CHAPTER III
DOWN THE ROAD IN DAYS OF YORE
II.--FROM LONDON TO NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE IN 1830
We also will make a tour down the road. It shall not be, in the strictly accurate sense of the word, a “journey,” for we shall travel continuously by night as well as day--a thing quite unknown when that word was first brought into use, and unknown to coaching until about 1780, when coaches first began to go both day and night, instead of inning at sundown at some convenient hostelry on the road.
It matters little what road we take, but as Mr. Murray came to town from Newcastle, we may as well pay a return visit along that same highway--the Great North Road. He does not explain how he came through Highgate, but for our part, the first sixty miles or so go along the Old North Road, and we do not touch Highgate at all.
Now, since we are setting out merely for the purpose of seeing something of what life is like on a great highway, there is no need to mortify the flesh by arising early in the blushing hours of dawn, to the tune of the watchman’s cry of “five o’clock and a fine morning!” and so we will e’en, like Christians and Britons able to call their souls their own, go by the afternoon coach. Let the “Lord Nelson” in this year 1830 go if it will from the “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill, at half-past six in the morning. For ourselves, we will wait until a quarter to three in the afternoon, and take the “Lord Wellington” from the “Bull and Mouth.” We can do no better, for the “Lord Wellington” goes the 274 miles in 30 hours, which a simple calculation resolves into 9 miles an hour, including stops. The fare to Newcastle is £5 15s. inside, or about 5d. a mile. Outside, it is £3 10s., or a fraction over 3d. a mile. As our trip is taken in summer-time, we will go outside; and so, although a good deal of the journey will have to be through the night, we, at least, shall not have the disadvantage of being stewed during the daytime in the intolerable atmosphere of the inside of a stage-coach on a July day. Why, indeed, coach-proprietors do not themselves observe that in summer-time the outside is the most desirable place, and charge accordingly, is not easily understood; nor, indeed, to be understood at all. That clever fellow De Quincey notices this, and points out that, although the roof is generally regarded by passengers and everyone else connected with coaching as the attic, and the inside as the drawing-room, only to be tenanted by gentlefolk, the inside is really the coal-cellar in disguise.
We recollect, being old travellers, that the fares to Newcastle used to be much cheaper. Time was when they were only four guineas inside and £2 10s. outside, but prices went up during the late wars with France, and they have stayed up ever since. The travelling, however, is better by some five hours than it was fifteen years ago.
Here we are at the “Bull and Mouth,” in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, now newly rebuilt by Sherman, and named the “Queen’s.” It is a handsome building of red brick, with Portland stone dressings, but the old stables are still to be seen at the side, in Bull-and-Mouth Street. A strong and penetrating aroma of horses and straw pervades the neighbourhood.
Wonderful building, the new General Post Office, opened last year, nearly opposite. They say the Government has got something very like a white elephant in that vast pile. A great deal too big for present needs, or, indeed, for any possible extension of Post Office business. Here’s the “Lord Wellington.” What’s that the yard-porter says?--He says “they don’t call it nothin’ but the ‘Vellington’ now.”--Smart, turn-out, is it not, with its yellow wheels and body to match? You can tell Sherman’s coaches anywhere by that colouring. What a d----d nuisance those boys are, pestering one to buy things one doesn’t want! No; be off with you, we don’t want any braces or pocket looking-glasses, nor the “Life and Portrait of His Late Majesty,” nor any “Sure Cure for Fleas”--use it on yourselves, you dirty-looking devils!
[Illustration: THE “QUEEN’S HOTEL” AND GENERAL POST OFFICE.
_After T. Allom._ ]
Thank goodness! we’re off, and the sooner we’re out of this traffic and off the stones at Kingsland Turnpike the better. These paved streets are so noisy, one can scarcely hear oneself talk, and the rattling sends a jar up one’s spine. How London grows! we shall soon see the houses stretching past Kingsland and swallowing up the country lanes of Dalston and Stoke Newington.
