On Tuesday last [the Birmingham Gazette reported on 6 May 1751], the Shrewsbury caravan was stopped between the Four Crosses and the Welsh Harp by a single highwayman who behaved very civilly to the passengers, told them that he was a stranger in distress, and hoped that they would contribute to his assistance. On which each passenger gave him something, to the amount in the whole of about £4, with which he was mighty well satisfied, but returned some halfpence to one of them, saying he never took copper. He told them there were two other collectors on the road, but he would see them out of danger, which he accordingly did, and begged that they would not at their next inn mention the robbery nor appear against him if he should be taken up hereafter.
Since roads were still generally the responsibility of the parishes through which they passed, and since the parishes were reluctant to spend money on them for the benefit of strangers, some more reliable method of maintaining them had to be devised. Parliament was, therefore, eventually induced to pass an Act authorizing the establishment of Turnpike Trusts to erect gates and toll-bars where passengers would be required to pay a toll to pass through. At first few turnpikes were established; in remote areas there was none until after the middle of the eighteenth century. But by 1770 about 15,000 miles of roads were under trusts; and, although Lord Hervey once complained that the Turnpike Commissioners ‘seldom execute what they undertake’, most roads cared for by trusts were being maintained appreciably better by the end of the century than they had been at the beginning. Turnpikes, however, were bitterly resented not only because of the high tolls which the users had to pay – at the Tyburn turnpike, for example, carriages were charged 10d, horsemen 4d, and drovers 5d for twenty oxen and 2d for twenty pigs – but also because so many of those who could afford the charges were exempt. At Tyburn, mail-coaches, members of the royal family, soldiers in uniforms, parsons on parish duty, funeral processions and prison carts were all exempt; at others, Turnpike Commissioners were excused from paying the charges they had themselves imposed. And when, in 1741, extra tolls were charged on vehicles over three tons, these new rates did not apply to gentlemen’s carriages, farmers’ vehicles or wagons in the king’s service.4 Attacks on toll-gates were so frequent that offenders – who had at first been liable to three months’ imprisonment and a whipping for a first offence and seven years’ transportation for a second – were eventually liable to be hanged. This, however, did not prove a deterrent. Numerous reports of attacks on turnpike gates and toll-keepers’ houses are to be read in the newspapers of the time; and the numbers of rioters were frequently large: 400 Somerset people were reported to have assaulted turnpikes in Bristol in 1749; and on another occasion it took six troops of dragoon guards to quell a body of Gloucestershire people, ‘some naked with their faces blackened’, who attacked a turnpike with the intention of blowing up the posts with gunpowder so that they could get their cattle to the fair without payment.
The toll-keeper’s appointment was clearly not an enviable one. In danger from attack from angry people, he was also an obvious target for robbers. He was, moreover, woken up at all hours of the night. It was not surprising that toll-keepers attempted to augment their meagre pay by cheating their employers and the users of the road alike. No one respected them:
Returning by way of frolic, very late at night, on horseback, to Wimbledon from Addiscombe … Lord Thurlow, then Chancellor, Pitt and Dundas, found the Turnpike Gate situate between Tooting and Streatham, thrown open. Being elevated above their usual prudence, and having no Servant near them, they passed through the gate at a brisk pace, without stopping to pay the Toll; regardless of the remonstrances or threats of the Turnpike man, who, running after them, and believing them to belong to some Highwaymen, who had recently committed depredations on that road, discharged the contents of his Blunderbuss at their backs. Happily he did no injury.5
Turnpike trusts, which could be sold like any other business, were valuable properties: Lewis Levi, a rich stockbroker, paid £12,000 for the lease of the Tyburn turnpike trust and it proved a sound investment.6 But turnpikes, naturally, much increased the cost of travelling. James Woodforde paid £4 8s for his fare from Oxford to London in 1774, a distance of 100 miles; and by the end of the century he would have been charged considerably more. A journey from Scotland to London undertaken by stage-coach by Thomas Somerville in 1800 cost him twice as much as the £7 he had paid in 1769. Coach fares were usually about 2½d a mile in summer and 3d in winter.7
Yet if journeys were more expensive, they were also much quicker. In 1700 a journey from Norwich to London had taken fifty hours, by 1800 it took no more than nineteen; the ninety hours of travel between Manchester and London was reduced to thirty-three, and the 256 between Edinburgh and London to sixty. Travellers had to wait until the nineteenth century before the road improvement schemes of Thomas Telford and John McAdam were completed. But by 1800 many road surfaces were incomparably better than they had been before. The enterprising John Metcalf, though blinded by smallpox at the age of six, had built over 500 miles of good roads in Yorkshire and Lancashire when he relinquished road-making for the cotton business in 1792. Main roads were provided with milestones for the first time since the days of the Romans. After an Act of 1793 they had more signposts as well; and for the convenience of travellers there were road atlases.
