Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

EARLY DAYS ON THE LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM RAILWAY.

The Holyhead Road: THE MAIL-COACH ROAD TO DUBLIN

By Charles G. Harper

Author of “The Brighton Road,” “The Portsmouth Road,” “The Dover Road,” “The Bath Road,” “The Exeter Road,” “The Great North Road,” and “The Norwich Road”

Illustrated by the Author, and from Old-Time Prints and Pictures

Vol. II. BIRMINGHAM TO HOLYHEAD

London: Chapman & Hall

ltd. 1902

[All rights reserved]

PRINTED BY

HAZELL, WATSON, AND VINEY, LD.

LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

List of ILLUSTRATIONS

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

Birmingham to Holyhead

THE OLD ROAD FROM MENAI VILLAGE TO HOLYHEAD

BIRMINGHAM TO HOLYHEAD

I

There are said to be no fewer than a hundred and forty different ways of spelling the name of Birmingham, all duly vouched for by old usage; but it is not proposed in these pages to recount them, or to follow the arguments of those who have contended for its derivation from “Bromwicham.” It is singular that in the first mention we have of the place, in Domesday Book, it is spelt “Bermingham,” almost exactly as it is to-day, and this lends much authority to the view that we get the place-name from an ancient Saxon tribe or family of Beormingas.

When the original Beormingas, the Sons of Beorm (whoever he may have been), settled here, in the dim Saxon past, they founded better than they knew; but they chose a hill-top, a place where no river runs, unless we choose thus to dignify the little stream called the Rea. This lack of watercourses mattered nothing at all to mediæval Birmingham, but when, in spite of all disabilities, the place rose into commercial importance, the want began to be severely felt, and herculean have been the efforts in modern times to effect a proper water-supply.

Little but scattered mention is heard of Birmingham and its smiths before the Civil War, but when that struggle broke out, they were heard of to some purpose. Its 4000 inhabitants in 1643 were Puritans to a man, and warlike. They furnished 15,000 sword-blades for Cromwell’s troops, and at a convenient opportunity waylaid the King’s carriage and seized it, his furniture, and his plate. For these enormities Prince Rupert came later from Daventry and punished them severely in a battle on Camp Hill, overlooking the town. Many Birmingham men were slain that day, and eighty houses burnt; the whole affair piteously related in a tract of that time called “The Bloody Prince; or, a Declaration of the Most Cruell Practises of Prince Rupert and the rest of the Cavaliers, in fighting against God and the true Ministers of his Church.” A woodcut intended to portray that sanguinary Prince appears on the cover, with Birmingham flaming furiously in the background; Daventry in the rear. The rest of the Cavaliers appear to be manœuvring somewhere else; at any rate, Rupert is alone, on horseback, with a mild expression of countenance and a big pistol.

Twenty-two years later the Plague depopulated the town, but in another twenty-three years it had grown to double its former size, and by 1791 numbered between 70,000 and 80,000. Yet it had no Parliamentary representation until 1832.

That Birmingham is seated on a hill is not so evident to railway travellers, but he who comes to it by road is well advised of the fact at Bull Ring, where the hilly entrance confronts him. Bull Ring is old Birmingham of a hundred years and more ago; the nucleus of the town, and little altered since David Cox drew his picture of the market there. The market remains, but there has come about since his day an extraordinary popular appreciation of the beauty of flowers, so that, instead of the fowls pictured largely in his view, the crowded stalls are radiant with blooms of every sort; cut flowers, and growing plants.

Here stands, as ever, St. Martin’s, the mother-church of Birmingham, where the ancient manorial lords of the place lie; those de Berminghams whose last representative was choused out of his rights in 1545. Here is that statue of Nelson for whose proper cleansing a patriotic tradesman left by will sixpence a week; and here occurred the Wesley riots of 1742 and the Chartist Riot of 1839. When Charles Wesley sought to preach, the people set the church bells a-ringing to drown his voice, and then began to pelt him with dirt and turnips; but the political riot was a much more serious affair, resulting in the pillaging of shops and houses, and immense damage.

II

In Birmingham, close upon four hundred years ago, Leland found but one street, yet that street was full of smiths, making knives and “all manner of cuttinge tooles, and many loriners that make bittes, and a great many naylors. Soe that a great part of the towne is maintained by smithes, who have their iron and sea-cole out of Staffordshire.”

Not only has Birmingham grown out of all knowledge since that time, but it has largely changed its trades. Sheffield has taken away the pick of the cutlery trade, and that of the loriners has its chief seat at Walsall; but Birmingham now makes everything, from a monster engine to a pin’s head, and in the murderous art of manufacturing fire-arms is pre-eminent.

“She is,” observed an enthusiastic writer, “in the truest sense the benefactress of the universal man, from the crowned head to the savage of the wilderness.” To the crowned heads, for example—or to their governments—Birmingham supplies stands of arms and ammunition; and to the savage, guns warranted to hurt no one but he who uses them. Civilisation is thus heavily indebted to Birmingham, and religion too; for if the heathen, who “in his blindness bows down to wood and stone,” is no longer restricted to those two materials, by reason of Birmingham industriously supplying little tin and brass gods by wholesale, and at extremely low prices, to Africa or India, yet on Sundays the godly folks of her hundred churches and chapels liberally subscribe to missionary funds for spreading Christianity in strange lands, and thus help to discredit the heathen Vishnus, Sivas, Hanumans, and assorted Mumbo-Jumbos they export.

BULL RING.       From a Print after David Cox.

“Birmingham,” said Burke, a hundred years ago, “is the toyshop of Europe.” Fancy articles in steel and paste; buckles, sword-hilts, buttons, and a thousand other trifles were made, for home or export; among them the sham, or “Brummagem” jewellery, and the base coin that long cast a slur upon the town. Things coming from Birmingham were in those times rightly suspect. One of its industries was the making of “silver” buckles of a villainous kind of cheap white metal, called from its nature “soft tommy.” A tale is told of the owner of the factory where this precious stuff was made up, going through one of the workshops and hearing a workman cursing the man who would chance to wear the pair of buckles he was making.

“Why,” asked the astonished employer, “do you do that?”

“Well,” replied the workman, “whoever wears these buckles is bound to curse the man that made them, and so I thought I would be the first.”

Those were the days when it was said that if you gave a guinea and a copper kettle to a Birmingham manufacturing jeweller he would turn you out a hundred guineas’ worth of jewellery!

