Part 2

Early or late in the coaching era robbery flourished. In the opening years the coaches, as already abundantly noted, were held up by the conventional figure of the highwayman; but, as civilisation advanced, methods changed, and, instead of bestriding a high-mettled steed at the cross-roads, there to await the coach, the thief, in concert with a chosen band, booked seats, and during a long journey cut open the boot from the inside of the vehicle, and having safely extracted the bank parcels and other valuables, made off from the next stopping-place with ease and complete safety. The advantages of this method were so obvious that coaching history teems with examples of such robberies. Very often, however, the booty was in notes, and difficult to turn to any account. Hauls such as that described in _Aris’s Birmingham Gazette_ of February 17th, 1823, were rare. It mentioned: “A parcel containing 600 sovereigns, directed to Messrs. Attwood and Spooner, was stolen last week from one of the London coaches, on its way to Birmingham.” The bankers never saw the colour of their money again.

IV

Birmingham, says De Quincey, was, under the old dynasty of stage-coaches and post-chaises, the centre of our travelling system. He did not like Birmingham. How many they are who do not! But, look you, he gives his reasons, and acknowledges that circumstances, and not Birmingham wholly, were the cause of _his_ dislike. “Noisy, gloomy and dirty” he calls the town. “Gloomy,” because, having passed through it a hundred times, those occasions were always and invariably (less once), days and nights of rain. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred; what a monstrous proportion! And even so, the hundredth was just one fleeting glimpse of sunshine, as the Mail whirled him through; so that he—with a parting sarcasm—had not time to see whether that sunshine was, in fact, real, or whether it might not possibly be some gilt Brummagen counterfeit; “For you know,” says he, “men of Birmingham, that you _can_ counterfeit—such is your cleverness—all things in Heaven and earth, from Jove’s thunderbolts down to a tailor’s bodkin.”

[Illustration: THE “HEN AND CHICKENS,” 1830.]

De Quincey put up, as most travellers of his time were used to do, at the famous “Hen and Chickens”; the enormous “Hen and Chickens.” “Never did I sleep there, but I had reason to complain that the discreet hen did not gather her vagrant flock to roost at less variable hours. Till two or three, I was kept waking by those who were retiring; and about three commenced the morning functions of the porter, or of ‘boots,’ or of ‘under-boots,’ who began their rounds for collecting the several freights for the Highflyer, or the Tally-ho, or the Bang-up, to all points of the compass, and too often (as must happen in such immense establishments) blundered into my room with that appalling, ‘Now, sir, the horses are coming out.’ So that rarely, indeed, have I happened to _sleep_ in Birmingham.”

The old Hen in High Street, ceased very many years ago to lay golden eggs, and her Chickens were dispersed, to be gathered under a new roof in 1798. The first notice of the original “Hen and Chickens” appeared in an advertisement of December 14th, 1741. In 1770, a certain “Widow Thomas” kept it, and in 1784 one Richard Lloyd. When he died, his widow carried on the business until the expiration of the lease in 1798. This lady, Mrs. Sarah Lloyd, was one of those enterprising and business-like women who—like Mrs. Ann Nelson and Mrs. Mountain—left so great a mark upon that age. She was not content to renew her lease of the old house, for which she had hitherto paid £100 a year rent; but, with a keen appreciation of Birmingham improvements, purchased a plot of land in the newly formed New Street, and, some time before the lease of the old house expired, began to build a much larger and imposing structure, “from the designs of James Wyatt, Esq.” It was one of the first houses in Birmingham to be built of stone, instead of brick. To this she removed in 1798, and named it “Lloyd’s Hotel and Hen and Chickens Inn.”

Mrs. Sarah Lloyd, who to many of her more irreverent guests typified the old Hen, sold her business and leased the inn five years later, April 16th, 1804, to William Waddell, of the “Castle,” High Street. He was the son of a London oil merchant, and years before had married Miss Ibberson, daughter of the proprietor of the “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn.