The frequency and extent of services had also much improved and cross-country connections had been established. There were forty daily coaches from Birmingham, fifty-four from Manchester; the ‘Exeter Flying Machine’ from Bath took up passengers there from the Oxford, Newbury and Reading coaches; at Bristol it connected with the Gloucester, Worcester and Birmingham coaches, and at its destination, Exeter, with the coach going on to Plymouth. There were five daily coaches from Bath to London, the first leaving the terminal at five in the morning, the last at nine at night.
The variety of private and public transport was extraordinary. The Turnpike Act of 1803 mentioned coaches, calashes, barouches, chariots, landaus, berlins, chaises, chaises marines, cars, chairs, caravans, hearses and litters. There were also phaetons, light, open, doorless, four-wheeled carriages with two seats which dashing young men drove at breakneck speed to the constant irritation of coachmen. For larger parties there were post-chaises which could be hired complete with postilions; for the public at large there were stage-coaches – much improved in comfort since the substitution of steel springs for leather – and mail-coaches.
These had been projected by John Palmer, a Bath theatre proprietor who on the journeys he made looking for talented actors, had observed how slow and inefficient the state post was, letters commonly taking three days to reach London from Bath. There had been no postal services at all until 1635 when the royal posts were made available to the public by the establishment of a General Post in London to carry letters out along the main post roads. Postage was charged according to the distance carried and, until the development of cross-country posts, all mail had to be sent through London. Even after cross-country posts had been established, the system was extremely slow, since letters were carried by postboys and postmen often riding very old horses.8
Postmen were much abused. Until the end of the century, when they were provided with red suits faced and piped with blue, they had no uniforms and were considered ‘rather an inferior set of men’. There were frequent complaints of them failing to blow their horns to give notice of their coming, of them being late with their deliveries, of them delaying their journeys on the least excuse, of them staying indoors in bad weather like the postman who takes shelter from the rain in the kitchen of Framley Parsonage and accepts a bowl of tea and a slice of buttered toast, though ‘the wery ’edges ’as eyes’, he says, and he is reported to the postmaster in Silverbridge if he as much as stops on his rounds to pick a blackberry.9 ‘The post is grown very indolent,’ runs a typical complaint in the Verney Letters of 1753, ‘and takes it into his head not to call here unless he pleases; and on Thursday last our letters did not go. He said
it was out of his way to call from Bicester to Wimslow, and he could not.’10
There were also frequent complaints about the expense of the post. In London, William Dockwra had set up a private penny post service towards the end of the seventeenth century. He had announced that ‘Letters or Pacquets under a Pound Weight’ would be conveyed ‘to and from all parts within the Cities of London and Westminster; and the Out Parishes … for One Penny’, to be paid by the sender. An extra penny was later charged for deliveries within ten miles of the General Letter Office; and this 2d rate was increased to 3d in 1711. Sending letters outside the London area was more costly still, and by the end of the century was considered bv many to be prohibitive. ‘Your letter is charged 8d,’ a London clerk told one of his correspondents in 1717, ‘but I have cheated Mr Pitt at that rate out of 3s 4d by having sent five letters by wagon.’ Others asked those who were allowed to send letters free – such as officials in government service and Members of Parliament – to frank their own letters for them. A country parson wrote to Horace Walpole, Member for Lynn, in 1766 asking him to frank an enclosed letter ‘by directing it … in his own Hand’, according to the Franking Act of 1764. It was not until 1840 that a uniform penny rate covering all places in the British Isles was established in accordance with proposals outlined in Rowland Hill’s Post Office Reform.