Things are very different now. The trades of Birmingham seem almost countless in their number; many of them conducted on a scale large enough for each one to suffice a small township of workers. Brass-founding, tube-making, gun-smithing, pin-making, wire-drawing, screw-turning, gold-smithing, electro-plating, tinplate working, coining (in the legitimate kind), steel pen-making—these are but a few of the countless industries to whose skirts clings for livelihood a population of half a million.

When Mr. Pickwick visited Birmingham, he repaired to the “Old Royal” hotel. Where is the “Old Royal” now? Ask of the winds—nay, consult the histories of Birmingham, and you shall learn. But if the old hotel and many of its fellows be gone, at least the description of the entrance to the town holds good, and “the dingy hue of every object visible, the murky atmosphere, the paths of cinders and brick-dust” are phrases that awake echoes of recollection in the breasts of those who know the town of old: but “the dense smoke issuing heavily forth from high toppling chimneys, blackening and obscuring everything around,” is not so descriptive of the Birmingham of to-day. For fully realising that picture, and the added touches of the “deep red glow of furnace fires, the glare of distant lights, the ponderous wagons laden with clashing rods of iron, or piled with heavy goods,” one must journey to Dudley, where such things may be seen and heard in a hellish crescendo: Birmingham has largely put those things in the background. In Mr. Pickwick’s time “the hum of labour resounded from every house, lights gleamed from the long casement windows in the attic storeys, and the whirr of wheels and noise of machinery shook the trembling walls, and the din of hammers, the rushing of steam, and the dead, heavy clanking of engines was the harsh music that arose from every quarter”; but most of these things are nowadays decently hid in purlieus remote, or masked from the chief streets by the towering modern buildings of hotels, banks, assurance offices, and all the hundred-and-one parasitical things of a limited liability age, that fasten like vermin on the producing body.

Birmingham became a City on January 11th, 1889. It is a City of two fine streets, surrounded by many miles of formless, featureless, dull and commonplace (or, at their worst, hideous and squalid) houses, workshops, and factories of every size and description. New Street was only new at a period over a century ago. Corporation Street was formed in 1871 by boldly cutting through a mass of slums. In those two thoroughfares, and the open space by the Town Hall to which they both lead, is included almost everything of architectural note. In their course are to be found the best and most attractive shops, and the principal banks and commercial offices. The rest is merely of a local and provincial character.

The geographical, municipal, and political centre is, of course, that spot where the Town Hall stands, a grim and massive building in the Corinthian style, with that air of age and permanency about its rusticated basement, as though when the Anglo-Saxons came they had found it here, the relic of an ancient civilisation. But the Town Hall can lay no claim to antiquity, built as it was in 1832. Around it, in an open space of a singularly irregular shape, are the General Post Office, the Art Gallery, the great Free Library, and other municipal buildings proper to a city so rich and prosperous; and, scattered about the pavements, a miscellaneous collection of statues, facing towards New Street Station, as though they formed some kind of deputation assembled there to welcome visitors. It is a very oddly assorted crowd, captained by Queen Victoria, and formed of such varied items as Joseph Priestley (who with his burning glass looks as though he were critically examining a bad coin), Peel, John Skirrow, Wright, George Dawson, James Watt, and Sir Josiah Mason. In the little corner called Chamberlain Square the curious will find a monument to the energy and enterprise (the “pushfulness” as those who love him not might call it) of Joseph Chamberlain, without whose work and initiative Birmingham would not own, as it does to-day, its gas, water, and tramways, and could not show such evidences of progress in new and handsome streets and model government.

It is a far cry from the Red Radical days of Birmingham’s great Mayor in 1874 to those of the Colonial Secretary, a pillar of the Empire and the darling of Duchesses. Perhaps no other man has, politically, travelled so far, estranged so many friends, or made such strangely alien alliances, with the result that his sheaf has been exalted over his brethren these years past. Hence the extreme bitterness of the hatred his name arouses in certain circles.

The memorial to his work on the comparatively small stage of Birmingham, before he trod the boards of Westminster, takes the form of a Gothic canopied fountain, with a profile portrait medallion, whereon one may trace in the aggressive, sharp-pointed nose a striking likeness to William Pitt, and that suggestion of the crafty fox the venomous caricaturists of a later day have seized and used to such advantage.

III

Sir William Dugdale, in his diary, under date of July 16th, 1679, mentions the first Birmingham coach we have any notice of. He says, “I came out of London by the stage-coach of Bermicham to Banbury.” That is all we learn of specifically Birmingham coaches until 1731, when Rothwell’s began to ply to London in two days and a half, according to the old coaching bill still preserved.

Afterwards came the Flying Coach of 1742, followed in 1758 by an “improved Birmingham Coach,” with the legend “Friction Annihilated” prominent on the axle-boxes. This the Annual Register declared to be “perhaps the most useful invention in mechanics this age has produced.” Much virtue lingered in that “perhaps,” for nothing more was heard of that wonderful device.

In 1812 the Post Office established a Birmingham Mail, and great was the local rejoicing on May 26th, when, attended by eight mail-guards in full uniform, adorned with blue ribbons, it paraded the streets. After two hours’ procession, when coachman and guards were feasted with wine, biscuits, and sandwiches, the Mail set out for London from the “Swan” Hotel, amid the ringing of St. Martin’s bells and the cheering of the assembled thousands.

Eight years later it was estimated that Birmingham owned eighty-four coaches. Forty of these were daily, and most plied on bye-roads.

OLD BIRMINGHAM COACHING BILL.

BIRMINGHAM

STAGE-COACH,

In Two Days and a half; begins May the 24th, 1731.

SETS out from the Swan-Inn in Birmingham, every Monday at six a Clock in the Morning, through Warwick, Banbury and Alesbury, to the Red Lion Inn in Aldersgate street, London, every Wednesday Morning: And returns from the said Red Lion Inn every Thursday Morning at five a Clock the same Way to the Swan-Inn in Birmingham every Saturday, at 21 Shillings each Passenger, and 18 Shillings from Warwick, who has liberty to carry 14 Pounds in Weight, and all above to pay One Penny a Pound.

Perform d (if God permit)

By Nicholas Rothwell.

The Weekly Waggon sets out every Tuesday from the Nagg’s-Head in Birmingham, to the Red Lion Inn aforesaid, every Saturday, and returns from the said Inn every Monday, to the Nagg’s-Head in Birmingham every Thursday.

Note. By the said Nicholas Rothwell of Warwick, all Persons may be furnished with a By Coach Chariot, Chaise or Hearse, with a Mourning Coach and able Horses, to any Part of Great Britain, at reasonable Rates And also Saddle Horses to be had.