Hal-lo! That was a near shave. Confound those brewers’ drays; Shoreditch is always full of ’em; might have sent us slap over. Why don’t you keep your eyes open, fool?
The drayman offers to fight us all, one after the other, with one hand tied behind his back, for sixpence a head, money down; but though we have some of “the Fancy” aboard, the “Wellington” can’t stop for a mill in the middle of Shoreditch High Street.
Now at last we’re fairly in the country. If you look back you’ll be able to see St. Paul’s. This is Stamford Hill, where the rich City indigo and East and West India merchants live. Warm men, all of them. There, ahead of us, on the right, goes the river Lea: as pretty fishing there as you’d find even in the famous trout streams of Hampshire. What a quaint, quiet rural place this is at Tottenham! And Edmonton, with its tea-gardens; why, London might be fifty miles away!
Here we are, already at Waltham Cross, and at our first change. This is something like traveling! We change horses at the “Falcon” in little more than two minutes, and so are off again, on the ten-mile stage to Ware, through the long narrow street of Cheshunt, past the New River at Broxbourne, and along the broad thoroughfare of Hoddesdon. At Ware we change teams at the “Saracen’s Head,” and four fine strong-limbed chestnuts are put in, to take us the rather hilly stage on to Buntingford. At this sleepy little town they take care to give us as strong a team as you will find in any coach on any road, for the way rises steadily for some miles over Royston Downs. A good thing for the horses that the stage on to Royston town is not more than seven miles. “I believe you, sir,” says the coachman; “vy, I’ve heerd my father say, vot driv’ over this ’ere road thirty year ago, that he vore out many a good ’orse on this stage; an’ ’e vere a careful man too, as you might say, and turned out every blessed one, _h_inside to _h_out, to valk up-hill for two mile, wet or fine; strike me blue if he didn’t.”
“They talk of lowering the road through the top of Reed Hill, don’t they, coachman?”
“Oh! yes; they torks, and that’s about all they does do. Lot o’ good torking does my ’orses. Vot _I_ vants to know is, v’y does we pay the turnpikes?”
We change at the “Red Lion,” Royston, and then come on to the galloping ground that brings us smartly, along a level road, to Arrington Bridge, the spelling of whose name is a matter of divergent opinions among the compilers of road-books. But whether called Arrington or Harrington, it is a pretty, retired spot, with a handsome inn and an equally handsome row of houses opposite.
“Will you please to alight?” asks the stately landlady of the “Hardwicke Arms” inn and posting-house, with perhaps a little too much air of condescension towards us, as coach-passengers. We of the stage-coaches--nay, even those of the mails--occupy only a second place in the consideration of mine host and hostess of this, one of the finest inns on the road. Their posting business brings them some very free-handed customers, and their position, hard by my lord of Hardwicke’s grand seat of Wimpole, spoils them for mere ordinary everyday folks.
However, it is now more than half-past seven o’clock, and we have had no bite nor sup since two. Therefore we alight at the landlady’s bidding and hasten into the inn, to make as good a supper as possible in the twenty minutes allowed.
Half a crown each, in all conscience, for two cups of tea, and some bread and butter, cold ham and eggs! We climb up to our places, dissatisfied. Soon the quiet spot falls away behind, as our horses get into their stride; and as we leave, so does a yellow po’shay dash up, and convert the apparently sleepy knot of smocked post-boys and shirt-sleeved ostlers, who have been lounging about the stable entrance, into a very alert and wide-awake throng.
Caxton, a busy thoroughfare village, where the great “George” inn does a very large business, is passed, and soon, along this flattest of flat roads, that grim relic, Caxton Gibbet, rises dark and forbidding against the translucent evening sky. Does the troubled ghost of young Gatward, gibbeted here eighty years ago for robbing the mail on this lonely spot, ever revisit the scene, we wonder?
The wise, inscrutable stars hang trembling in the sky, and the sickle moon is shining softly, as, having passed Papworth St. Everard, we drop gently down through Godmanchester and draw up in front of the “George” at Huntingdon, 58½ miles from London, at ten o’clock.