With his wide experience of the defects of the postal services of his day, John Palmer proposed that mail should be carried in coaches which were to have armed guards, to travel at a speed of eight or nine, miles an hour, and to carry no outside passengers. The officials of the Post Office declared that Palmer’s proposals were impracticable; and, when the government nevertheless decided that they should be put to the test on the London to Bristol road in August 1784, the local postmasters on the route had to be strongly warned against putting obstructions in their way. The trial runs were so promising that the Treasury suggested that the mail-coach service should be extended to Norwich, Nottingham, Liverpool and Manchester; and a year later its facilities were extended all over the country from Swansea to Birmingham, from Leeds to Dover, Exeter to Shrewsbury. By 1786 there was a regular mail-coach service between London and Edinburgh.
The four passengers inside the mail-coaches travelled in greater comfort and safety, and at far greater speed, than they did in the ordinary stagecoaches. De Quincey wrote of their marvellous velocity: ‘We heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give [like the railway trains which were to replace them] but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest among brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs.’11
Travelling by mail-coach, however, was not cheap: a seat on the London to Bristol run cost 28s in 1784. And the quality of the service offered in the inns en route was highly variable. There were some truly dreadful places. At Windsor, Carl Moritz was shown a room which ‘much resembled a prison for malefactors’, and upon asking for an alternative, he was advised to go on to Slough. Eventually, he found what seemed a more promising place in Windsor, but here he was also told, by a sneering chambermaid, to go elsewhere when he complained of the room he was offered. Eventually the innkeeper found him another room which he was obliged to share with a fellow-guest who proved to be drunk. ‘Right under this bedroom was a tap-room,’ Moritz said. ‘The floor shook. Drinking songs were sung … I was hardly able to sleep with such a noise and bustle, and had just dozed off a little when my sleeping-partner arrived, possibly one of those from the tap-room, who knocked into my bed. With great difficulty he found [his own] and threw himself onto it just as he was – clothes, boots and all.’ In the dining-room the waiter served him grumpily and afterwards demanded a tip. ‘I gave him three halfpence,’ Moritz recorded, ‘on which he saluted me with the heartiest “God damn you, Sir!” I had ever heard. At the door stood the cross maid, who also accosted me with “Pray remember the chambermaid!” “Yes, yes,” said I, “I shall long remember your most ill-mannered behaviour, and shameful incivility”; and so I gave her nothing.’12
Travellers were often required to share a room, as Moritz had been, though now such inns as the one in Derbyshire – where, so Celia Fiennes said, there were four beds in a room and sometimes three people in each of them – were now rarely encountered. Nor was it likely that the traveller would come across an inn like the Rose and Crown at Nether Stowey where John Taylor, the Thames waterman turned poet, stayed in the seventeenth century and waited three hours for the boiled beef and carrots he had ordered. After this exasperating delay he was told that there was no beef: would he make do with fried eggs and parsley? Two hours later he was told that there were no eggs either. He went out to try to find some bread and butter.13
Yet, if inns were not so crowded or so ill-run, the service in many of them left much to be desired. A French traveller in Dover who could get no one to attend to him in the main inn in the town and so helped himself to what he could find in the kitchen was turned out of his room at three o’clock in the morning by servants who told him it was needed for someone else.14 English travellers were likely to fare no better, being often troubled by flies and sometimes by rats as was Dr Syntax who threw his bolster and pillow and his shoes at them, but could not stop them eating his wig until an ostler came up to deal with them with two fierce cats.15 Arthur Young classified all the inns where he had stayed during the travels which resulted in A Tour through the Southern Counties. Many of them were either ‘bad’ or ‘dirty’, or ‘dear’. The George at Winchester was both ‘dirty and dear’, but that at least was also ‘civil’.16
By the end of the century the food and accommodation at inns were both much improved, and the prices quite moderate, the more so the further the coach travelled from London.