From 1822 to 1826 Birmingham witnessed a great improvement in its coaches. Waddell owned the two most prominent yards in the town, but had many ardent competitors. In 1822 the “Tally-ho” was established, shortly to be followed by the hotly competing “Independent,” “Real,” and “Patent” Tally-hoes. Supposed to keep a pace of ten miles an hour, they no sooner left the town behind than they started racing, to the terror of the nervous and the delight of the sporting passengers. Annually, on the First of May, they were spurred to superhuman and super-equine exertions, and, we are told, covered the hundred and eight miles between Birmingham and London “under seven hours.” How much under is not stated, but as an even seven hours gives us fifteen miles an hour, including stops, the pace must have been furious. Harry Tresslove, the coachman of the “Independent Tally Ho,” always galloped the five-mile stage between Dunchurch and the “Black Dog,” Stretton-upon-Dunsmore, in eighteen minutes.

The existence of all stage-coaches being furiously competitive, they could not afford to be quiet and plain, like the Mails. “Once I remember,” says De Quincey, “being on the top of the Holyhead Mail between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham, some ‘Tally-ho’ or ‘Highflyer,’ all flaunting with green and gold, came up alongside of us. What a contrast with our royal simplicity of form and colour in this plebeian wretch! The single ornament on our dark ground of chocolate colour was the mighty shield of the Imperial arms, but emblazoned in proportion as modest as a signet-ring bears to a seal of office. Even this was displayed only on a single panel, whispering, rather than proclaiming, our relations to the mighty State; whilst the beast from Birmingham, our green-and-gold friend from false, fleeting, perjured Brummagem, had as much writing and painting on its sprawling flanks as would have puzzled a decipherer from the tombs of Luxor. For some time this Birmingham machine ran along by our side—a piece of familiarity that already of itself seemed to me sufficiently Jacobinical. But all at once a movement of the horses announced a desperate intention of leaving us behind. ‘Do you see that?’ I said to the coachman. ‘I see,’ was his short answer. He was wide awake, yet he waited longer than seemed prudent, for the horses of our audacious opponent had a disagreeable air of freshness and power. But his motive was loyal; his wish was that the Birmingham conceit should be full-blown before he froze it. When that seemed right he unloosed, or, to speak by a stronger word, he sprang his unknown resources: he slipped our Royal horses like cheetahs, or hunting-leopards, after the affrighted game. How they could retain such a reserve of fiery power after the work they had accomplished seemed hard to explain. But on our side, besides the physical superiority, was a tower of moral strength, namely, the King’s Name. Passing them without an effort, as it seemed, we threw them into the rear with so lengthening an interval between us as proved in itself the bitterest mockery of their presumption; whilst our guard blew back a shattering blast of triumph that was really too painfully full of derision.”

The “Emerald” was a fast night coach between London and Birmingham, “driven,” says Colonel Corbet, in his book, An Old Coachman’s Chatter, “by Harry Lee, whose complexion was of a very peculiar colour, almost resembling that of a bullock’s liver—the fruit of strong potations of ‘early purl’ or ‘dog’s nose,’ taken after the exertions of the night and before going to bed.”

The last coach put on the road between London and Birmingham, we are told, on the same authority, was in 1837. It was a very fast day mail, started to run to Birmingham and then on to Crewe, where it transferred mails and passengers to the railway for Liverpool. It was horsed by Sherman, and timed at twelve miles an hour.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

WEDNESBURY.

As for Bilston, where is the man heroic enough to sound its praises? Passengers by railway, passing through Bilston, see only deserted slag-heaps, cinder mounds, and a general area of desolation, but the road reveals Bilston in an added squalor of grimy houses and frowzy courts. The collieries and ironworks that created the town are things of the past, and their ruins only remain to tell of what it was a century ago. Surely never was there a more second-hand looking place than Bilston is now, with its long street apparently divided between old-clothes shops, “marine stores,” pawnbrokers’ establishments, and public-houses. Even Bilston gritstone, once prized for the making of grindstones, is under a cloud, and the old saying, that “a Dudley man and a Bilston grindstone may be found all the world over,” takes a new significance in the fact that the enterprising native, if he wishes scope for his enterprise, must go forth in the world to places as yet unexhausted. But the decay of the town perhaps dates more certainly from the fearful times of the cholera epidemic of 1882, when Bilston suffered more severely than any other place; when so many died that help had to be brought from other districts to bury them; and when hundreds of children were left fatherless and motherless in the stricken town. Of a population numbering 14,492, no fewer than 742 died.

You enter Bilston across a tract of abandoned coal mines, and leave it for a similar waste. The forlorn and derelict condition of these deserted mining fields, strewn with shale and piled with fantastic, but always grim and forbidding, rubbish heaps, is a blot upon these busy districts, and a reproach to the condition of affairs that permits such things. Apart from the certainty that the mineral wealth of a country should be the property of the State rather than of the individual landowner, the question of the deserted coal-fields is a very serious one. Here, in these barren and absolutely unproductive wastes, the cynical selfishness of the landed class is abundantly evident. The coal measures exhausted and the collieries closed down, the land is unoccupied and contributes nothing in rates or taxes. It may lie thus, unfenced and hideously sterile, until such time as it is wanted for building operations. In many instances it will never be required for that purpose, and so much land has thus permanently become as useless as the Sahara or the stony deserts of Arabia. There is no reason, beyond individual self-interest, why such a state of things should exist. Before the pits were sunk and coal dug, these wild and uncared-for tracts were in many cases cultivated fields, from which the soil was removed when the colliery companies began operations. In leasing ground for this purpose, landowners usually insert a clause protecting themselves in the event of the coal being exhausted and the works deserted; a clause binding lessees’ to restore the surface soil, or to pay a fine of £30 an acre. In practice, it is much cheaper to pay the £30 fine on every acre than it would be to remove the refuse-heaps and to spread the nutritious soil over the land again; hence these abominations of desolation that else might become fields once more, grow the kindly fruits of the earth again, employ industry, and contribute toward the rates and taxes of the community.

The old red-brick toll-house still standing by the wayside, about two miles from Wolverhampton, where Gibbet Lane toll-gate once barred the way, is in midst of these wastes. The modern settlement of Monmore Green, as little like the picture of a village green, conjured up by its name, as possible, is beyond. It was here in September, 1829, that the “Greyhound” coach came to grief on its way to Birmingham. The breaking of an axle, that fruitful source of disaster, threw the coach over, and of the five “outsides” who jumped for their lives, one was killed, and the other four badly injured.

