CHAPTER XII
END OF THE COACHING AGE
“This is the patent age of inventions.”--_Byron._
In 1789, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, of Shrewsbury, in writing his poem, the _Loves of the Plants_, penned a most remarkably accurate prophecy, comparable with Mother Shipton’s earlier “carriages without horses shall go.” He wrote:--
Soon shall thy arm, unconquered steam, afar Drag the slow barge, or urge the rapid car; Or on wide waving wings expanded bear The flying chariot through the realms of air. Fair crews, triumphant, smiling from above, Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move; Or warrior bands alarm the gaping crowd, And armies shrink beneath the rushing cloud.
The first part of this prophecy was fulfilled in the period between 1823 and 1833, when steam-carriages--the motor-cars of that age--had a brief popularity.
Before railways successfully assailed the coaches, horsed vehicles had faced the inventions of a number of ingenious persons who wrestled with that problem of steam traction on common roads which had attracted Murdock in 1781. Trevithick took it up in 1800, and others followed; but it was not until 1823 that the subject began greatly to interest engineers. At that period, however, Hancock, Ogle, Church, Gurney, Summers, Squire, Maceroni, Hills and Scott-Russell plunged into that troubled sea of invention. Chief among these, from the standpoint of results achieved, were Mr. (afterwards Sir) Goldsworthy Gurney, Walter Hancock, and Colonel Maceroni. Gurney as early as 1827 had patented and tried a steam-carriage on the road. The boiler, it was explained for the benefit of nervous people, was perfectly safe. Even if it were to burst, being “constructed on philosophical principles,” no one could be hurt. On July 28th, 1829, he ran one of his inventions on the Bath Road. This was what he termed a “steam-tractor,” used as an engine to draw an ordinary barouche. Unfortunately for Gurney, he and his party reached Melksham on the annual fair-day, and a hostile crowd of rustics not only surrounded the steam-carriage, shouting “Down with machinery!” but stoned the engine, the carriage, and Gurney and his friends, with such effect that the machinery was disabled and several of the party very seriously injured.
But he evidently travelled the kingdom pretty extensively with his machines, for he agreed with one Mr. Hanning to grant him the right of working them on a royalty on the West of England roads, and entered into similar arrangements on the routes between London, Manchester, and Liverpool, London and Brighton, London and Southampton, and London, Birmingham, and Holyhead. Their price was agreed upon--to be hired at 6d. a mile, or to be sold by Gurney at £1000 each. During four months at the beginning of 1831, Sir Charles Dance, who had bought some of the carriages, established a steam service on the road between Cheltenham and Gloucester. Three double journeys a day were made, 396 regular trips in all, covering 3644 miles, and conveying 2666 passengers, who paid £202 4s. 6d. in fares. The enterprise was just beginning to show a profit when the local Trusts secured an Act under which they raised the tolls against steam-carriages to a prohibitive height, and even went so far as to obstruct the roads with loose gravel and stones, with the result that the axle of one machine was broken.
In June 1831 the “philosophical” boiler of one of Gurney’s steam-carriages, warranted not to burst disastrously, exploded at Glasgow, and seriously injured two boys. Tom Hood wrote:--
Instead of _journeys_, people now May go upon a _Gurney_, With steam to do the horses’ work By power of attorney;
Tho’ with a load it may explode, And you may all be undone; And find you’re going up to Heaven, Instead of up to London.
Yet a Select Committee of the House of Commons, which had been appointed to consider the question of steam-carriages, reported, four months later, that such carriages could be propelled at an average rate of ten miles an hour; that they would become a cheaper and speedier mode of conveyance than carriages drawn by horses, and that they were perfectly safe (!).
Between 1832 and 1838 there were no fewer than seven important Steam-Carriage Companies in existence, and probably, had it not been for the hostility of Turnpike Trusts all over the country, the roads would have been peopled with mechanically-propelled vehicles. But tolls were raised to such a height against the new-fangled inventions that it became commercially impossible to run them. Between Liverpool and Prescot the 4s. toll for a coach became £2 8s. for a steam-carriage; between Ashburton and Totnes the 3s. impost became £2.