My father [George Colman the Younger recalled] frequently observed upon the gradual lowering of charges in proportion to the distance from London: the articles enumerated in a bill for dinner, which were then cheap, not only grew cheaper as we went on, but, when we reach’d the northern counties were not enumerated at all; and, instead of swelling the account with a roast fowl, sauce for ditto, potato, melted butter for ditto, to poach’d eggs, to cheese, to toasted ditto, &c. &c., the items were all consolidated under the head of ‘EATING,’ against which was regularly placed the sum of One Shilling; and this for no scanty meal, but plenty of everything; fish, flesh, and fowl, and excellent of their kind.17
An Irish gentleman travelling in England at about the time of which Colman wrote, paid only 6d at the Liori, Liverpool, for ‘a very good supper, consisting of veal cutlets, pigeons, asparagus, lamb and salad, apple-pie and tarts’.18 At inns like this the bedrooms were also comfortable, well finished with four-poster beds, chairs, wash-stands and carpets; they had fires in the grates and warming-pans between the sheets.
Some inns were now very large establishments. The London Inn at Exeter had ‘a complement of five hundred horses’; at the White Hart at Bath guests were met by liveried footmen; while at the George and Blue Boar, Holborn, the starting point for the coach to Glasgow, there were forty bedrooms, stabling for over fifty horses and seven coach-houses.19
When Tom Brown went to Rugby for his first term in the 1830s the journey which Thomas Hughes described and the inns at which the coach stopped were much the same as they had been thirty years before. Tom was woken up at half past two in the morning at the Peacock Inn, Islington, by the bootboy’s voice: ‘Now, Sir, time to get up if you please. Tally-ho coach for Leicester ’ll be round in half an hour, and don’t wait for nobody.’ Having drunk a cup of coffee and eaten a biscuit, Tom said goodbye to his father and rushed out to climb on to the coach while the guard, having examined them by the lamps, threw a bundle of parcels into the hind boot and jumped up beside him as the coach rattled off, forty-five seconds after it had first pulled up. Tom was very cold, despite his scarf and his Petersham coat and the straw with which the guard muffled his feet
and the oat sack he pulled over his knees. But
it had its pleasures, the old dark ride … There was the music of the rattling harness, and the ring of the horses’ feet on the hard road, and the glare of the two bright lamps through the steaming hoar-frost over the leaders’ ears into the darkness; and the cheery toot of the guard’s horn to warn some drowsy pikeman or the ostler at the next change.
At dawn the coach stops at a wayside inn where the coachman, guard and passengers all get down to drink a glass of purl as they stand before the fire. They are soon off again through the morning countryside, passing a market-cart or two, men in smock-frocks going to work, pipes in their mouths, a pack of hounds jogging along to a distant meet at the heel of the huntsman’s hack, an early up-coach which they approach at eleven miles an hour, the coachmen gathering up their horses and passing one another with the accustomed lift of the elbow. And then, as the coachman calls out, ‘Twenty minutes here gentlemen’, the coach stops at another inn for breakfast.
There is the low dark wainscoted room hung with sporting prints; the hat-stand, with a whip or two standing up in it belonging to bagmen, who are still snug in bed, by the door; the blazing fire, with the quaint old glass over the mantelpiece, in which is stuck a large card with the list of the meets for the week of the county hounds. The table covered with the whitest of cloths and of china, and bearing a pigeon-pie, ham, round of cold boiled beef cut from a mammoth ox, and the great loaf of household bread on a wooden trencher. And here comes in the stout head waiter, puffing under a tray of hot viands; kidneys and a steak, transparent rashers and poached eggs, buttered toast and muffins, coffee and tea, all smoking hot. The table can never hold it all; the cold meats are removed to the sideboard, they were only put on for show, and to give us an appetite.20
33 Hunters, Poachers and Smugglers
The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only) Page 47