The great and progressive town of Wolverhampton now looms ahead, a busy and thriving contrast with the scenes just passed, and a place second to none in the forward strides made towards improvement in these days of its expansion.

IX

The old entrance into Wolverhampton, before the making of Cleveland Road in 1830, was by the narrow Bilston Street, still remaining as an object-lesson in old-time thoroughfares, and thence by Snow Hill along Dudley Street, and so into what was then called “High Green,” now known as “Queen Square.” Darlington Street did not come into being until 1821, and before that time the rest of the way through the town and out at the other end, followed a devious course, by lanes long since swept away, or widened out of recognition. Coaches changing horses at the “Peacock” in Snow Hill, a house still existing as the “Swan and Peacock,” had the privilege of driving through its yard, and so by a short cut into Bell Street, across into Barn Street (long since re-christened Salop Street), and right away for Chapel Ash, and the open country again. The coaches thus privileged were the “Tally-ho,” “Hibernia,” “Crown Prince,” “Emerald,” “Reindeer,” and “Beehive.” The mails and other coaches using the “Swan” in High Green, or Market Place as it was indifferently called, or the “Lion” in North Street close by, had a longer journey, and threaded a mazy course utterly vanished and forgotten since the broad and spacious thoroughfare of Darlington Street was made.

Wolverhampton has nothing to do with wolves. It was never the “wolves’ town” of Dr. Mandell Creighton’s contemptibly childish etymology, but probably derived its name from Wulfrun, sister of Ethelred II. She it was who in 994 founded the great collegiate church of St. Peter, that, collegiate no longer, stands on the crest of the waterless ridge forming the site of the town. It is true that there had been both a church and a town here before that time, for Wulfhere, first Christian king of Mercia, dedicated a church to St. Mary at “Hamtun” in the year 657, and the names of both founders have such close points of similarity that there must ever remain some uncertainty as to which of them really gave Hampton its distinguishing prefix. It may be noted as a curious fact that the town is still known in the surrounding districts as “Hampton.”

Although it is not approached from Birmingham and Bilston by any appreciable hill, Wolverhampton is seen by one standing in Queen Square—now, as ever, the centre of the town to occupy an elevated site, sloping rapidly towards the west. It is, indeed, situated, very curiously, three hundred feet above sea-level, and on the great watershed dividing the river-system of the Midlands. To the east flows the Trent into the German Ocean, and to the west the Severn and its tributaries empty themselves into the Bristol Channel; but, decreeing though it does the destinies of those rivers, this ridge itself sends forth only the rivulet called the Smestow.

Wolverhampton is (not very happily) called the “Capital of the Black Country.” That title is misleading, for the reason that, although it has grown enormously, and has long ceased to be the agricultural market-town it once was, it stands, not in the centre, but at the very edge of that busy and grimy tract. Coming through the Black Country from Birmingham you suddenly, on taking leave of Wolverhampton, step over the threshold again into a land of grass and trees and clear sunshine.

It is a fine and an interesting town, not wholly given up to factories and soot, and still keeping a hold upon ancient memories in the great church of St. Peter, a noble building that, about 1450, rose upon the site of Wulfrun’s church, and presents as magnificent an example of the Perpendicular style as anything to be found in the Midlands. Much might be said of St. Peter’s if this were the place for it—of its rich interior, of the curious and beautiful carved stone pulpit, and its grotesque lion, goggling with its stony eyes, erected about 1480, and of the life-sized bronze statue of Admiral Sir Richard Leveson, by Le Sœur, that supreme artist who wrought the beautiful equestrian statue of Charles I. at Charing Cross. But these pages are not for lengthy archæological disquisitions, and so St. Peter’s must needs he thus summarised, and even that fruitful source of angry discussion, the so-called “Dane’s Cross” in the churchyard, must be but mentioned. It is not a cross, but a circular pillar of red sandstone, standing twenty feet high, and covered with interlacing ornament that may be either Saxon or Norman, and is thought by some to be the memorial of a seventh century battle of Tettenhall.

St. Peter’s and its surroundings form the pleasantest part of Wolverhampton, and though electric tramways and the press of commerce make the neighbourhood anything but reverend, the lawns and beautiful gardens on whose grass and variegated flowers the ancient tower looks down prove that, although the town is very earnest on the subject of getting on in the world, it does not, for all the striving, forget all those gracious things that make life better worth the living.

Of old times there is little, besides the church, remaining, and the one notable thing, curiously enough, is, or was, connected with the church itself. This is the old Deanery, built in the reign of Charles II., and reminiscent of the time when the oddly conjoined Deanery of Wolverhampton and Windsor lasted, together with the collegiate establishment dissolved in 1846. The Deanery, a grand old mansion of red brick, standing in its own grounds, is now a Conservative Club.

To ask a catalogue of what they make in modern manufacturing Wolverhampton would mean a lengthy and varied list; but to specialise is an easier task. Locks stand at the head of all products, with more than sixty firms—Chubb’s the most generally known—engaged in a weekly output of close upon 400,000 locks; probably as eloquent a testimonial to the world’s ingrained dishonesty as anything likely to be advanced. Thirty firms make the attendant keys. Tin-plate working and japanning come next, with cycle-manufacturing; and at the end of a long list of hardware industries, five “soot merchants.” There must be great scope for their business in this neighbourhood of the Black Country, and the only wonder is that there are not more of them.

X

Little indeed is left of the Wolverhampton of the coaching era—a fact not very greatly to be regretted, because the old town had no architectural pretensions, but a great many squalid cottages and lanes, of no real interest or antiquity. High Green was the exception. It must be borne in mind that the Wolverhampton of that time was a very small place compared with the great manufacturing town of to-day, and that the “neat market-town” of Wigstead and Rowlandson’s tour in 1797 contained only some 11,000 inhabitants. To-day it numbers 96,000, and extends along the Holyhead Road as far as Tettenhall, a distance of nearly two miles, more than a mile beyond what was, a century ago, the “small village” of Chapel Ash, a place forming now an integral part of the town. High Green was a place well named in the adjectival part of its title, for it occupied the highest part of the commanding ridge on which Wolverhampton was first built. Whatever there was of a green on its site has vanished these centuries ago, and as a market-place it has long been superseded by the great market-buildings near by, and by the Corn Exchange; both erected about 1851. Before that time it was thronged with the stalls of butchers, and with country folk come to sell their vegetables, fruit, eggs, butter, poultry, and other produce. Farmers and corn-dealers met there, in the open air, careless of the weather, as their grandfathers and remote ancestors had done before them, holding forth samples of golden grain in their great outstretched palms, and doing business with a hand-shake and a convivial glass at the “Swan,” to the great content of the pigeons that hovered numerously over this then picturesque centre of the old market-town, not yet transformed by the discovery of the mineral wealth of the district.