Evidently, from a coloured print published in 1833, Goldsworthy Gurney projected a London and Bath service, but the turnpike authorities crushed that also. An inscription under the original print obligingly tells us all about this type of Gurney’s carriages:--
“The Guide or Engineer is seated in front, having a lever rod from the two guide-wheels, to turn and direct the Carriage, and another at his right hand, connecting with the main Steam Pipe, by which he regulates the motion of the Vehicle--the hind part of the Coach contains the machinery for producing the Steam, on a novel and secure principle, which is conveyed by Pipes to the Cylinders beneath, and by its action on the hind wheels sets the Carriage in motion. The Tank, which contains about 60 Gallons of water, is placed under the body of the Coach, and is its full length and breadth. The Chimneys are fixed on the top of the hind boot, and, as Coke is used for fuel, there will be no smoke, while any hot or rarified air produced will be dispelled by the action of the Vehicle. At different stations on a journey, the Coach receives fresh supplies of fuel and water. The full length of the Carriage is from 15 to 20 feet, and its weight about 2 tons. The rate of travelling is intended to be from 8 to 10 miles per hour. The present Steam Carriage carries 6 inside and 12 outside Passengers. The front Boot contains the Luggage. It has been constructed by Mr. Goldsworthy Gurney, the Inventor and Patentee.”
Gurney was held, by a Parliamentary Committee, to be “foremost for practical utility”; but that statement was owing, there is little doubt, to the influence of his many friends in Parliament. Hancock’s steam-carriages were at least as efficient--but then he had no such influential supporters. Gurney claimed to have lost £36,000 directly in his experiments, and a much larger sum indirectly, through the excessive tolls imposed, and brought his grievances before Parliament. A Committee recommended a grant of £16,000 to him, as the first to successfully apply steam-carriages to use on public roads.
[Illustration: GOLDSWORTHY GURNEY’S LONDON AND BATH STEAM-CARRIAGE, 1833.
_After G. Morton._ ]
In 1824 Walter Hancock was experimenting on similar lines, but it was not until 1828 that a proposal was made to run a service of steam-carriages between London and Brighton, and not until November 1832 that his “Infant” actually made the attempt. It had already, at the beginning of 1831, plied for public service as an omnibus between Stratford and London, and now was to essay those 52 miles between London and the sea.
It performed the double journey, but, owing to lack of fuel on the way, not in anything like record time, although it is said in places to have attained a speed of 13 miles an hour.
In 1833 Hancock started a steam omnibus between Paddington and the City, and by 1836 had three. Between them, they conveyed no fewer than 12,761 passengers. They were named the “Era,” “Autopsy,” and “Automaton.” Why the middle one should have been named in a manner so suggestive of accidents and post-mortem examinations is not clear. But indeed, the names of old-time and modern motor-cars and their inventors, strange to say, generally have been, and are now, sometimes singularly unfortunate. Thus, in 1824, a Scotch inventor of Leith produced a steam-carriage. His name was Burstall! Among recent motor-cars are the “Mors” and the “Hurtu.”
In October 1833 Hancock ran the “Autopsy” to Brighton in 8½ hours (including three hours in stops on the way), and later had successful trips to Marlborough and back and Birmingham and back. These performances were considered so promising that a “London and Birmingham Steam-Coach Company” was formed, and more steam-coaches ordered to be built. Fares between London and Birmingham were not to exceed £1 each, inside, and 10s. out. Hancock, a thorough believer in his invention and its capacity for solving the road-problems of the time, offered to carry the mails at 20 miles an hour; but the Post Office declined. Railways had, in fact, just succeeded in attracting attention, and were so strongly supported by capitalists that steam-carriages suffered neglect, and their inventors were utterly discouraged. Bright hopes and prospects gradually faded away, and by 1838 the railways held the field, undisputed.
