered in number and in value from this extraordinary bias towards quarrelling with his inoffensive passengers: and the balance was not redressed by the rare occasions on which he found a peer or a landed proprietor by his side.

How the coachmen found themselves so constantly and so plentifully in choice cigars of the most expensive kind must remain mysterious. Jervis—who, by the way, refused to be known as “Bill” and was always addressed as “Mr. William Jervis”—smoked the best Havanas as a rule, and could not endure inferior brands. One memorable day, a passenger beside him was puffing happily away at a cheap and nasty smoke—a real Flor de Cabbage—when Jervis turned upon him, and, without further ado, snatched it from his mouth and threw it away.

“Can’t stand a bad cigar,” said Jervis, in not very adequate explanation: “take one of mine.”

The end of this bold and haughty fellow was sad. When railways superseded coaching, he hanged himself behind a stable-door of the “Swan with Two Necks.”

The guards were, to a man, of more consideration and urbanity. Their cue was a general heartiness to every one, from an ostler to a county magnate; but there was much scope for development in the character of a guard, for he came into intimate personal relations with the passengers in general, while the coachman had but one companion—the passenger beside him on the box-seat. Guards were entrusted, not only with parcels of all kinds, but with buying-commissions in town for rural customers; and acted frequently, as was sufficiently well known to the more shady characters of the countryside, as interested intermediaries between poachers and those poulterers in London who did not mind dealing in poached game.

Comparatively little has come down to us, save in general terms, of the guards who manned the coaches on this road; but Venables, one of those upon the “Manchester Telegraph,” stands out prominently. He was not, like so many of his brethren, a performer upon the key-bugle, but possessed a beautiful tenor voice which he lifted up in sentimental song along the roads on sunny days, greatly to the delight of passengers, and to his own profit. He had at least one dramatic experience, in being very nearly chloroformed and flung off the coach by three confederated thieves, who had by some means learned of an extremely valuable case of jewels that had been entrusted to him, which he had, for greater safety, deposited in a locked box under his seat. With the exception of the box-seat passenger, these enterprising would-be jewel thieves formed the only passengers on the roof, and they had reckoned on stifling the guard and heaving him over the side, in the darkness between Ashbourne and Leek, trusting to the noise made by the coach to drown the sound of any scuffle. What they would then have done, after securing the jewels, is only to be guessed at, for the behaviour of the conspirators had early attracted Venables’ suspicions, and no sooner had one whipped out his chloroform-pad than he felt himself struck full in the face with stunning force. The coachman’s attention was aroused, and the coach was on the point of being stopped when the three jumped off the roof and disappeared in the night.

Venables in later years became a guard on the London and Birmingham Railway.

Skaife, himself a man of some musical abilities, and a good performer on the bass-viol, became landlord of the “Graham Arms,” Longtown. Jim Byrns, guard on the Glasgow mail between Preston and Carlisle, was in the next era station-master at Preston, and saw the trains go by on their way to Shap, whose bleak uplands he had travelled thousands of times. Standing up for miles together, and blowing his horn continually to prevent a collision on foggy nights; or wading through the drifts of a snowstorm and saddling one of the leaders to ride off to a farmhouse and rouse the farm-labourers to come and help with their shovels to dig out His Majesty’s mails, he had earned all he received, and a bit over. “Jim,” says one who knew him, “was the right man in the right place, a rare hand at the head of a fatigue-party with shovels, and a perfect master of the carpenter’s tools in case of a break-down.”