It was during Waddell’s reign that the “Hen and Chickens” saw its greatest prosperity. His rule extended from 1804 until 1836, ending only with his death in that year; and not only covered the best years of the coaching era, but almost saw its close. His was the greatest figure in Birmingham’s coaching business. In 1830 he had purchased the freehold of the “Hen and Chickens” and about the same time bought the “Swan,” and with his son Thomas carried on a general coaching business and contracting for the Mails.

In 1819 thirty coaches left the “Hen and Chickens” yard daily; by 1838 the ultimate year, the number was thirty-two. But by far the greatest number started from the “Swan,” for in 1838 no fewer than sixty-one coaches hailed from thence.

On Waddell’s decease the freeholds of both the houses were sold, and bought in by members of the family; that of the “Hen and Chickens” realising £14,500, and the “Swan,” £6,520. The beds alone of the “Hen and Chickens” were then stated to bring in £800 per annum. The “Hen and Chickens” was then leased by Devis, of the “Coach and Horses,” Worcester Street, at a rent of £600. He shortly afterwards sublet it for £700 to Mrs. Room, a widowed innkeeper, who remarried and gave it up in 1843, after a term of seven years, when Devis resumed.

These appear to have been ill years for the famous old house. Coaching and posting business had decayed, and the commercial growth of Birmingham did not make amends for the loss of the good business done with the nobility and gentry who resorted here in the old days of the road, but now travelled through by train. Devis, accordingly disappears, and the Waddell family, finding difficulties in getting a tenant, put in a manager, Joseph Shore by name. A tenant was at length found in Frank Smith, who had long been a druggist in New Street, but was now ready to try his fortune as hotel-keeper. His rule extended from 1849 to 1867, and was then changed for that of Oldfield, who reigned until 1878, when the old fittings of the hotel were sold and its career brought to a close. The end of the building, was, however, not yet, and the “Hen and Chickens” continued in a modified form, until 1895. Lately it has been pulled down, and a tall, showy “Hen and Chickens Hotel and Restaurant,” in a Victorian Renaissance style and liver-coloured terra-cotta erected on the site; a complete change from the old house, once looked upon as an ornament to New Street, but become at last, owing to the rebuilding carried on all around, altogether out of date and, by contrast, heavy and gloomy. Its severe architecture had been frilled and furbelowed at different times—a portico built out over the pavement in 1830, and a stone attic storey added in more recent years, with a saucy turret at one end—but, however comfortable within, the exterior suggested a bank or some sort of public institution, rather than the warmth and good cheer of an hostelry, and so it was swept away.

“The Fowls” as Young Birmingham delighted to call the “Hen and Chickens,” housed of course many notable persons, but not those of the most exclusive kind. The “Royal,” where no coaches came, was in those days the first house. In later days, however, somewhere about 1874, the “Hen and Chickens” lodged the Grand Duke of Hesse, and never ceased to boast the fact. Absurdly much was made of him. He walked on special carpets, dined off plate that had graced no plebeian board, and came and went between rows of servants frozen at a reverential angle of forty-five degrees. The management even went to the length of placing likenesses of his wife on his dressing-table, to make it seem more home-like. Excellent creatures! How touching a belief they cherished in the prevalence of the domestic virtues, even in the august circumstances of a Grand Duke!

V

Although the “Hen and Chickens” had so early been removed to New Street, Bull Ring and High Street continued to be the chief coaching thoroughfares. There stood the “Swan,” the “Dog” afterwards known as the “Nelson,” the “Castle,” “Albion,” and “St. George’s Tavern.” In Bull Street was the “Saracen’s Head.”

But the most exclusive and aristocratic of all was the “Royal,” afterwards known as the “Old Royal.” This was the house mentioned in the “Pickwick Papers,” where the waiter, having at last got an order for something, “imperceptibly melted away.” It stood in Temple Row, and long arrogated to itself, before ever the title of “Royal” came into use, the name of “The Hotel.” Other hotels there were, but this proud house professed ignorance of them. It was originally built, with its Assembly Rooms, in 1772, and set forth, as a special attraction to its patrons, the statement that no coaches ever approached to disturb the holy quiet of Temple Row.