Railways themselves were at first ridiculed, and suffered from the necessity of obtaining Parliamentary sanction at a period when the landowning interests and public opinion were decidedly hostile. Even when their construction was authorised, every one ridiculed the railways, and called those people fools who had invested their money in them. To be a railway shareholder was at that time, to the majority of people, proof positive of insanity, while engineers and directors were regarded as curious compounds of fools and rogues. Any time between 1833 and 1837, the coachmen on the Great North Road would point out to their box-seat passengers the works of the London and Birmingham in progress beside that highway, and distinctly visible all the way between Potter’s Bar and Hatfield and at various other points. “Going to run us off the road, _they say_” a coachman would remark, jerking his elbow and nodding his head towards the place where hundreds of navvies were delving in a cutting or tipping an embankment. Then, squirting a stream of saliva from between his front teeth, in the practised manner assiduously cultivated by admiring amateurs, he would lapse into a contemplative silence, quite undisturbed by any suspicion that the railway really would run the coaches off. The passengers by coach were nearly all of the same mind. Some thought the railways would be useful in carrying goods, but declined to believe that they or any one else would ever travel by them; and a large proportion of the railway directors and proprietors shared the same opinion, being quite convinced that railways would convey heavy articles and general merchandise, and that coaches would continue to run as of old. Lovers of the road, coachmen and passengers alike, called the engines “tea-kettles,” protested that coaching had nothing to fear, and wished their heads might never ache until railroads came into fashion. They declared they would never--no, _never_--go by the railroad; but at length, when some urgent occasion arose, demanding speed, they trusted their precious persons in a railway train, and, to their surprise, found it “not so bad after all.” The next occasion, such a person going to town would shrink as he encountered the “Swallow” coach, by which he had always travelled, and would feel guilty as he shook his head to the coachman’s “Coming by me this morning, sir?” Why? Because he had made up his mind to go by train, and so save something in time and pocket. This time our traveller rather liked it; and thus the “Swallow,” and many another coach not already withdrawn, was doomed.
Let us follow the career of such a coach, to its last days.
Deprived of its best passengers, the exchequer of our typical “Swallow” began to decline. The stalwarts, whose love for the road was superior to economy of time and money, were faithful, but they were not numerous enough, and did not travel sufficiently often, for the old style of that fast post-coach to be maintained, so it was reduced from four horses to three. In coaching parlance, it ran “pickaxe,” or “unicorn.” No connoisseur in coaching matters would condescend to travel as a regular thing by a three-horse coach, and so those supporters were alienated, and, against their will, driven to the railway; and the “Swallow,” badly winged, carried only frightened old women who looked upon steam-engines as wild beasts. As they died away, no one took their places, and the old concern became a pair-horse coach. The coachman had seen the change coming, and declared he would never be brought so low as to drive two horses. He had said the same thing when it was proposed to have three. “Drive unicorn!” he had said: “never!” But he did, and he drove pair-horse as well, when the time came. It was better to do so than to lose his place and face starvation.
By this time the iron had entered the soul of our poor old friend, and had rusted there. He who had been so smart and gay, with song and joke and always good-humoured, suffered, like the coach, a strange and pitiful metamorphosis. The stringency of the times had thinned the establishment, and in the absence of ostlers and stablemen he put in the horses himself, badly groomed, and the harness dirty. No one washed or cleaned the coach, and it ran with the mud and dirt of many journeys encrusted on its sides. His coat grew seedy, his gloves soiled. Instead of the silver-mounted whip he had wielded for years, he used one of common make. The old one, he said, had gone to be repaired, but somehow or another the job was never completed. At any rate, no one ever saw the old whip again. At the same time his smart white hat disappeared and was replaced by a black one: observant people, however, perceived that it was the identical hat, disguised by process of dyeing. He could sink no deeper, you think. But he could, and did. Even the short journey to which the old “Swallow” had in course of time been reduced by railway extensions came at last to an end; and then he drove the “Railway Bus” to and from the station, with one horse. His temper, once so high-mettled, had by now grown uncertain. He was like an April day--stormy, dull, gloomy, and with fitful gleams of sunshine, all in turn. No one knew quite how to take him, and every one at last left him very much to himself. He was never a favourite with the “commercial gentlemen,” who were now his most frequent passengers, for he had always in the old days looked down upon any one under the rank of a county gentleman, and could by no means rid himself of that ancient attitude of mind. Indeed, he lived in the past, and when he could be induced to talk at all, would generally be reminiscent of better days. Commencing with the unvaried formula, “I’ve seen the time when....” he would then proceed to draw comparisons, much to the disadvantage of present time and present company. He was then absurdly surprised when acquaintance, tired of these tactless speeches, avoided him. Not so quick in his movements as of yore, and always impatient of dictation, he resented the bluff impatience of a “commercial” one morning, and when that “ambassador of commerce” desired him to “look alive there, now, with those boxes,” flung the boxes themselves on the ground, and told that astonished traveller to “go and be damned!” Unfortunately, although the traveller would have overlooked the insolence, he could not afford to disregard the loss of his samples, which happened to be china, and were all smashed. He reported the occurrence to the hotel-proprietor, who, being a compassionate man, explained, as he instantly dismissed the offender, that he was very sorry, but he could not afford to keep so violent a man in his employ.
