in these pages, which purport to show the old west of england highway as it was in days of old and as it is now, it is not proposed to follow either of the two routes taken by the ‘telegraph’ coach or the ‘quicksilver’ devonport mail, by amesbury or by shaftesbury, although there will be occasion to mention those smart coaches from time to time. we will take the third route instead, for the reasons that it is practically identical with the course of the via iceniana, the old roman military way to exeter and the west; and, besides being thus in the fullest sense the exeter road, is the most picturesque and historic route. this way went in 1826, according to cary, those eminently safe and reliable coaches, the ‘regulator,’ in twenty-four hours; the ‘royal mail,’ in twenty-two hours; and the ‘sovereign,’ which, as no time is specified, would seem to have journeyed down the road in a haphazard fashion. of these, the ‘mail’ left that famous hostelry, the ‘swan with two necks’ (known familiarly as the ‘wonderful bird’), in lad lane, city, at 7.30 every evening, and piccadilly half an hour later, arriving at the ‘new london inn,’ exeter, by six o’clock the following evening.
early coaching days
but even these coaches, which jogged along in so leisurely a fashion, went at a furious and breakneck—{9}not to say daredevil—pace compared with the time consumed by the stage coach advertised in the mercurius politicus of 1658 to start from the ‘george inn,’ aldersgate without, ‘every monday, wednesday, and friday. to salisbury in two days for xxs. to blandford and dorchester in two days and a half for xxxs. to exminster, nunnington, axminster, honiton, and exeter in four days xls.’
the ‘exeter fly’ of a hundred years later than this, which staggered down to exeter in three days, under the best conditions, and was the swiftest public conveyance down this road at that time, before the new stages and mails were introduced, had been known, it is credibly reported, to take six.
fares
palmer’s mail coaches, which were started on the exeter road in the summer of 1785, rendered all this kind of meandering progress obsolete, except for the poorest class of travellers, who had still for many a long year (indeed, until road travel was killed by the railways) to endure the miseries of a journey in the great hooded luggage waggons of russell and company, which, with a team of eight horses, started from falmouth, and travelling at the rate of three miles an hour, reached london in twelve days. a man on a pony rode beside the team, and with a long whip touched them up when this surprising pace was not maintained. the travellers walked, putting their belongings inside; and when night was come either camped under the ample shelter of the lumbering waggon, or, if it were winter, were accommodated for a trifle in the stable lofts of the inns they halted at. messrs. russell and company were in business for{10} many years as carriers between london and the west, and at a later date—from the ’20’s until the close of the coaching era—were the proprietors of an intermediate kind of vehicle between the waggon at one extreme and the mail coaches at the other. this was the ‘fly van,’ of which, unlike their more ancient conveyances which set out only three times a week, one started every week-day from either end. this accommodated a class of travellers who did not disdain to travel among the bales and bundles, or to fit themselves in between the knobbly corners of heavy goods, but who would neither walk nor consent to the journey from the far west occupying the best part of a fortnight. so they paid a trifle more and travelled the distance between exeter and london in two days, in times when the ‘telegraph,’ according to sir william knighton, conveyed the aristocratic passenger that distance in seventeen hours. he writes, in his diary, under date of 23rd september 1832, that he started at five o’clock in the morning of that day from exeter in the ‘telegraph’ coach for london. the fare, inside, was ￡3: 10s., and, in addition, four coachmen and one guard had to be paid the usual fees which custom had rendered obligatory. they breakfasted at ilminster and dined at andover. ‘nothing,’ he says, ‘can exceed the rapidity with which everything is done. the journey of one hundred and seventy-five miles was accomplished in seventeen hours[2]—breakfast and dinner were so hurried that the cravings of appetite could hardly be{11} satisfied, and the horses were changed like lightning.’ the fare, inside, was therefore practically 5d. a mile, to which must be added at least fifteen shillings in tips to those four coachmen and that guard, bringing the cost of the smartest travelling between london and exeter up to ￡4: 5s. for the single journey; while the fares by waggon and ‘fly van’ would be at the rate of a halfpenny and twopence per mile respectively, something like 7s. 6d. and 29s. 6d.; without, in those cases, the necessity for tipping.
there were, however, more degrees than these in the accommodation and fares for coach travellers. the proper mail coach fare was 4d. a mile, but the mails were not the ne plus ultra of speed and comfort even on this road, where the ‘quicksilver’ mail ran a famous course. hence the 5d. a mile by the ‘telegraph.’ but it was left to the ‘waggon coach’ to present the greatest disparity of prices and places. this was a vehicle which, under various names, was seen for a considerable period on most of the roads, and can, with a little ingenuity, be looked upon as the precursor of the three classes on railways. there were the first-class ‘insides,’ the second-class ‘outsides,’ and those very rank outsiders indeed, the occupants of the shaky wickerwork basket hung on behind, called the ‘crate’ or the ‘rumble-tumble,’ who were very often noisily drunken sailors and people who did not mind a little jolting more or less.
some very fine turns-out were on this road at the end of the ’30’s. firstly, there was the ‘royal mail,’ between the ‘swan with two necks,’ in lad lane,{12} and the ‘new london inn,’ exeter, both in those days inns of good solid feeding, with drinking to match. it was of the first-named inn, and of another equally famous, that the poet (who must have been of the fleshly and bacchic order) wrote:—
at the swan with two throttles
i tippled two bottles,
and bothered the beef at the bull and the mouth.
one can readily imagine the sharp-set and shivering traveller, fresh from the perils of the road, ‘bothering the beef’ with his huge appetite, and tippling the generous liquor (which, of course, was port) with loud appreciative smackings of the lips.
then there were the ‘sovereign,’ the ‘regulator,’ and the ‘eclipse,’ going by the blandford and dorchester route; the ‘prince george,’ ‘herald,’ ‘pilot,’ ‘traveller,’ and ‘quicksilver,’ by crewkerne and yeovil; and the ‘defiance,’ ‘celerity,’ and ‘subscription,’ by amesbury and ilminster; to leave unnamed the short stages and the bye-road coaches, all helping to swell the traffic in those old days, now utterly forgotten.