We take the opportunity afforded by the change of filling our pocket-flasks with some rich brown brandy of the right sort, and invest in some of those very special veal-and-ham sandwiches for which good Mrs. Ekin has been famous these years past. Our coachman “leaves us here,” and we tip him eighteenpence apiece when he comes round to inform us of the fact.
The new coachman, after some little conversation with the outgoing incumbent of the bench, in which we catch the remark made to the newcomer that some articles or some persons are “a pretty fair lot, taking ’em all round”--a criticism that evidently sizes us up for the benefit of his _confrère_--climbs into his seat, and giving us all a comprehensive and impartial glance, settles himself down comfortably. “All right, Tom?” he asks the guard over his shoulder. “Yes,” answers that functionary. “Then give ’em their heads, Bill,” he says to the ostler; and away we go into the moonlit night at a steady pace.
The box-seat passenger, who very successfully kept the original coachman in conversation nearly all the way from London to Huntingdon, does not seem to quite hit it off with our new whip, who is inclined to be huffish, or, at the least of it, given to silence and keeping his own counsel. “Have a weed, coachman?” he asks, after some ineffectual attempts to get more than a grunt out of him. “Don’t mind if I do,” is the ungracious reply, and he takes the proffered cigar and--puts it into some pocket somewhere beneath the voluminous capes of his greatcoat. After this, silence reigns supreme. For ourselves, we have chatted throughout the day, and now begin to feel--not sleepy, but meditative.
The moon now rides in unsullied glory through the azure sky. We top Alconbury Hill at a few minutes to twelve, and come to the junction of the Old North and the Great North Roads. Everything stands out as clearly as if it were daylight, but with a certain ghost-like and uncanny effect. “The obelisk,” as the coachmen have learned to call the great milestone at the junction of the roads (it is really a square pedestal) looks particularly spectral, but is not the airy nothing it seems--as the coachman on the Edinburgh Mail discovered, a little while ago. The guard tells us all about it. The usual thing. Too much to drink at the hospitable bar of the “George,” at Huntingdon, and a doubt as to which of the two milestones he saw, on coming up the road, was the real one. The guard and all the outsides were in similar case--it was Christmas, and men made merry--and so there was nothing for it but to try their quality. Unfortunately, he drove into the real stone, and not its spectral duplicate, conjured up by the effects of strong liquors. We see the broken railings and the dismounted stone ball that once capped the thing as we pass. The local surgeon mended the resultant broken limbs at the “Wheatsheaf,” whose lighted windows fall into our wake as we commence the descent of Stonegate Hill.
Stilton. By this time we are too drowsy to note whether we changed at the “Bell” or at its rival, directly opposite, the “Angel.” At any rate, nobody asks us if we would not like a nice real Stilton cheese to take with us, as they usually do: it is midnight.
We now pass Norman Cross, and come in another eight miles to Wansford turnpike, where the gate is closed and the pikeman gone to bed. “Blow up for the gate,” said the coachman, when we were drawing near, to the guard, who blew his horn accordingly; but it does not seem to have disturbed the dreams of the janitor. “Gate, gate!” cry the guard and coachman in stentorian chorus. The guard himself descends, and blows a furious series of blasts in the doorway, while the coachman lashes the casement windows.
[Illustration: THE TURNPIKE GATE.
_From a contemporary lithograph._ ]
At last a shuffling and fumbling are heard within, and the door is opened. The pikeman has not been to bed after all; he was, and is, only drunk, and had fallen into a sottish sleep. He now opens the gate, in the midst of much disinterested advice from both our officials--the guard advising him to stick to Old Tom and leave brandy alone, and the coachman pointing out that the Mail will be down presently and that he had better leave the gate open if he does not wish to present the Postmaster-General with forty shillings, that being the penalty to which a pike-keeper is liable who does not leave a clear passage for His Majesty’s Mails.
We now cross Wansford Bridge, a very long and narrow stone structure over the river Nene. Having done so, slowly and with caution, we know no more: sleep descends insensibly upon us.