It was about 1825 that something of this seclusion was sloughed off, and the business transferred to the old Portugal House in New Street, where, with two additional wings, it blossomed forth as the “New Royal.” Its old supremacy now began to be challenged by the newly established “Stork,” in Old Square, then a quiet and dignified retreat, very different from the same place to-day, with its flashing shops, electric lights, and tramways; nothing now old about it, excepting its name. The “Stork,” of course, suffered something at the hands and pens of witlings, just as did the “Pelican” at Speenhamland, on the Bath Road! and to make humorous reference to its “long bill” was the custom, whether the charges were high or moderate.

[Illustration: THE “OLD ROYAL.”]

But the days of the old hotels, exclusive or otherwise, were in sight when the railway came. Another sort replaced them, and, although the kind in its turn has gone out of favour, examples may yet be found. Who does not know the typical hotel of, say, the Fifties and the Sixties, that abominably draughty type of building, all cold would-be magnificence and interminable flights of stairs, with lofty rooms, apparently built for a Titanic race fifteen feet in height, and, by consequence, never warm, and never with an air of being fully furnished. That such as these should ever have replaced the cosy old houses can only be explained on the score of fashion, for there are illogical and senseless fashions in architecture, as in everything else.

The railway era commenced in Birmingham with the opening of the Grand Junction and the London and Birmingham Railways in 1837 and 1838. The early railway engines and carriages, and, indeed, everything connected with those days of the rail, are curious nowadays, and not the least amusing are the comments then made on travelling by steam. “A railway conveyance,” said one, writing in favour of the coaches, “is a locomotive prison, and, the novelty of it having subsided, we shall seldom hear of a gentleman condescending to assume this hasty mode of transit.” That was a very bad shot at prophecy, but it was followed by a perfect howler in the way of error. “It has already been proved,” says this person, “that railways are not calculated to carry heavy goods.”

An early London and Birmingham train was an odd spectacle; the engine with immensely tall funnel, and a huge domed fire-box; the carriages modelled on the lines of stage-coaches, and their panels painted with high-sounding names. Luggage was carried on the roof, and the first guards rode outside with it, until the cinders and red-hot coals from the engine half blinded them and destroyed their uniform, when they quitted that absurd position and travelled inside. Early railway journeys were penitential for travellers, for, instead of rolling smoothly over wooden sleepers, the granite slabs to which the fish-bellied rails of that time were riveted, produced a continual jarring and a deafening rattle. Fares too, with less than a quarter of the accommodation now provided, were almost double what they are now, and the breaking-down of engines, and all manner of awkward accidents, disposed many to think a revival of coaches probable.

VI

The way out of Birmingham is dismal and unpromising, by way of Livery Street and Great Hampton Street. At the end of that thoroughfare—formerly known as Hangman’s Lane—Birmingham is left behind; but some seventeen miles of continuous streets, ill-paved and hilly, and infested with tramways, yet lie before the pilgrim.

Livery Street, so-called (at a hazard) because its granite setts jolt so unmercifully the cyclist who is rash enough to ride along it, gives an outlook on to close-packed, mean, and frowsy little courts and thoroughfares with grotesquely commonplace or absurd names—among them “Mary Ann Street.” Here and along Great Hampton Street, where the smuts from Snow Hill Station and those from adjacent factories now fall thickest, the Birmingham of little more than a century ago ended, and gave place to the open heath of Soho, enclosed only in 1793. “At the second milestone,” says an old Birmingham guide-book, “on the left, when you have passed through the turnpike, is Soho Factory, a magnificent pile of buildings”; but that great workshop of Boulton and Watt has long since disappeared and the turnpike itself forgot; while Soho Heath is covered, far and near, with streets of a terribly monotonous kind—as like one another as the peas in a pea-pod. The only landmarks and bright spots are public-houses. Not inns for travellers, but gin-palaces for boozers, where plate-glass, gas-lamps the size of balloons, and florid architecture give the inhabitants of these wilds their only idea of style and distinction, and that a mistaken one. All else is dull and grey. Such are Hockley and Soho, and such is Handsworth.