The “Lion” was the principal inn of old Wolverhampton. It stood on the site now occupied by the Town Hall, and was originally built about 1750. Thirty coaches a day are said to have changed horses in its yard, or to have started from its doors, and under the sway of Thomas Badger, who died in 1799, and of his successor, Richard Evans, it enjoyed for a long series of years the chief posting business. The yellow-jacketed and black-hatted postboys of the “Lion” for nearly three-quarters of a century rode the pigskin, bumped and plied the whip in front of the best in Staffordshire, Shropshire, and Warwickshire.

Richard Evans was highly successful in the combined parts of coach-master, horse-owner, and innkeeper. The variety of his business was surprising, and his methods matched every shade. He ruled his stable-yards with a passionate storm of objurgatory eloquence, bore himself with a tactful but self-respecting deference to the great ones who honoured his house, was popular with the townspeople who used his assembly-rooms, and at one with the Town Commissioners, a body first established in 1779, and meeting, in those days before Town Halls, under his roof. One of his strange guests was the body of the Duke of Dorset, killed in 1815 in an Irish hunting-field, and brought to England for sepulture with his forefathers in the Sackville vault at Withyham, in distant Sussex. A kind of lying-in-state, with the public admitted to view, took place at every town where the mournful procession halted. The next year, 1816, Napoleon’s travelling carriage, captured after Waterloo, was here, being shown in the stable-yard for a week at sixpence a head to thousands of country-folk and colliers. The pit-men were not content with gloating over the capture: they wanted to mark their hatred of “Boney” by dragging his carriage out and burning it.

HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1797.       After Rowlandson.

Richard Evans in 1821 sold his coaching business to his son, who took it to the newly built “New Hotel” in Bell Street, itself now a thing of the past. Shortly afterwards he relinquished the “Lion” into other hands, but in a few years the old house began to decline. Landlords and landladies succeeded one another at increasingly frequent intervals, and at last it was closed in 1838, to be used for a period partly as a private house and partly as a chemist’s shop. The growing dignity of the town and of municipal life had by this time begun to demand the provision of a Town Hall, and it was acquired and altered at a large cost for that purpose, only to be found so highly inconvenient that it was pulled down in 1869 and the building erected that now stands upon the site.

Next in importance to the “Lion” was the “Swan,” already mentioned, which stood on the east side of High Green, where Lloyd’s Bank now is. In the old theatre down its yard, built in 1779, the Kembles, Mrs. Siddons, and many another trod the boards, and from the balcony over the “Swan” entrance Daniel O’Connell addressed excited crowds before the passing of the first Reform Bill. Reform, however, did not still political passions, for it was in front of this house that the election riot of 1835 took place, with the result that the military were sent for, the Riot Act read, volleys fired, and several persons—not rioters, but women and children—severely wounded.

It was ill work that destroyed the old “Star and Garter” inn, that stood, a picturesque brick and timber house in Cock Street (since re-named “Victoria Street”) until 1834. In that old house, on a night in 1642, Charles I. slept, on his way from Shrewsbury to London, to be intercepted, and his army defeated, at Edge Hill. The inn was rebuilt and opened again in 1836, with a make-believe “King’s Room,” a spurious bedstead, and such incongruities as portraits of the King and Cromwell on its walls.

Beside these hostelries, and the “Coach and Horses” on Snow Hill, the old inns of Wolverhampton were of a minor sort, where the simpler business-men of those times repaired in the evening to drink a jovial glass and smoke a companionable pipe; to play bowls or quoits and enjoy themselves in what the present generation would consider a very free and easy, not to say low, manner.

HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1826.       From an Old Print.

XI

Perhaps the most striking way of picturing the great changes that have taken place in Wolverhampton in the course of a century is by comparing the different aspects presented by High Green at periods ranging from 1797 to modern times. It has had many changes. Only two features in the series of pictures have remained unaltered during that period: the handsome old brick houses at one corner have survived, and the noble tower of St. Peter’s still looks down upon the scene, as it has done for close upon five hundred years. The series opens with Rowlandson’s spirited drawing, showing the market in full swing. There are the butchers’ and other stalls; there you see a milkmaid, milk-pail on head, and the pack-horse of some country trader in the foreground. On the right hand is a picturesquely gabled, half-timbered shop, selling such incongruous things as toys and oysters: the building covered over with plaster and become an inn, long known as “Cholditch’s,” by the time the next view, taken in 1826, was drawn.

In that view, the coach, making so stately an exit in the direction of Birmingham and London, is the “Prince of Wales,” from Maran’s Hotel, Holyhead, to the “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn. It reached London from Birmingham by way of Henley-in-Arden, Stratford-on-Avon, Woodstock, and Oxford. The imposing-looking coachman with the three-caped coat was Miller, said to have been of Dunstall Hall, reduced in circumstances, and driving a coach as to the manner born. As for the monumental structure, like the second cousin to a lighthouse, standing in the middle of the road, that was erected in 1821 by the “Light Committee” of the town, to celebrate the establishment of the first gasworks and to illuminate the Market-place. As a monument it was successful enough, and the patent refracting gas-lamp that crowned it shed a light visible for miles around; but its height was so great that the Market-place itself remained in darkness. It only served to illuminate the bedroom windows of the surrounding houses and light the good folks to bed. The “Big Candlestick,” as the pit-men of the neighbourhood called it, was a failure, and, after several proposals had been made to crown the pillar with a statue of the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, or other heroes of that time, it was removed in 1842, to be succeeded some years later by that warlike trophy the captured Russian gun, seen in the picture of “High Green, 1860.” Railways had then long abolished coaches, and cabs waiting to be hired form a feature of the scene, eloquent alike of altered manners and of Wolverhampton’s growth. Some of the houses are also seen to have been rebuilt.

HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1860.       From a Contemporary Photograph.

