CHAPTER VII

SNOW AND FLOODS

Severe weather, in the shape of frosts, thunderstorms, or hurricanes, was powerless to stop the coach-service, but exceptionally heavy snowfalls occasionally did succeed in doing so for very brief intervals; and floods, although they never were or could be so general as to wholly suspend coaching, often brought individual coaches to grief.

In the severe winter of 1798–9, when snow fell heavily and continuously at the end of January and during the first week of February, several mails, missing on February 1st, were still to seek on April 27th, and St. Martin’s-le-Grand mourned them as wholly lost. By May Day, however, they did succeed in running again!

Very few details survive of that exceptional season, or of that other, in 1806, when Nevill, a guard on the Bristol Mail, was frozen to death; but the records of the great snowstorm that began on the Christmas night of 1836 are very full.

Christmas Day, 1836, fell on a Sunday, and it is worth notice, as a singular coincidence in this country of only occasional heavy snowfalls, that the Christmas night of 1886, also a Sunday night, exactly half a century later, was marked by that well-remembered snowstorm which disorganised the railway service quite as effectually as that of 1836 did the coaches, and broke down and destroyed nearly every telegraph-post and wire in the land.

The famous snowstorm of 1836 affected all parts of the country, and only on two mail routes were communications kept open. Fourteen mail-coaches were abandoned on the various roads, and for periods ranging from two to ten days the travels of others ceased. The snowstorm itself continued for nearly a week. The two routes remaining unconquered during this extraordinary time were those to Portsmouth and Poole, but precisely why or how they were thus distinguished is not made clear. There is no doubt that the coachmen and guards on the Portsmouth and Poole Mails were strenuous men, but that quality was common to many of those engaged upon the mails. Nor can we find any favouring circumstance of physical geography to account for this unusual good fortune. On the contrary, those roads are in places exceptionally bleak and exposed to high winds; and the strong wind that on this occasion bared the heights and buried the hollows twenty and thirty feet deep in snow-wreaths was an especial feature of the visitation. Fortunately for all upon the roads--for those who laboured along them, and for those who were brought to a standstill in the drifts--the cold was not remarkably severe.

But never before, within living recollection, had the London mails been stopped for a whole night within a few miles from London, and never before had the intercourse between the South Coast and the Metropolis been interrupted for two whole days. On Chatham Lines the snow lay from thirty to forty feet deep, and everywhere, except on the hilltops, it was higher than the roofs of the coaches. Nay, according to a contemporary newspaper account, “The snow has drifted to such an extent between Leicester and Northampton as to occasion considerable difficulty and danger. In some parts of the road passages have been cut where the snow had drifted to the depth of thirty, forty, and in some places fifty feet.”

The great difficulty with which the coaches had on this occasion to contend was not merely the getting along the roads, but, as with these extraordinary depths of snow the natural features of the country were mostly obscured, of keeping on or anywhere near the road. Hedgerows were blotted out of existence: many trees had fallen under their snowy burdens, and it was not unusual, when at last the snowed-up mails were recovered, to find them strayed far from their course, and in the middle of pastures and ploughlands.

Snowstorms produced curious travelling experiences. It was this great occasion that effectually blocked all the up night coaches for two days at Dunchurch, on the Holyhead Road, and so succeeded in bringing together a party not unlike those weatherbound travellers who in Dickens’ Christmas stories gather round the hearth, and, comforting themselves with many jorums of punch, tell dramatic stories. One party crowded the “Dun Cow,” another the “Green Man.” Among the coaches were the Manchester “Beehive” and the “Red Rover.” The first morning of their enforced leisure they--coachmen, guards and passengers--made up a poaching party, with two guns among sixteen of them. Jack Goodwin, guard of the “Beehive,” was the only fortunate sportsman, and shot a hare. In the evening a dancing party was held at the “Dun Cow” at the suggestion of the landlord, who invited some friends, and the next morning Goodwin turned wandering minstrel, taking with him a chosen few to help in chorus. Wandering along the Rugby Road, they were entertained at the farmhouses with elderberry wine and pork pies. Another pleasant evening, and they were off the next morning for London.