Between those two last Warwickshire is left behind, and Staffordshire entered—“Staffordshire ful of Queenys,” as an old writer has it. What he meant by that, no commentator appears yet to have explained, but it sounds complimentary.

The “elegant village” of Handsworth, as it is called by the author of that old guide-book already quoted, was built over the great surrounding commons, enclosed in 1798. That extraordinary person seems to look upon this enclosing and filching of public property as virtuous and altogether praiseworthy, and talks with unctuous satisfaction of “at least 150 respectable houses erected on land which lay formerly entirely waste. Plots of land”—he continues, with greasy delight—“have been sold from £200 to £1,000 an acre.”

He tells the same tale of the waste lands of West Bromwich, enclosed in 1801, and realising similar sums. These long thoroughfares, therefore, are nearly all built upon stolen property, and the rents of the houses should by right go into municipal or imperial coffers, instead of private pockets.

West Bromwich, the greater part of whose site was a rabbit-warren so late as 1800, is a continuation of this weary street. Here, perhaps, it was that Mr. Bull, “an eminent tea merchant,” while journeying on horseback from Wolverhampton to London in October, 1742, was overtaken by “a single Man on Horseback, whom he took for a Gentleman. After they had rode three or four miles,” the account continues, “the highwayman then ordered him to deliver, which Mr. Bull took to be in Jest; but he told him that he was in Earnest, and accordingly robb’d him of about four Guineas and his Watch, and afterwards rode with him three miles, till they came near a Town, when the Highwayman rode off.”

West Bromwich is now a busy ironworking town, with newly opened collieries and a population of 90,000. Just as the cuttle-fish obscures its surroundings by exuding an inky fluid, so do West Bromwich and Dudley, away to the left, belch forth clouds of smoke, and between them till the sky with a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. The road, running as it does at a considerable height, commands a good view of the clustered towns and districts of the Black Country, with the sullen-looking canals, collieries, blast-furnaces, and a hundred other kinds of the commercial enterprises of this wonderful hive of industry. Dudley, with its ancient castle on a hill-top, wreathed in inky fumes, and Dudley Port down below, with rows of brick and tile works spouting smoke so black and dense as to look almost solid, form the centre; with Tipton, Oldbury, Priestfield, and Swan Village as satellites offering their contributions to the general stock of grime and obscurity. At night all this is changed, and the chimneys that in daylight seemed only to smoke all become tipped with tongues of fire, casting a lurid glow upon earth and sky. Turner has left, in his weird picture of Dudley, a characteristic view of Black Country scenery; and Dickens, in the morbid pages of the _Old Curiosity Shop_, has described its darker and more repellent side. It is a country where every effort of Nature to put forth leaves and grass is thwarted. Land not built upon has been ransacked for mineral wealth and turned inside out, with the result that on the shale and debris only the scantiest and most innutritious of weeds can find a livelihood—and weeds commonly thrive where nothing else can exist.

VII

At Hilltop, where the rattling and belching steam tramcars branch off for Dudley, a descent is made by Holloway Bank to Wednesbury—the “Wodensburgh,” as it is thought to have been, of Saxon times, and the “Wedgebury” of modern local parlance. Wednesbury begins at the bottom of this descent at Wednesbury Bridge, where the filthy stream called the river Tame trickles between slimy mud-banks under the brick arches built by Telford in 1826; but the end of one town and the beginning of another in the Black Country, where the streets between half a dozen townships are continuous, can only be noted with certainty by the borough surveyors concerned. There are still on the West Bromwich side of the bridge a few queerly gabled old cottages—kept white by dint of constant recourse to the whitewash pail and brush—that show by their sunken position how the road once dipped to the ford, before the bridge was built.