In the “Queen Square” of to-day the gun is replaced by an equestrian statue of the Prince Consort: a Gothic stone bank stands on the site of the old inn, and on the right hand stands a newer new building, with sundry other reconstructions and changes. High Green became “Queen Square” from November, 1866, when Queen Victoria unveiled the statue. History does not tell us why the Prince Consort should have been especially honoured at Wolverhampton, which owed him nothing, nor he it. Local association he had none, and in the placing of his effigy here we find only another example of the tiresome excess of loyalty that has planted statues of Royal personages thickly all over the kingdom, and has produced a dreary and unmeaning repetition of “Victoria” and “Albert” squares, streets, stations, museums, and what not, to the blotting out of really interesting local names that had endured for centuries before the wallowing snob came upon the scene, like some evil pantomime sprite.

Electric tramways now run through Queen Square to all parts of this modern and progressive borough, and new streets and new buildings of both a business and a public character have changed the squalid and formless character of the town into something very different; while pleasant suburbs extend far into the country districts.

XII

At Tettenhall the borough of Wolverhampton ends, and with it the Black Country. Crossing over the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, the road makes direct for Tettenhall Hill, eased in its course by a long embankment in the hollow, and by a deep cutting through the red rocks of the hill-top, but still a formidable rise. The old road, however, was infinitely worse. Its course may still be traced branching off to the left by the “Newbridge Inn,” where the old toll-house used to stand, and plunging down into the hollow where Wolverhampton’s only watercourse, the Smestow brook, trickles under a narrow bridge, thought to enshrine among its stones some remains of Roman masonry. Thence the old way rose steeply, and went partly through grounds now private, and up “Old Hill,” where a bye-road still zig-zags with an extravagant steepness between sheer rocks. Here is the chief part of old Tettenhall village, much the same as it was a hundred years ago, and, with the exception of an ugly modern hotel built on the summit of the rocks, untouched by the life and changes of all the revolutionary years that have passed since Telford cut the new road and left this in a quiet backwater of life.

Tettenhall church and pretty churchyard are cut off from the rest of the village by the modern Holyhead Road. Half-way up the hillside, and overhung with trees, the old-fashioned rural spot overlooks Wolverhampton, seated in smoky majesty on its ridge.

OLD HILL, TETTENHALL.

In the crowded churchyard they show the confiding stranger a stone with the much flattened and battered figure of a woman, and recount the legend of it being the memorial of a seamstress who worked on Sundays, and when reproached for it replied that if it were wrong she hoped her arms would drop off. Her arms dropped off accordingly the next Sunday, when plying her needle! The stone is really a much mutilated effigy from some ancient tomb, cast out of the church so long ago that every feature has been worn away; but it will be noticed that the arms have been hacked off at the shoulders.

THE SABBATH-BREAKING SEAMSTRESS.

On the hill-top is Tettenhall Green, where old road and new meet, and so go past a park and hamlet oddly named “The Wergs” to Wrottesley Park, fenced off for the length of a mile by as ugly a stone wall as it would be possible to find in many a long journey. “The Wergs” is a corruption of the ancient name “Witheges,” itself a mangled form of “withy hedges.” It is probable that the name was derived from the sallows with which some early squatter fenced his land, instead of the rude cut-wood fences of primitive times. Wrottesley Hall, burnt in 1896, still lifts its ruined and blackened walls between the trees.

Five miles beyond Wolverhampton, passing the “Foaming-Jug” Inn, Staffordshire is left behind, and the borders of Shropshire crossed.

XIII

Shropshire is the land of the “proud Salopian.” Of what, you may ask, is the Salopian proud? It may be doubted, however, if the phrase really means more than that the Shropshireman has ever been high-spirited, jealous of his own good name, and quick to wrath. But he has good cause for pride in the fair shire that held out of old against the Welsh in the hazardous centuries when this was part of the Marches, the Debatable Land where the frontiers shifted hither and thither as the Lords Marchers or the Welsh chieftains warred with varying fortunes, and where the Englishman often sowed, and raiding Taffy came and reaped unbidden. Shropshire bore its part well in those centuries of strife, when the Welsh were continually striving to get back their own; for it should not be forgotten that this also was Wales in the dim background of history. More than eleven hundred years ago the Englishman threw the Welshman back upon his rugged hills and out of these fertile plains, and this became part of the great Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. Not only politically a part of that realm, but socially, for war was not an affair of kid gloves in those days, but an affair of race-hatred and extermination, so that when the conquering King Offa had set his rule over what is now Shropshire, those Welshmen who had not fled were slain, and their land occupied by an alien race. So thorough was that change that the very names of the towns and villages were altered, and are either quite forgot or else only survive in the memories of antiquaries. Take a map of England and its neighbouring Wales, and you will find a mysterious earthwork called “Offa’s Dyke,” traced from near Prestatyn, on the Flintshire coast, to Bridge Sollars, on the Wye in Herefordshire. That was the boundary set up by Offa, “the Terrible.” The Shropshire portion of it runs from Chirk, by Llanymynech, Welshpool, Montgomery, and Clun, and to this day not only the place-names, but the people on either side show a distinct cleavage between Saxon and Welsh. In the heart of Shropshire it is difficult to find a trace of the old race. Who but the antiquary knows that before Offa came and seized that town Shrewsbury was “Pengwern”? Yet that was its name. Under the Saxon it became “Scrobbesbyrig,” that is to say “Scrub-borough,” or the Town in the Bush. Two hundred years after Offa and his kingdom had perished, another fierce personage laid his heavy hand upon the Welsh in this region. This was the Norman, Richard Fitz Scrob, to whom Edward the Confessor granted what was not his to give, namely, all the land he could seize from the Welsh on the Borders. The curious similarity of his name to that of “Scrobbesbyrig” has often led to the supposition that he built the first castle of Shrewsbury, and that the place took its name from him. But he certainly built Richard’s castle, on the border, near Ludlow, one of a chain of more than thirty fortresses designed to keep the as yet unconquerable Welsh in check.

From “Scrobbesbyrig,” its capital, Shropshire derived its Saxon name of “Scrobbescire” (pronounced “Shrobshire”), changed in after centuries to its present form; and let it be noted by all who would not earn the contempt of Salopians that the right pronunciation of Shrewsbury follows the derivation, and that to name it as spelled is regarded by all Salopians as a vulgarism. It is “Shrowsbury” to the elect, rhyming with blows, not news.

The name of “Salop,” applied frequently both to shire and county town—whence “Salopian”—is another matter, and difficult of derivation. It comes, say philologists, from “the ancient Erse words, sa, a stream, and lub, a loop,” describing the site of Shrewsbury, encircled as it is by the strange windings of the Severn.