... Immeasurable æons of time pass by. We are floating with rhythmic wings in the pure ether of some unterrestrial paradise. Our gross earthly integument (twelve stone and a few extra pounds avoirdupois of flesh and blood and bone) has fallen away. We want nothing to eat, for ever and ever, and have left everything gross and unspiritual far, far below us, and ... a fearful crash! Convulsively, instinctively, our arms are thrown out, and we awake, tenaciously grasping one another. What is this that has brought us down to earth again and made us unwillingly assume once more that corporeal hundredweight, or thereabouts, we had left so gladly behind? Are we overturned?
No; it was nothing: nothing, that is to say, but the hunchbacked bridge over the river Welland, that leads from Stamford Baron into Stamford Town. It is only the customary bump and lurch, the guard informs us. May all architects of hunchback bridges be converted from straight-backed human beings into bowed and crooked likenesses of their own abominable creations! We will keep awake, lest another such rude awaking await us.
With this intent we gaze, wide-eyed, upon Stamford Town, its noble buildings wrapped round in midnight quiet, the moon shining here full upon the mullioned stone windows of some ancient mansion, there casting impenetrable black shadows, making dark mysteries of grand architectural doorways decorated with curious scutcheons and overhung with heavy pediments, like beetling eyebrows. Grand churches whose spires soar away, away far into the sky, astonish our newly-awakened vision as the coachman carefully guides the coach through the narrow and crooked streets, in which the shadows from cornices and roof-tops lie so black and sharp that none but he who has driven here before could surely bring this coach safely through. Once or twice we have quailed as he has driven straight at some solid wall, and have breathed again when it has proved to be only some oblique monstrous silhouetted image cast athwart the way. Fear only leaves us when we are clear of the town and once more on the unobstructed road; then only is there leisure for the mind to dwell upon the beauties of that glorious old stone-built town. We are thus ruminating when, between Great Casterton and Stretton, where we enter Rutlandshire, the glaring lamps of a swiftly approaching coach lurch forward out of the long perspective of road, and, with a clatter of harness and a sharp crunching of wheels, fall away, as in a vision. The guard, answering someone’s question, says it is the Leeds “Rockingham,” due in London at something after ten in the morning.
The determination to keep awake was heroic, but without avail. Even the screaming and grumbling of the skid and the straining of the wheels down Spitalgate Hill into Grantham did not suffice to quite waken us. But what that noise and the jarring of the wheels failed to do, the stoppage at the “George” at Grantham and the sudden quiet _do_ succeed in. Our friend the moon has by now sunk to rest, and a pallid dawn has come; someone remarks that it is past three o’clock in the morning, and someone else is wakened and hauled forth from amid the snoring insides, whose snores become gasps and gulps, and then resolve themselves into the yawns and peevish exclamations of tired men. The person thus awakened proves to be a passenger who had booked to Colsterworth, which is a little village we have now left eight miles behind us. He had been asleep, and as Colsterworth is not one of our stopping or changing places, the guard forgot all about him until the change at Grantham. The passenger and the guard are now waging a furious war of words on the resounding pavements of the sleeping town. It seems that the unfortunate inside, besides being himself carried so far beyond his destination, has a heavy portmanteau in the like predicament. If he had been a little bigger and the guard a little smaller, his fury would perhaps make him fall upon that official and personally chastise him. As it is, he resorts to abuse. Windows of surrounding houses now begin to be thrown up, and nightcapped heads to inquire “what the d----l’s the matter, and if it can’t be settled somewhere else or at some more convenient season?” The guard says “This ’ere gent wot’s abusing of me like a blooming pickpocket goes to sleep and gets kerried past where he wants to get out, and when I pulls him out, ’stead of taking ’im him on to Newark or York, ’e----” “Shut up,” exclaims a fierce voice from above: “can’t a man get a wink of sleep for you fellows?”