After this dramatic incident the ex-coachman hung about the station, and obtained a few, a very few, odd jobs as porter, until one day a gentleman alighting from a train saw him. With surprise and sorrow in his eyes he recognised the once smart coachman, who, years before, had tutored him in driving. “Good God!” he exclaimed: “is it you?” The old man burst into tears.
He ended more happily than, but for this chance, would have been the case, for the Squire took him into his service, and there he remained until he followed his generation to the Beyond.
The opening of the London and Birmingham Railway in September 1838 did not suddenly bring the Coaching Age to a close. Many routes remained for years afterwards practically unassailed, and even on the road to Birmingham some coach-proprietors struggled with great spirit against the direct competition of the railway. At the close of 1838 a newspaper is found saying: “A few months ago no fewer than twenty-two coaches left Birmingham daily for London. Since the opening of the railway that number has been reduced to four, and it is expected that these will be discontinued, although the fares by coach are only 20s. inside and 10s. outside, whilst the fares for corresponding places on the railroad are 30s. and 20s.”
Prominent among those men who declined to give up without a struggle was Sherman, of the “Bull and Mouth,” whose coaches had run to Birmingham, Manchester, and other places on the north-western road. For two years he maintained the unequal contest, and only relinquished it when he had lost seven thousand pounds and found his coaches running empty. Before finally beaten, he had even gone the length of re-establishing some coaches originally withdrawn in 1836, on the opening of the Grand Junction Railway. The reasons for this were many. The train-service in those early days was very poor, and engine-power insufficient, so that heavy loads, rain-showers that made the rails slippery, and the innumerable minor accidents always happening to the engines themselves, made travelling by railway not only uncertain, but, in not a few instances, even slower than by coach. Railway officials, too, were insolent to an incredible degree. Only when one has read the “Letters to the Editor” in contemporary journals can we have any idea of that insolence. The public complained that, having run the coaches off and secured a monopoly, the officials, finding themselves masters of the situation, behaved accordingly like masters, and not like the servants of the public they really were, or should have been. Newspaper comments dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, and generally emphasised and embroidered these grievances. It is not, then, to be wondered at that a regret for “the good old times” found expression, or that coaches reappeared for a while. Many coach-proprietors were deceived by this partly indignant, partly sentimental attitude, and when they had committed themselves to a revival did not find the support which, from the newspaper outcry, they might reasonably have expected. Thus early do we find that gigantic evil of modern times--irresponsible and misleading newspaper talk--directly to blame for losses and disappointments to those foolish enough to pay heed to it.
[Illustration: THE LAST JOURNEY DOWN THE ROAD.
_After J. H. Agasse._ ]
Sherman’s country partners were not so rash or so obstinate as he, and some of the coaches he personally would have continued had been withdrawn early in the railway advance. Among those was the Manchester “Red Rover”; but when the popular indignation against railway delays and official insolence was thus exploited by the newspapers, Sherman was enabled to again secure the co-operation of his allies, and to put that coach on the road once more. The decision to do so was announced in a striking handbill:--
“THE RED ROVER RE-ESTABLISHED throughout to Manchester.
_Bull and Mouth Inn and Queen’s Hotel._
It is with much satisfaction that the Proprietors of the RED ROVER Coach are enabled to announce its
RE-ESTABLISHMENT
as a direct conveyance THROUGHOUT, BETWEEN LONDON AND MANCHESTER, and that the arrangements will be the same as those which before obtained for it such entire and general approval. In this effort the Proprietors anxiously hope that the public will recognise and appreciate the desire to supply an accommodation which will require and deserve the patronage and support of the large and busy community on that line of road.