Shropshire remains one of the most exclusive and aristocratic counties in England, as well as one of the wealthiest. It might well have claimed, not so long since, to be the thirstiest also, the Squire as an institution lived longer here than in most parts, and flourished most. Two generations ago, Salopians of every class had the reputation of being able to drink all others senseless, but that is one of the obsolete virtues.

One topples over the edge of Staffordshire, as it were, into Salop, for here the steep descent of a range of hills leads, by a dramatic transition, from the waterless plateau around Wolverhampton to the valley of the Severn. Summerhouse Hill is the joy of the cyclist bound for Shrewsbury, and the bane of his return; with a mile run down in one direction, and a steady heartbreaking climb in the other. Near the summit is the “Summer House,” an inn where the flying “Wonder” of seventy years ago changed horses punctually at 8.16 every morning, on its journey from London to Shrewsbury; and at the foot of the hill, the “Horns” of Boningale. Boningale itself may be sought on a slip road that goes off to the left and returns in a semicircle of five hundred yards: the tiniest village, with a very small church and one very large black-and-white farmhouse, almost as ancient as the church itself. The road onwards is quiet, and unmarked by any outstanding features, save a house at Whiston Cross; Albrighton and other large villages lying a little distance to one side.

Whiston Cross, situated 130¼ miles from London, can claim the distinction of being exactly half-way between London and Holyhead. The house was once an inn, but has long been the place where the Albrighton Hounds are kenneled. In the old days of hard drinking, this and the “Harp” inn at Albrighton were the resorts of a cobbler reputed to be the greatest sot in the neighbourhood. He must have been exceptional, for he scandalised even these parts. He was once the victim, when in his cups, of a joke whose echoes still linger mirthfully in the countryside. Senselessly and helplessly drunk, he was driven over to a coalpit at Lilleshall and lowered into its depths. When he came dimly to his senses, he found himself surrounded by a circle of inquisitors, their faces blackened, in an uncanny place, spectrally lighted, and was very soon made to understand that he was dead and come to judgment before a jury of fiends anxious to consign him to a warm corner.

“I don’t know why I was brought here,” he said miserably, addressing the supposedly satanic tribunal, “and I can assure you, gentlemen, I was once a respectable shoemaker, of Albrighton, in Shropshire.”

Beyond Whiston Cross, in Cosford Brook Dingle, the Wolverhampton Waterworks raise their tall chimneys unexpectedly from the surrounding woodlands of Halton Park; the engine houses humming with the machinery that daily pumps more than three million gallons of water for the use of that enterprising community. In another two miles across the Salopian plain, Shiffnal is reached, and with it the first, and entirely lovable, specimen of a Shropshire town.

XIV

Shiffnal is a little place, changed less in the course of three hundred years than any along this road. Three centuries ago, when it was called “Idsall” quite as often as by its other name, all the town, with the exception of the church, was brand new, and its site with it; for the fire that in 1591 had levelled it with the ground led to the new township being erected a hundred yards or so to the east of the old one.

SHIFFNAL.

No fires, however destructive, warned our Elizabethan forbears that timber was a dangerous material to build with, and Shiffnal arose, one mass of timbered houses, and by a happy chance they most of them remain to this day; so that, whether one comes into the town by road, or is swept swiftly over it by train on the Great Western Railway that looks down from a lofty embankment upon the queer old Market-place, the effect is charming indeed. But, lest this magpie architecture should, or ever could, look monotonous, there have been introduced, from time to time, buildings in other styles and materials. Down the street, and seen, in fact, before one arrives at the Market-place itself, is, for example, the “Jerningham Arms,” stucco-fronted and thrusting forth the elaborate quarterings of the Jerninghams, Lords Stafford, and lords of the manor, ensigned with the Bloody Hand of Ulster, which leads the ignorant to suppose that Allsopp’s ales are obtainable within. The “Jerningham Arms” was a coaching inn, and the “Star” (prominent in the illustration, with a skylight on its roof) another, and a handsomer. Behind the fine old red-brick front of that house, and through the archway, the stable yard runs down; the beam over the arch rich in the badges of old fire insurance offices, and above them the sculptured armorial shield of some forgotten county family.

Shiffnal church stands a little apart: a fine red sandstone building with a central tower crowned with a low pyramidical red-tiled roof that only by a little overtops the battlements. Does that sound like a depreciation of it? I hope not, for it is a type characteristically English, and very lovable. One may trace many architectural periods in Shiffnal church, from the Norman when they could not build too heavily, to the Perpendicular, when lightness was coming in. Not that lightness has part or lot here, for the church is stately rather in the massive masculine way. Within a recess of the chancel wall lies the monumental effigy of Thomas Forster, “sometime Prior of Wombridge, Warden of Tongue and Vicar of Idsall,” 1526. In that inscription the old name of the parish is preserved, as it is also on a tablet giving an account of a much more interesting person; a certain William Wakley. It recounts how he “was baptised at Idsall, otherwise Shiffnal, May 1st, 1590, and was buried at Adbaston, November 28th, 1714. His age was 124 years and upwards. He lived in the Reign of eight Kings and Queens.” But this ancient’s record is surpassed, for the tablet goes on to tell of “Mary, the wife of Joseph Yates, of Lizard Common,” who died August 7th, 1776, aged 127 years. “She walked to London just after the fire in 1666, was hearty and strong 120 years, and married a third husband at ninety-two.”

Two other curiosities, and we are done with Shiffnal church. The first is the odd Christian name of a woman—“Kerenhapputh”—on a stone in the churchyard: the second a Latin inscription of 1691 on the churchyard wall. It may be Englished thus (the wall supposed to be speaking): “At length I rise again, at the sole expense of William Walford, the kindest of men.”

XV

Breasting a long incline of nearly three miles, the road comes to Prior’s Lee and Snedshill, and, reaching a commanding crest, looks down upon the industry and turmoil of Lilleshall on the one side, and the equally busy and industrious Coalbrookdale on the other. The prettiness of Prior’s Lee is in name alone. It and Snedshill are wastes of slag and cinder-heaps—some a century old, others the still smoking refuse from the blast-furnaces that roar and whizz and vomit smoke on the left.

SNEDSHILL FURNACES.

But the great iron furnaces of Snedshill are seen at their most impressive at night. The strange cyclist who has never before known the road sees the reflection of their flames a long way off, and comes upon the scene bewildered by the rising and falling of the lurid light that glows intensely in one direction and sinks all other quarters in an impenetrable obscurity. It is the weirdest of scenes, the surrounding house-fronts and the tower of Prior’s Lee church standing out in the radiated glare against the blackest of backgrounds: spouting flames an angry red, turning the white light of arc-lamps down at the ironworks a wicked and debauched-looking blue. Sighings of escaping steam, like the groans of some weary Titan exhausted with labour, rise now and again, and are succeeded by thunderous crashings and huge clouds of steam and smoke, mingled with millions of sparks, as the molten metal is now and again discharged.