So, the change being put to, the altercation is concluded in undertones, and we roll off; the irate passenger to bed at the “George,” vowing he will get a legal remedy against the proprietors of the “Wellington” for the unheard-of outrage.
At Newark, a hundred and twenty-five miles of our journey performed, it is broad daylight as the coach rolls, making the echoes resound, into the great market-square. Clock-faces--a little blanched and debauched-looking to our fancy--proclaim the hour to be 5.30 a.m. The change is waiting for us in front of the “Saracen’s Head,” and so is our new coachman. The old one leaves us, but before doing so “kicks us”--as the expressive phraseology of the road has it--for the usual fees. He has been, so far as we remember him, a dour, silent, unsociable man, but we think that, perhaps, as we have been asleep during the best part of his reign on the box-seat, any qualities he may possess have not had their due opportunity, and so he gets two shillings from ourselves. A passenger behind us gives him a shilling, which he promptly spits on and turns, “for luck” as he says, and “in ’opes it’ll grow.” The passenger who gave it him says, thereupon--in a broad Scots accent--that he is “an impudent fellow, and desairves to get nothing at all;” to which the jarvey rejoins that he has in his time brought many a Scotchman from Scotland, but, “this is the fust time, blow me, that _h_ever I see one agoin’ back!”--which is a very dark and mysterious saying. What did he mean?
Our new coachman is a complete change from our late Jehu. He is a spruce, cheerful fellow, neat and well brushed, youthful and prepossessing. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he says cheerily: “another fine day.” We had not noticed it. All we had observed was of each other, and that as every other looked pale, wearied and heavy-eyed, so we rightly judged must be our own condition.
“Chk!” says our youthful charioteer to his horses, and away they bound. Newark market-square glides by, and we are crossing the Trent, over a long bridge. “Newark Castle, gentlemen,” says our coachman, jerking his whip to the left hand; and there we see, rising from the banks of the broad river, the crumbling, time-stained towers of a ruined mediæval fortress. Much he has to say of it, for he is intelligent beyond the ordinary run. A good and graceful whip, too--one of the new school: much persuasion and little punishment for the horses, who certainly seem to put forward their best paces at his merest suggestion. It is a good, flat, and fairly straight road, this ten-mile stage to Scarthing Moor. We cross the Trent again, then a low-lying tract of water-meadows, where the night mists still cling in ghost-like wisps to the grass, and then several small villages. “This”--says our coachman, pointing to a church beside the road, and down the street of one of these little villages--“this is where Oliver Cromwell came from.”
“What is the name of it?” we ask, knowing that, whatever its name, the Protector came from quite a different place.
“Cromwell,” he says.
So this was probably the original seat of that family many centuries before Oliver came into the world, which has since then been so greatly exercised about him.
“Blow up for the change,” says the coachman to the guard, as, having passed through Carlton-on-Trent, Sutton-on-Trent, and round the awkward bend of the road at Weston, we approach Scarthing Moor and the “Black Bull.” “They’re a sleepy lot at the ‘Bull,’” he says, in explanation. The guard produces the “yard of tin” from the horn-basket, and sounds a melodious tantara: quite unnecessarily, after all, it seems, for, quite a distance off, the ostler, dressed after his kind in trousers and shirt only, with braces dangling about him, is seen standing in the road, with the change ready and waiting.
“Got up before you found yourself, this morning?” asks the coachman.
The ostler says he don’t take no sauce from no boys what ain’t been breeched above a twelvemonth.
“All right, Sam,” replies the coachman; “your ’art’s all right, if you _have_ got a ’ed full of wool. Shouldn’t wonder if you don’t make up for this mistake of yourn by sleepin’ it out for a month of Sundays after this. If so be you do, jest hang the keys of the stable outside, and when we come down agen, Jim and me ’ll put ’em in ourselves, won’t we, Jim?”
Jim says they will, and will petition Guv’ment to pension him off, and retire him to the “R’yal ’Orsepital for Towheads.”
