The greatest figure in the coaching world up north was Teather, who was principal contractor for mails and stage-coaches in all that lengthy territory of 166 miles between Lancaster and Glasgow. The careers of the Teathers reflect the fortunes of the road. John Teather, the father, was originally landlord of the “Royal Oak,” Keswick, which does not stand on the main route to the north; but he left the comparative obscurity of that Lakeland town for the bustling activities of Carlisle, and from that strategic coaching position worked the coaches sixty-five miles south to Lancaster, and 101 miles north, to Glasgow.

Eight mails entered and left Carlisle daily, and seven stage-coaches; and eighty horses were kept for the proper working of them. Teather and his son managed this important business: the younger succeeding to it in 1837 and, in the general wreck brought about by railway extension, living to end where his father had begun, as landlord of the “Royal Oak” at Keswick.

With the coming of the nineteenth century, some steps were taken to make Carlisle a port. It was thought that a ship-canal from a place called Fisher’s Cross on the Solway, to Carlisle, a distance of twelve miles, would make the ancient city a place of commercial importance; and accordingly the canal was cut, 1819-23, at a cost of £90,000, and Fisher’s Cross was dignified by the new name of “Port Carlisle.” The enterprise never paid its way, any steps that might in after years have been taken to improve the position being rendered impossible by the coming of railways; while the irony of fate long ago overtook the canal, in its conversion into a railway.

It was in December 1846 that the first railway ran into Carlisle from the south. This was the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, long since absorbed into the London and North-Western. In September 1847 the Caledonian Railway, from Carlisle to Moffat, carried on the new methods another stage, and in the following February it was further extended to Glasgow and Edinburgh. It was necessarily the death-blow of the coaches along the main route. My old friend, Mr. W. H. Duignan, of Walsall, who remembers that time, travelled from Carlisle to Glasgow by the last mail-coach. He went to the “Bush” hotel and booked a seat for the occasion.

The bookkeeper remarked, when he gave his name, “I think I have often booked you before, sir, have I not?”

“Yes,” the traveller replied.

“Then, sir,” rejoined the clerk, refusing the money, “Mr.——”—mentioning the name of the hotel-keeper—“will feel it a pleasure if you will accept a seat, and order anything you please, at his expense.”

My friend declared that was the most gentlemanly-dying mail he ever knew.

The “Bush” has since been rebuilt, but at Corby Castle, some two miles away, in what was once the “Haunted Room,” there hangs in a frame an interesting pane of glass from one of its windows, inscribed by no less notable a traveller than Hume, the historian, with the satirical verse, reflecting upon the “Bush,” the Cathedral, and Carlisle in general:

Sir Walter Scott saw this in 1825, and humorously remarked in a letter to his friend Morritt upon “Hume’s poetical works.”

The reason that made Carlisle in early days the key of military dispositions, and in later times so important a coaching centre, acted even more powerfully in making it the busy centre of many railway systems that it is to-day. Carlisle has ever stood squarely in the way of those who would pass on the west between England and Scotland. To-day, the rival railways all run into one joint station: and there the London and North-Western, the Midland, and their respective allies, the Caledonian, the North British, and the Glasgow and South-Western, after many a Parliamentary battle in the past, compose their differences.

The chief coaching-business was ruined thus early, but the branch coaches yet remained, and the last coach—that to Edinburgh by Hawick—did not leave Carlisle on its final journey until August 31st, 1862. Coaching history, however, is as little illustrated in Carlisle by visible remains as the ancient story of the place, for while the “Bush” has been rebuilt, the rival inn, the “Crown and Mitre,” in Castle Street, has declined to the state of a coffee-tavern, and the “Blue Bell,” in Scotch Street, has obviously seen its best days.

If you seek frowning gateways, embattled walls, and the like, sufficient to clothe the stirring story of Carlisle, you will be freezing in the cold shade of disappointment, for the streets of Carlisle are wide, many of the houses are modern, and railways are very much to the fore. The Cathedral is obscurely placed, and almost the only picturesque nook is the alley called St. Alban’s Row. Even the old upping-blocks that used to stand so plentifully by the kerbstones for the convenience of horsemen, and were a feature of Carlisle, have disappeared. Only the odd names of the streets and alleys occasionally remain: among them Rickergate, Whippery, and Durham Ox Lane.

Carlisle of to-day has a commercial reputation. It makes hats and whips, and textile fabrics, to say nothing of dye-works, where the citizens of Carlisle are prepared (at a price) to dye for their country. The manufacture of gingham, too, the secret of it stolen long ago from Guingamp, its native place, in Brittany, occupies a good deal of attention, and the production of biscuits and cardboard-boxes makes up the tale of the city’s activities. But Carlisle, for all these developments, looks a poor place, and by no means a merry. All the fun ceased when raiding and murdering went out of date, and the only merry-making nowadays to be seen and heard is not indigenous. It is to be found at the great Carlisle Joint Station, at unseasonable hours, and is provided, free, gratis, all for nothing, by travelling theatrical companies bound for Scotland. For two generations past, the low comedians of the companies have whiled away the weary waiting sometimes to be done on Carlisle platforms, and astonished the tired porters by dancing Scotch reels and sword-dances, accompanied by fiendish yelps, or have expressed a desire to have a “willie waucht,” to “dee for Annie Laurie,” to be “fou the noo,” or anything else supposedly Scottish. It is one of the most cherished conventions of the theatrical profession on tour.

This great joint railway station—the Citadel Station, as it is called—is neighboured by two enormous mediÆval-looking drum towers of red sandstone, restorations of two of the same character built in the sixteenth century. They look none the less gloomy because they serve merely the purpose of Assize Courts, instead of fortifications. You must needs pass between them on entering Carlisle from the London road, and they are among the first things to dispel any idea the stranger may have brought with him that Carlisle is really “merry.”

There is that about the modern appearance of Carlisle which irresistibly reminds one of a ragged urchin clothed in some full-grown man’s trousers. Many things are too large for its circumstances. Two prominent things among the many that suggest this comparison are the unnecessary electric tramways and the noble Eden Bridge, carrying the road across the river to Stanwix. The bridge, built a hundred years ago, is monumental, and even the lamp-standards, designed for it at the same time, are fine. But the over-head trolley-wires are an offence to the spirit of the thing, and the city of Carlisle cares so little for it that ugly electric light standards are placed at intervals, and the fine old iron lamps that might so easily and handsomely have been adapted, now serve no useful purpose.