REMINISCENCES OF THE MAILS.*
THOUGH we have improved roads somewhat since the days when the Telegraph,' the Wonder,' and the Red Rover' achieved such remarkable performances, we have no longer the strong goad of necessity to urge the coaches of to-day, nor the continuous service of day and night coaches which acted as such an admirable school for coachmen. Now and then a Selby or some other famous whip has, with the aid of a specially selected team and nimble ostlers, performed a fast journey, and won perhaps a bet. Sixty years ago the day- coaches horsed by Sherman of the Bull and Mouth,' carried the mails to Exeter, Shrewsbury, and Leicester at a pace that must have been very trying even to horses in the pink of condition. The Exeter coach took seventeen and a quarter hours—that was the Telegraph' (afterwards the 'Quick- silver' delivered the mails in sixteen and a half)—the Leicester mail, eleven and a quarter hours, and the 'Wonder' covered the distance between London and Shrewsbury in sixteen ! Probably the western road was the best of the three, but nothing done since has affected the prestige of the 'Wonder.' Eight passengers seem to have been the load at this period ; it varied from six in the twenties to twelve in the later days of the mails. Some coaches were built to carry only five. Thus, we suppose, the 'Defiance,' the great Aberdeen and Edinburgh coach, which ran fron Edinburgh to Aberdeen, one hundred and twenty-nine and a half miles, in twelve hours and ten minutes, could not be called a mail-coach, as it car- ried seventeen passengers. This run included the crossing at Queensferry, and half an hour for stoppages, and there were some fast stages—ten miles in fifty minutes down to the Ferry—such travelling as only a coach can give to make glad the heart of man. But no one dreams of travelling by coach now. Then a man thought nothing of travelling down to Scotland to shoot, and spending all night on the outside of a coach ; now he grumbles if he cannot get a foot-warmer in a first-class carriage. Discomfort and necessity apart, it cannot be proved that the men who never spared them. selves shortened their lives to an unreasonable extent. Even railways have not done away with some anomalies of the postal service in certain districts, due to difficulties of local distribution. In coaching days letters between Hull and Barton-on-Humber went a long way round, as the Hull mails were generally sent on to York by the Edinburgh coach, and Barton obtained their letters from the same coach as it passed through Bawtry. The stage-coaches, however, ran • On the Track of the maii Coach, By F. B. Baines, 0.B. London: Richard tentley and Son.
to the Barton Ferry, as five miles of ferry were preferable to an additional sixty odd miles of coach-route.
Many observant people must have noticed in what dark and inconvenient places the Post Office of fifty years ago ensconced itself. One still sees "Post Office Passage" written up at the end of a narrow footway, and the contrast between the office that like a hermit-crab concealed itself at the end of a convoluted shell (till it grew too large for its home), and the office of to-day placed conspicuously in the busiest thoroughfare, is very striking. But the greatest oddity of the Post Office was, and is, the rural postman ; and indeed some of the urban postmen were peculiar characters. Hull in 1798 had one postman, Dickey Sagg, and this man, according to Mr. Baines, had the reputation of being the fastest walker in England, and during the day delivered the letters for the whole of Hull. We are told that he would take his stand in a court or square and call out the names of those for whom he had letters, and if any one kept him waiting he used language about which there could be no mistake whatever, and perhaps took unclaimed letters home for people to call for at their leisure. The successor to this fast walker was a one-legged man, and he appears to have done his duty as well as he could, and the tap of his wooden leg was perhaps as eagerly listened for as any postman's knock. As for the rural postman, there are few country districts which have not their tales to tell. He is often a character, sometimes a rascal, but always a favourite, for he is a first-rate gossip, and your countryman will believe anything if it is told him by the postman. Till a few months ago, a post town in the west of England used to send on one of the beats a tipsy rascal, who for years swindled village people over the little commissions he used to do for them, and when at last the rumour of his downfall reached the townspeople a peti- tion in his favour, testifying to his sobriety, was circulated. Nor would the farmers even, who had noticed his condition of unstable equilibrium, whisper aught but of his civility and punctuality to the official sent to collect evidence. Such is human nature, and such the interest attaching to the man as a purveyor of news. For if there had been a fire at night he brought the news. Was it not he who knew the dreadful particulars, and had seen an iron bedstead fall from the top- most story to the ground floor ?
We do not know if things are better arranged nowadays, but the Postmasters of fifty years ago were a hard-worked race, as many of them had no assistants, and their night's rest was regularly disturbed when the mail-guard called for the bags, and the aforementioned postmen were, of course, a matter of anxiety. But work keeps men going as it does machines, and the Postmaster has generally plenty of amuse- ment in his day's routine. His opinion is sought on a variety of points, and one old lady, Mr. Baines tells us, questioned the Postmaster on the legality of her daughter's marriage, and failing to obtain satisfaction, sent a message to Mr. Gladstone, who, unfortunately, happened to be away. Let us mention the case of another rural postman, to show that a little local colour creeps into the hard life of a public servant. He was a man with a weak back, and when his unpunctuality was complained of, he spoke of his "poor back." Men are merciful, bat one day, when spoken to seriously, he said, "Well, to tell you the truth, there were more people than usual that day on my round who wanted shaving."
Mistakes in telegrams are serious, but occasionally we can afford to laugh at them. We hear of a company who ordered five thousand boxes of oranges, and an additional naught, by some blunder, was added in the telegram. One can imagine the dismay of the consignees when an imposing convoy of ten steamers came into port. We are not responsible for this story, and Mr. Baines speaks of it as a legend. Some blunders are almost incredible. In the account of a horse- race, the "favourite was said to have won easily by a week." That abbreviations lead to mistakes does not surprise us. "Coy." for " company " is an instance, so that a county cricket-match, owing to the substitution of " b " for "c," was reported to have begun in the presence of a small boy, though in the case of some county cricket-matches the mistake would not be so very wide of the mark.
Though we cannot praise too highly the resources and the ability of the Post Office to rise to sudden emergencies, we must regret the passing away of the mail-coach period. With the last of those coaches also went the last of the mail-guards,
a race of men who in the severest weather were expected to do their duty, and did it. If the coach came to grief, the driver had his horses to care for, but the guard had the mafl to carry to its destination, and in many a case has that loyal servant of the public, by sheer endurance and devotion to duty, straggled on with his charge. What became of the driver on these occasions we do not hear ; bat, after all, the driver was of no importance compared to the mail- bags ; at any rate he does not interest Mr. Baines. If the coach was very badly stuck indeed, it has sometimes been left until the return of spring has melted the snow. But it is astonishing what the coachmen and teams of that heroic period accomplished. The coaches in the twenties and thirties were magnificently horsed, there was a noble rivalry between the drivers, and the sport of mail-coach driving had a great attraction for the gentlemen of the period. The horses were terribly hard worked, but as the men of that time never spared themselves they could hardly be expected to spare their horses. It has all gone now, and with it much of the colour of provincial life. We do not know whether Mr. Baines regrets it as much as we do—we rather think he does—but the official, of course, is always for the ideal. Those who like to read of these things will find a great deal of the life of those times in his book and a few sketches of the humours of the postal service to enliven it. The laugh was sometimes against the Postmaster, as when the sleeping man was roused by the mail-guard and let down with a rope from his bedroom window, not the mail-bag, but what is described as a " dotnettic beadle,"
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