Evidently some ancient feud between the ostler and the coach is in progress, and still far from being settled. The ostler sulkily watches us out of sight, as we make our next stage to Retford. The clocks in the market-place of that busy little town mark half-past seven, and the “White Hart,” where we drop a passenger for the Gainsborough coach and another for Chesterfield, and take up another for York, is a busy scene. Appetising aromas of early breakfasts being prepared put a keener edge upon our already sharpened appetites, and we all devoutly wish we were at Doncaster, where _our_ breakfast awaits the coming of the coach. Across Barnby Moor, past the great “Bell” inn, we take our way, and come to one more change, at the “Crown,” Bawtry; then hie away for Doncaster, which we reach, past Rossington Bridge and the famous St. Leger course, at half-past nine o’clock.
“Twenty minutes for breakfast, gentlemen,” announces the coachman as we pull up in front of the “New Angel” inn; while the guard, who has come with us all the way from London, now announces that he goes no farther. We give him half a crown, and hasten, as well as stiffened limbs allow, down the ladder placed for us outsides to alight by, to the breakfast-room.
We catch a glimpse of ourselves in a mirror as we enter. Heavens! is it possible an all-night journey can make so great a difference in a man’s personal appearance? While here is a lady who has been an inside passenger all the way from town, and yet looks as fresh and blooming as though she had but just dressed for a walk. How do they manage it, those delicate creatures?
Our friend, who says he is starving, refuses to discuss this question. He remarks, with eye wildly roving o’er the well-laden table-cloth, that something to eat and drink is more to the point. We cannot gainsay the contention, and do not attempt it, but sink into a chair.
“Coffee, sir; tea, sir; ’ot roll; ’am and heggs. Yorkshire brawn, tongue,” suggests the waiter, swiftly.
We select something and fall-to. After all, it is worth while to take a long coach journey, even if it be only for the appetite it gives one. Here we are, all of us, eating and drinking as though we had taken no meals for a week past. Yes, another cup of coffee, please, and I’ll thank you to pass the----
“Time’s up, gents; coach just agoin’ to start!”
“Oh! here, I say, you know. We’ve only just sat down.”
“Ain’t got more’n ’nother couple o’ minutes,” says the new guard; and so, appetite not fully satisfied, we all troop out and resume our places.
Our coach goes the hilly route, by Ferrybridge and Tadcaster, to York. We change on the short stage out of Doncaster, at Robin Hood’s Well, where the rival inns, the “New” and the “Robin Hood,” occupy opposite sides of the road; and again at Ferrybridge, at the “Swan,” where our smart coachman resigns his seat to an enormously fat man, weighing nearly, if not quite, twenty stone. He is so unwieldy that quite a number of the “Swan” postboys gather round him, and by dint of much sustained effort, do at last succeed in pulling and pushing him into his place, resembling in so doing the Liliputians manipulating Gulliver; the coachman himself, breathing like a grampus, encouraging them by calling out, “That’s it, lads; another heave like t’last does it. All together again, and I’ll mak’ it a gallon!”
Across the river Aire to Brotherton, and thence through Sherburn to Tadcaster, where, having changed at the “White Horse,” we come along a level stage into York; the new guard, who rejoices in the possession of a key-bugle and a good ear for music, signalising our entrance by playing, in excellent style, “The Days when we went Gipsying, a Long Time Ago.”
The coach dines at York. The “Black Swan,” to which we come, is a house historic in the annals of coaching, for it was from its door that the original York and London stage set forth; but it is a very plain and heavy building. Half an hour is allowed for dining, and, unlike the majority of houses down the road, the table-cloth and the knives and forks and glasses are _not_ the only things in readiness.
“What have you got, waiter?”
“Hot roast beef, sir, just coming in; very prime.”
“Haven’t you any cold chicken for a lady here?”
“Yessir; cold chicken on the table, sir; in front of you, sir.”
“You call _that_ chicken, waiter! why, it’s only a skeleton. Take it away and give it to the dog in the yard.”
“Very sorry, sir; ‘Royal Sovereigns’ very hungry to-day; very good appetites they had, sir; wonder they left even the bones.”