[Illustration: DUDLEY _After J. W. M. Turner, R.A._]

Wednesbury is not, any more than its neighbours, a place of beauty; but it is of far more remote origin than most, and, though it be dirty and foul, and surrounded by waste lands like a vast congeries of domestic dustbins, has a story going back to Saxon times, and the highly romantic connection with Woden, the war-god, already hinted at. The old parish church, conspicuous on the hill that forms the site of Wednesbury, is beautiful within, even though as black as your hat outside, and, moreover, dates as to its foundations from the Norman period. Those foundations have an unusual interest, built as they are of the material called “pockstone,” which is nothing less than surface-clay baked and burnt by the underground fires that have raged at intervals from time immemorial in the coal-beds underlying the town and its surroundings.

For Wednesbury is, or was, one great coalfield, and long before its modern iron and steel trades had developed, was a place of collieries. Many of them are exhausted now, but there were times when to dig in one’s back-yard was to open up a private coal-mine and find fuel for the seeking, so near the surface did the coal-measures lie. Even to this day, when the streets are “up” for new gas or water pipes, the excavating discloses coal of sorts: not perhaps equal to the best Wallsend, but still coal that will burn and give out heat, and as such eagerly pounced upon by the poor little ragamuffins of the town, who come forth with bags and baskets and aprons to freely fill the domestic scuttle.

The first coal-getting at Wednesbury was by “openworks,” just as gravel is dug, or the brick-earth of brickfields is excavated. These “openworks” are very ancient and mostly disused, and even in places where they still yield coal, it is of inferior quality. To these succeeded the “bell-pits” of the middle period, and the deep levels of more modern times. In all this succession of years the underground conflagrations continued, and the parish registers contain many references to them; for example, when on “June y^e 20th, 1731,” a collier was “most dismally scorched and roasted to death by ye Hellish Wildfire.” Even in recent years these fires, thought to be caused by spontaneous combustion, have broken out. Such was the one that burned from 1894 until 1898, and not only destroyed a great part of the King’s Hill Road, but caused the death of a watchman, who fell into one of the gaping holes and was burnt to death.

Wednesbury’s blast-furnaces, foundries, iron and brass and steel tube works, and manufacture of railway wheels and axles support the place, now that coal is not so plentifully got. The quantities of railway material may not surprise one, but feelings of astonishment arise on contemplation of the tubing produced—tubing for bicycles, bedsteads, water-pipes, gas-mains, and for many other purposes known only to specialists in these matters; tubing from gauges as slender as a lead-pencil to a size ample enough for one to crawl into, if so minded. All the world, it might be thought from a sight of these things, has an insatiable appetite for tubes!

The coal trade is not so completely exhausted but that pit-men are a common enough sight in Wednesbury, and pit-girls too, or rather pit-bank lasses; gentle creatures who sort and pick the coal over at the pit’s mouth, and have muscles strong enough to fell an ox. It is not known when a lass of the pit-bank ceases to be a lass; probably they always remain so, just as postboys were, and “Cape boys” are, nominally juveniles for the term of their natural lives. Let it not, however, be thought that the pit-lass is being made fun of: it is done here in print as little as it is likely to be within reach of her brawny arm.

A curious revival of old customs here is the trade of the “coal-jagger,” a peripatetic retailer of coals to the poorer classes. The moneyed man may have his coals in by the ton, but the working-man buys his by the pony or donkey load of the jagger, who may be seen in the streets leading a patient and depressed animal hitched up to three or more odd little three-wheeled trucks, coupled together like a miniature mineral-train. Each truck contains about a sackful of coals, offered direct from the pit’s mouth at a price low enough to suit modest weekly exchequers.

VIII

Down-hill from Wednesbury Market Place, and thence rising to Cock Heath and Moxley, the road runs between rubbish-heaps; a scene of desolation that, however ill it may be to live near to, makes a not unpleasing picture in a sketch, taken at a backward glance, with the town grouped on a curving sky-line. Moxley, perhaps, hints at decayed trade in the sign of the mean little “Struggler” inn.

[Illustration: WEDNESBURY.]