The RED ROVER will start every evening, at a quarter before seven, by way of
Coventry, Birmingham, Walsall, Stafford, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Congleton, Macclesfield, and Stockport,
and perform the journey _in the time which before gave such general satisfaction_.
☞ It will also start from the ‘Moseley Arms’ Hotel, Manchester, for London, every evening, at nine o’clock.
EDWARD SHERMAN, } Joint JOHN WETHERALD & CO., } Proprietors.
_London, October 28th, 1837._”
It was a gallant effort, but failed. Manchester men had grumbled at railway delays, but they were not sentimentalists, and when the London and Birmingham Railway was opened throughout, and an uninterrupted run through to Manchester was possible, they forsook the road, and the “Red Rover” roved no more.
But still, sentiment gushed freely over the coaches in every channel of the periodical press, except, of course, in those railway journals that even thus early had come into existence. Poetry, of sorts, was lavished on the coachmen by the bucketful, and they were made to consider themselves martyrs in a lost cause. They felt themselves greatly honoured by all those attentions, and now began to perceive that they were really very fine fellows indeed. It was a proud position they now occupied in the public eye, but it had its own peculiar drawbacks. Amid all this adulation they could not but see that they were like the gladiators of ancient times, going forth to glory, it is true, but to simultaneous extinction; and as all the plaudits of the multitude must have seemed to them a hollow mockery, so did this latter hero-worship appear cheap and unsubstantial to the coachmen. Some of them assumed a pensive air, which did by no means sit well upon their burly forms and purple countenances, and was often, to their disgust, mistaken for indigestion.
Here, from among a wealth of verse, is a typical ballad of the time, among the best of its kind; but even so, perhaps not altogether one that Tennyson would have been proud to father:--
THE DIRGE OF THE DRAGSMEN
Farewell to the Coach-box, farewell to the Vip! By Fate most unkindly we’re cotch’d on the hip; Brother Dragsmen, come join in a general chorus, For there’s nothing at present but ruin before us.
Once who were so gay as we trumps of the team? Now our glory hath vanish’d away, like a dream; Doom’d to suffer adversity’s punishing lash, For the villainous Railroads have settled our hash.
Patricians no more of our craft will be backers, And our elegant cattle must go to the knackers; Guards, porters, and stablemen now on a level, And all the road innkeepers book’d for the devil.
We four-in-hand worthies, however desarving, Will have nothing in hand to prevent us from starving, Compell’d by hard treatment our colours to strike, We may shortly turn Chartists and handle the pike.
Our beavers broad-brimm’d, and our togs out and out, Must, the needful to raise, be soon shov’d up the spout; Our fine, portly forms will be meagre as spectres,-- So much for these steam and these railroad projectors.
By Heavens! ’tis a cruel affair, and the nation In justice are bound to afford compensation; And, as on the shelf we must shortly be laid, To found an asylum for Dragsmen decay’d.
There, taking our pint in all brotherly love, We may chaff at the swells and the prads as we druv, While spectators, admiring, exclaim’d with a shout, “We’re bless’d if that ’ere ain’t a spicy turn-out!”
And how, as we tied round our necks the silk fogle, The rosy-cheek’d barmaids would tip us the ogle; And when all was ready the ribbons to seize, How slyly the darlings would give us a squeeze.
A plague upon Railways! the system be blowed! Grim engineers now are the lords of the road; And passengers now are conveyed to their goal, Not by steaming of cattle, but steaming of coal.
’Tis a black, burning shame! Must our glory be crush’d, And the guard’s lively bugle to silence be hush’d? Oh! ’tis fit that our wrongs we should freely declare, For we always look’d out for the thing that was _fare_.
Let mourning as gloomy as midnight be spread O’er the _Swan with Two Necks_ and the _Saracen’s Head_; Let the _Black Bull_, in Holborn, be cow’d, and the knell Of glory departed be heard from the _Bell_.