“You’re laughing at me, you rascal; bring another chicken!”
“No more chickens, sir; roast lamb, would the lady like? hot or cold; green peas, new potatoes?” ...
“Your apple tart, sir. Ale, sir. Claret, ma’am.” ...
Dinner disposed of, the coach is ready, but one of our passengers is missing. Has any one seen him? He went off, it seems, to see the cathedral, instead of having dinner. Fortunately for himself he comes hurrying up just as we are starting, and the guard hauls him up to his outside place by main force.
“Tip us a tune,” says the coachman to the guard, who, rendered sentimental by the steak and the bottle of stout he had for dinner in the bar, in company with the buxom barmaid, responds with “Believe me, if all those Endearing Young Charms,” as we pass the frowning portal of Bootham Bar and bump along the very rough street of Clifton, York’s modern suburb.
This is a thirteen-and-a-half mile stage from York to Easingwold; but although long, it is an easy one for the horses, if the coachman does not demand pace of them, on account of the dead level of the road. He very wisely lets them take their own speed, only now and then shaking the reins when they seem inclined to slacken from their steady trot. It is a lonely stretch of country, treeless, flat, melancholy; and the appearance of Easingwold is welcomed. At the “Rose and Crown” the new team is put in, and off we go again, the ten miles to Thirsk. At Northallerton the horses are changed for a fresh team at the “Golden Lion,” and the fat coachman, assisted down with almost as much trouble as he was hoisted up, resigns the ribbons into the hands of another.
The usual knot of sightseers of the little town are gathered about the inn to witness the one event of the day, the arrival of the London coach. Among them one perceives the coachman out of a place; a beggar out at elbows; three recruits with ribbons in their hats, not quite recovered from last night’s drink, and stupidly wondering how the ribbons got there; the “coachman wot is to take the next stage”; several errand boys wasting their masters’ time; and a horsey youth with small fortune but large expectations, who is the idler of the place--the local man about town. There is absolutely nothing else for the inhabitants of Northallerton to do for amusement but to watch the coaches, the post-chaises and the chariots as they pass along the one long and empty street.
Our box-seat passenger leaves us here. Although he has, all the way down, shown himself anxious to be intimate with the successive coachmen, and has paid pretty heavily for the privilege of occupying that seat of honour, it has been of no sporting advantage to him, for he is only a Cockney tradesman, who has never even driven a trap, let alone four-in-hand. So when each whip in turn asked him the questions, conventional among whips, “whether he had his driving-gloves on, and would like to take the ribbons for the next few miles,” he evaded the offer by “not being in form,” or not knowing the road, or something else equally annoying to the coachman, who, in not having an amateur of driving on the box, thereby missed the canonical tip of anything from seven shillings to half a sovereign which the handling of the reins for twenty miles or so was worth to the ordinary sportsman.
Our new coachman, on our starting from Northallerton, keeps the seat beside him vacant. He says he has a passenger for it down the road. Tom Layfield, for that is the name of our present charioteer, works the “Wellington” up and down between this and Newcastle on alternate days, Ralph Soulsby being the coachman on the other. Tom Layfield is a very prim-looking, tall and spare man, tutor in coachmanship to many gentlemen on these last fifty-five miles; and it does not surprise some of us when, passing Great Smeaton, we are hailed by a very “down the road” looking young man, whose hat is cocked at a knowing angle, and whose entire get-up, from the gigantic mother-o’-pearl buttons on his light overcoat to the big scarf-pin in the semblance of a galloping coach and horses, proclaims “amateur coachman.” It is the young squire of Hornby Grange, on the right hand, we are told, who is anxious to graduate in coaching honours, and to be mentioned in the pages of the _Sporting Magazine_ by Nimrod, in company with Sir St. Vincent Cotton, the Brackenburys, and other distinguished ornaments of the bench.