Floods were infinitely more dangerous than snowstorms, and the Great North Road, between Newark-on-Trent and Scarthing Moor, was

## particularly subject to them, the Trent often, and on the very

slightest provocation of rain, flooding many miles of surrounding country. It was here, and on these occasions, that the outsides had the better bargain of the two classes of travelling, for they kept their seats without fear of being drowned, while the insides went in constant terror of a watery death, and often only escaped it by the pitiful expedient of standing on their seats and so--keeping the doubled-up attitude this necessity and the lowness of the roof imperatively demanded--remaining until the levels were passed and the dry uplands reached again.

[Illustration: WINTER: GOING NORTH.

_After H. Alken._ ]

In August 1829, when extraordinary floods devastated a great part of Scotland, a stirring episode occurred in connection with them and the mail-coach running through Banff. The tradition that his Majesty’s mails were to be stopped for nobody and hindered by nothing on the road was a very fine and fearless one, but it was occasionally pushed to absurd lengths, and hideous dangers provoked without reasonable cause. This episode of the Banff and Inverness Mail is a case in point. The mail of the preceding day had found it impracticable to go by its usual route, and so took another course, by the Bridge of Alva. It was therefore supposed that the mail following would adopt the same plan; but what was the astonishment of the good folk of Banff when they perceived the coach arrive, within a few minutes of its usual time, at the farther end of the bridge that crosses the River Dovern. The people, watching the eddying floods from the safe vantage-point of their windows, strongly dissuaded the guard and coachman from attempting to pass, the danger being so great; but, scouting the idea of perils to be encountered in the very streets of the town, those foolhardy persons drove straight along the bridge and into a street that had been converted by the bursting of the river-bank into the semblance of a mountain torrent. When the furious current caught the coach, it was instantly dashed against the corner of Gillan’s Inn, and the four animals swept off their legs. They rose again, plunging and struggling for their lives, and a boat was pushed off, with men eager to free the poor animals from their harness, to enable them to swim away; but it was not possible to save more than one. The other three were drowned.

By this time the coach, with coachman and guard, had been flung upon the pavement, where the depth of water was less; and there the guard was seen, clinging to the top, and the coachman hanging by his hands from a lamp-post, regretting too late the official ardour and slavery to tradition that had wrought such havoc. When, for humanity’s sake, as well as to secure the mail-bags, a boat came and rescued them, they were not suffered to depart without much Aberdonian plain-speaking on the folly that had nearly cost them their lives and endangered the correspondence of the good folks of the ancient burgh of Banff.

[Illustration: MAIL-COACH IN A SNOW-DRIFT.

_After J. Pollard._ ]

There were no passengers on this occasion, but we are not to suppose that, had there been any, they would have received much consideration. The mail would probably have been driven on, just the same. The official attitude of mind towards them may be judged from the wintry horrors encountered by the Edinburgh to Glasgow Mail in March 1827. It became embedded in the snow near Kirkliston, and the guard, riding one horse and leading another loaded with the bags, set off for Glasgow; while the coachman, with the other horses, set off in the opposite direction to secure a fresh team, pursued by the entreaties of the four terrified passengers, beseeching him to use all diligence and return soon. There, on a lonely road, immovably stuck in huge snowdrifts, they remained throughout a bitter night, made additionally miserable by one of the windows being broken. It was not until nine o’clock the next morning that the coachman returned, with another man, but only two horses. Having loaded them with some luggage and parcels, he was, with a joke upon his lips, leaving the passengers to shift for themselves, but was compelled to take one who had fallen ill. The remaining three extricated themselves as best they could.

On September 11th, 1829, a month later than the watery adventures at Banff, the Birmingham and Liverpool Mail had an unfortunate experience at Smallwood Bridge, near Church Lawton, a point where the road is crossed by an affluent of the River Weaver. Unknown to those on the mail, the flooded stream had burst the arch of the bridge, and when the coach came to the spot, along a road almost axle-deep in water, it fell into the hole and was violently overturned. Of the three inside passengers, only one escaped. He was an agile young man, who broke the window and so extricated himself. The horses were drowned, but the coachman was fortunate enough to be washed against a tree-stump as the river hurried him along at six miles an hour. The force of this happy meeting nearly stunned him, but he held on, and eventually found his way ashore. The guard was saved in a similar manner. Accidents almost forming parallels with this were of frequent occurrence, and a seasoned traveller exclaimed: “Give me a collision, a broken axle and an overturn, a runaway team, a drunken coachman, snowstorms, howling tempests; but Heaven preserve us from floods!”

[Illustration: MAIL-COACH IN A FLOOD.

_After J. Pollard._ ]

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