The _Blossoms_ must speedily fade from the bough, And cross’d are the hopes of the _Golden Cross_ now; The _White Horse_ must founder, the _Mountain_ fall down, The _Gloster_ be clos’d, and the _Bear_ be done _Brown_.
The _Eclipse_ is eclips’d, and the _Sovereign_ is dead, And the _Red Rover_ now never roves from its shed; The _Times_ are disjointed, the _Blucher_ at peace, And the _Telegraph_ shortly from working must cease.
The _Victory_ now must submit to defeat, And the _Wellington_ own he is cruelly beat; The sport is all up with the fam’d _Tally-Ho_, And the old _Regulator_ no longer will go.
Oh! had I, dear brethren, the muse of a Byron, I’d write down the system of traveling on iron; For flying like lightning but poorly atones For crushing the carcase or breaking the bones.
So, farewell to the Coach-box, farewell to the Vip! By Fate most unkind we are cotch’d on the hip; Then join, brother Dragsmen, in sorrowful chorus, For at present there’s nothing but ruin before us.
On a few out-of-the-way routes, originally not worth the while of railway companies to exploit, coaching did, however, survive an incredible time. Cordery in 1796 painted the even then old-established Chesham coach, and coaches continued to run into Buckinghamshire until quite recent times. Aylesbury, Chesham, Amersham, and Wendover only obtained direct railway accommodation when the Metropolitan Railway, under the lead of Sir Edward Watkin, extended into the country past Harrow and Rickmansworth, reaching Aylesbury in 1892. The Amersham and Wendover coach--really better described as a three-horsed ’bus--went to London daily until 1890, returning from the “Old Bell,” Holborn, at five o’clock in the evening. It was the sole survivor of the host of coaches that left London fifty years earlier.
But two generations have passed away since coaches began to disappear and to become historic, and the “elderly man,” with his enviable memories of a long journey in mid-spring or autumn on the outside of a stage-coach, written about by George Eliot, is no longer to be found, reminiscent of the times that were. Nay, the locomotive steam engine itself is doomed, in turn, to be replaced by self-moving electric motor carriages, and we shall live to drop a salt tear upon an express locomotive retired from active service, or to sigh at sight of a solitary Metropolitan Railway engine placed in a museum of things that were. The days of the prophets were not ended with the Biblical prognosticators, with Nixon, red-faced or otherwise, or with Mother Shipton, or even with Erasmus Darwin, who, although he could foresee steam and the balloon, could not envisage electricity. They included George Eliot, also, among the prophets, shadowing forth, in a most remarkable way, the Central London Railway and other tube lines of our own time, in this extraordinary passage: “Posterity may be shot, like a bullet, through a tube, by atmospheric pressure ... but the slow, old-fashioned way of getting from one end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory. The tube journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as barren as an exclamatory ‘O!’” How true! The scenery on what the vulgar call the “Tuppenny Tube” is distinctly uninteresting.
[Illustration: THE CHESHAM COACH, 1796.
_From the painting by Cordery._ ]
But Marian Evans had, you see, her limitations as a diviner of things to be. Electricity was not within her ken; she did not suspect the steam-carriages of her youth would be reincarnated as modern motor-cars. Yet, all the time, they were simply laid by, and Gurney, Hancock, and their fellows are justified in this our day. Everything recurs, essentially the same as before, with a complete revolution of the wheel of time, and thus the Road has become itself again.
Will a time come when the day of the motor-car will be looked back upon with that air of regretful sentiment with which the vanished Coaching Age is regarded? The rhythmic footfall of the horses and the rattle of the bars, the tootling of the “yard of tin” and the cheerful circumstance that attends the progress of a well-appointed coach, are things which have been, and may still be, experienced in our time by those who journey down the roads affected by the summer coaches, to Brighton, St. Albans, and Virginia Water; but as the Coaching Age itself has passed away, these are only sentimental revivals. The horseless carriages are upon us, and “going strong,” alike in speed and scent. The odour of the imperfectly-combusted petrol desecrates the airs of the country-side. Already the length and breadth of the land have been explored by them, on roads good, bad and indifferent, hilly or flat; and the characteristic rattle of their machinery and the hoarse trumpeting of their cyclorns are becoming familiar even to the rustics of Devon and Somerset.