“‘Afternoon, squire,” says Layfield, as that young sportsman swings into the seat beside him; and they talk guardedly about anything and everything but coaches, until Layfield asks--as though it had just occurred to him--if he would not like to “put ’em along” for a few miles. He accepts, and is just about to take the reins over when the voice of a hitherto silent gentleman is heard from behind.
“I earnestly protest, coachman,” he says, “against your giving the reins into the hands of that young gentleman, and endangering our lives. I appeal to the other passengers to support me,” he continues, glancing round. “We read in the papers every day of the many serious, and some fatal, accidents caused by control of the horses being given to unqualified persons. If you are well advised, young gentleman, you will relinquish the reins into their proper keeping; and you, coachman, ought to know, and do know, that you would be liable to a fine of any amount from £5 to £10, at the discretion of a magistrate, for allowing an unauthorised person to drive.”
The coachman takes back the reins, and sulkily says he didn’t know he had an informer up; to which the gentleman rejoins by saying that, so long as the coachman drives and performs the duty for which he is paid by his proprietors, he himself is not concerned to teach him proper respect; but he cannot refrain from pointing out, to the coachman in especial, and to the passengers generally, that it would have been the policy of an informer to allow the illegal act to be committed and then to lay an information. He was really protecting the coachman as well as the passengers, because it was well known that the road swarmed with informers, and continued infractions of the law could not always hope to go unpunished.
Every one murmurs approval, except the coachman and his friend, and the guard. The guard, as an official, is silent; the amateur coachman has a hot flush upon his face. The coachman, however, clearly sees himself to be in the wrong, and awkwardly apologises. Still, we all feel somewhat constrained, and, passing Croft Spa and coming to Darlington, experience an ungrateful relief when the champion of our necks and limbs leaves us there.
He is no sooner gone than tongues are wagging about him. “Who is he? What is he? Do you know him?”
“Talks like a Hact o’ Parlymint,” says the coachman to his friend.
“And a very good reason, too,” says a man with knowledge: “he is a Justice of the Peace and Chairman of the Bench of Magistrates at Stockton, which holds a higher jurisdiction than your bench, coachman. I think you’ve had a very narrow escape of parting with £10 and costs.”
The guard has a few parcels to take out of the boot at the “King’s Head,” and a few new ones to put in, and then we’re off for Rushyford Bridge, where the coach takes tea, and where we leave the amateur coachee at the “Wheatsheaf.”
Durham and the coal country open out on leaving secluded Rushyford. Durham Cathedral, although itself standing on a height, has the appearance of being in a profound hollow as the coach, with the skid on, slowly creaks and groans down the long hill into the city. Changing at the “Three Tuns,” the new team toils painfully up the atrociously steep streets to Framwellgate Bridge, where the river Wear and the stern grandeur of the Norman Cathedral, with the bold rocks and soft woods around it, blend under the westering sun-rays of a July evening into a lovely mellowed picture.
Chester-le-Street and Gateshead are ill exchanges for the picturesqueness of Durham, but they serve to bring us nearer our journey’s end, and, truth to tell, we are very weary; so that, coming down the breakneck streets of Gateshead in the gathering darkness to the coaly Tyne and dear dirty Newcastle, with the hum of its great population and the hooting of its steamers in our ears, we are filled with a great content. “Give ’em a tune,” says the coachman; and, the guard sounding a fanfare, we are quickly over the old town bridge, along the Side, and at the Turf Hotel, Collingwood Street. It is nearly ten o’clock. The journey is done.
Let us tot up the expenses per head:--
£ s. d. One outside place 3 10 0 Supper at Arrington Bridge 0 2 6 Brandy and sandwiches at Huntingdon 0 3 0 Coachman, Huntingdon 0 1 6 Coachman, Newark 0 2 0 Breakfast, Doncaster 0 2 3 Guard, Doncaster 0 2 6 Coachman, Ferrybridge 0 2 0 Dinner, York 0 3 6 Coachman, Northallerton 0 1 6 Tea, Rushyford Bridge 0 2 0 Coachman, Newcastle 0 2 0 Guard, Newcastle 0 2 6 ---------- Total £4 17 3
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