Let it not be supposed, however, that skill in driving is not so necessary now as in the days of the spanking teams of coach-horses. The careful coachman of old saved his horses over the road for the long climbs and rugged places; he “sprung” them perhaps on the level, and gave them a “towelling” as a persuader to greater efforts through snow-drifts, winds or floods; and the driver of a motor-car does many of these things to his machinery, not indeed with the aid of a whip, but through the agency of levers, taps and brakes. You can overdrive and exhaust a motor just as easily as you can a horse, while it wants feeding just as well. “A just man is merciful to his beast,” and a cautious man is careful of his car, not only because if he was not he would perhaps be left with half a ton of inert machinery upon the road, but because he is just as fond of his automobile as many another of his steeds of flesh and blood.
But to most people who have only seen motor-cars, and have neither driven them nor ridden in one, this will not readily be understood; while the veteran who remembers the sights and sounds of the coaching days does not hear the clatter of the new occupants of the road with pleasurable feelings. To him there is no music in the “Gurr-r-r-_umph_! bang, gr-rrr!” of a Daimler, changing speeds in going uphill, nor any charm in the rattle of a Benz; the “ft-ft-ft” of a motor-tricycle, or the banshee-like minor-key wail, “wow-wow-wow,” of an electric cab on wood pavement. How very odd if there were!
[Illustration: THE LAST OF THE “MANCHESTER DEFIANCE.”
_From a lithograph._ ]
Does it never occur to thinking men that the “blessings” of invention and the age of mechanical and other improvements have been too loudly and consistently praised? We need not be thought fanatically opposed to change if we deny the reality of some of those blessings. Let it be granted that they are ultimately in favour of the community and for the eventual improvement of the race; but if you view him unconventionally, does not the inventor, with his ingenious devices to overturn the practice and habits of generations past, seem sometimes rather a curse than a benefactor to mankind? While with one hand he simplifies and cheapens something (whether it be in travel or in anything else does not particularly matter for argument’s sake), with the other he sets a more strenuous pace to life. In the long ago he invented printing; and the Devil, seeing prophetically ahead, looked on with approval, because he foresaw the halfpenny evening papers. He introduced gas, replaced horses by steam-engines, and away went the leisured pace of that generation; and then, when a newer one was born to take steam as a matter of course, brought electricity to bear upon lighting and tractive problems. Always he sets you a quicker pace when you would be going quietly or resting by the way. One generation of him takes away the traffic of the roads; another filches that of the railways and puts the traffic on the road again in an altered form. There is no finality about the inventor, who ought, for the peace of the age, first to be gently dissuaded, then admonished, and, in the last resort, severely dealt with. Our ancestors had a “quick way” with such, and discouraged invention by putting inventors to death as wizards. A drastic method, but they saved themselves much worry and trouble thereby. The inventor is not usually entitled to any consideration on the score of working for the benefit of humanity. So little does he do so that he takes infinite care to patent and to provisionally protect even his immature devices. He works, in short, to build his own fortune.
Apply these feelings to the case of the coachmen who were born in an age that knew nothing of steam. Every stand-by was rooted up in the coming of railways, and the steam-engine was just as strange a monster to them as the electric dynamo is to many of ourselves. Often they could not transfer their allegiance to the railway, even though they starved. It was not always stubbornness or pride that held them aloof, but a certain and easily-understood lack of adaptability that forbade one who had held the reins to handle the starting-lever of the locomotive. More guards than coachmen transferred themselves from the road to the rail, because the duties were not so diverse; but, although there were coachmen who took positions on railways, no one has ever heard of one who became an engine-driver.
But coachmen and guards and the passengers they drove are all passed away, and the world rolls on as though they had never existed. The coaches, like the old Manchester “Defiance,” shown in the picture, rotting away in the deserted inn-yard, were left to decay in unconsidered places or were reduced to firewood; unlike many of the old “Bull and Mouth” mails, which, after lying there for some time idle, were bought and shipped to Spain, running for many years on Peninsula roads, from Malaga in the south to Vittoria and Salamanca in the north, and by a singular fate visiting in their old age those blood-red fields of victory whose fame they had once spread from London all over triumphant England.
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