To this is added the clattering of coal-waggons where Oakengates and the collieries lie, deep down in the valley, brilliant at night with constellations of lights. In strange contrast with all this, the benighted wayfarer sees roadside cottages whose open doors disclose housewives going about the business of their homes with all the world, as it were, for a background. The sight enforces the thought—how great the little home, how small the vast outside world!

Passing Ketley Station and rising Potter Bank, great banks loom mystically on the left, and bars of light from wayside inns streak the road. If it be summer night, sounds of glee-singing rise by the way, for the colliers, although this is not Wales, have got musical culture.

But daylight strips Ketley of all possible mysticism, for the soaring banks are then found to be just cinder-heaps, and the depth of the deep valley on the right is not so appalling after all. Most of Ketley’s mines are deserted now, but the cinder-heaps are gaunt as ever. Telford drove a new road through the heaps and used vast quantities of the cinders in ballasting and paving it, leaving a portion of the Watling Street, diving down a hollow, on the right. It is still there, with the disreputable roadside cottages beside it, as of old, and the same semisavage class as ever inhabiting them.

Away in the distance, rising majestically over the miners’ rubbish-heaps, comes the whalelike outline of the Wrekin, shaggy and blue-black with pines. Not a great hill, compared with the Stretton Hills and the Welsh mountains presently to come in sight; but its isolated position in the surrounding Shropshire plain gives it a commanding appearance, and has made the Wrekin a centre to which all Salopian hearts fondly turn in response to that old toast, honoured with three times three, “To all friends round the Wrekin.” The toast has not so limited an application as those who are not Salopians, or know not Shropshire, might imagine, for the Wrekin is visible from incredible distances, and the view from it comprises not only the whole of Shropshire, but a radius of distant hills sweeping the horizon round from Malvern, the Warwickshire Edge Hill, the Peak in Derbyshire, the mountains about Llangollen, the Berwyns, Cader Idris, and Plinlimmon, to the Brecon Beacons.

The famous hill rises only 1,260 feet above the surrounding plain, but just because it is a plain, its Protean bulk looms larger and loftier than many a taller eminence. Protean the Wrekin is because the outline of it, viewed from different quarters, varies singularly. Whale-like from Wellington, from the south-west it looks like a truncated sugar-loaf, and seen from the road near Wroxeter resembles a huge and shapely dome.

Wellington lies a mile distant from the road, but straggling outposts of houses extend all the way, and at Cock Corner one may look down the cross-road and clearly perceive the existence of the town and what manner of town it is. To coaching travellers Wellington was but a name and a distant mass of roofs; for, with but two minutes to change horses at the “Cock”—or, if they travelled by the famous Shrewsbury “Wonder,” a minute at Haygate inn, a mile onward—they were gone, and roofs and chimneys sank, as though by magic, beyond the rounded fields and tall hedgerows.

The “Cock” has remained game to the present day, and has witnessed the disappearance of its once prosperous neighbour, the “Hollybush.” That picturesquely named inn was a coaching house of a humbler sort, and carriers and coal-waggoners made it a house of call. Now a private house, brilliantly whitewashed, it seems by that dazzling raiment to have put away, as far as possible, all coaly memories.

XVI

Haygate inn stands, just as does the “Cock,” at the fork of a bye-road leading to Wellington. The “Cock” caught the travellers from London, the “Falcon” (which was really the sign of Haygate inn, although few knew it by any other name than that already mentioned) those from Wales and Shrewsbury. It was intimately connected with the Shrewsbury “Wonder,” being kept by H. J. Taylor, a brother of Isaac Taylor of the “Lion” at Shrewsbury, who put that famous coach upon the road in 1825. Another brother kept the chief inn at Shiffnal, and so between them they kept the hotel and coaching business in the family along the first eighteen miles from Shrewsbury.

When the “Falcon” was rebuilt, in the flush of the coaching age, it was built to outlast the requirements of rich and jovial posting and coaching travellers for at least a century to come. So much is evident at sight of the house, substantially constructed and designed with all the dignity of a private mansion. Alas! for all such anticipations; the first railway train rolled into Shrewsbury Station in 1839, and shortly afterwards the house became what it is now—a farmstead.

HAYGATE INN.

Hay gate derived its name from “the Haye of Wellington,” and was a gate into the forest of the Wrekin in ancient times. Nothing remains of that forest; the pine-trees that now clothe the Wrekin were planted on what was then a bare hillside in the early years of the last century.

Down this road that once led into the forest glades in one direction, and to Wellington in the other, the town is soon reached. Shropshire has few places so uninteresting, and its modesty in thus secluding itself from the old turnpike is therefore not misplaced. The narrow and devious streets of the town are not excused by their houses, almost without exception ugly and dull. A duller and uglier church, very “classic” and grimy, fitly lords it over those secular buildings, and looks down upon the railway station, placed in a cutting in the very centre of the town. A portion of the churchyard, indeed, was cut away to form the site of that station. A depressing monument, as pagan and as “classic” as the church, stands prominent among the humbler tombs. It is black-painted and gilt, like a jeweller’s show-case, and forms a canopy or shrine over an urn that does not contain the ashes of the Reverend John Eyton, who died in 1823, and is commemorated in a very long epitaph. He lies below, and the urn is merely decorative: just of a piece with the rest of the pagan affectation around. The author of that epitaph was evidently not one who “damned with faint praise.” But listen to the virtues of the departed:—

“As a Christian Pastor he was vigilant, affectionate, and faithful; unweariedly devoted to the concerns of the fold, gathering the lambs with his arm, and daily feeding the flock committed to his charge. And now, while the Chief Shepherd places upon his Head a crown of glory that will never fade away——.”

And so forth. Another side of the monument takes up the tale, and tells us what manner of cleric this was:

“A man of whose character and endowments it is difficult to speak in any other language than that of admiration and reverence. His person and appearance interesting and attractive. His deportment and manners graceful and engaging. His intellectual and sacred attainments so various, so extensive, and so captivating as to render him everywhere the Desire and Delight of his edified associates.”

All these advantages and virtues did not avail him much for preferment, for he never became a Right Reverend. And yet this surely would have been the man for a Bishopric. Nay, Primates could be no more—and are commonly less.

XVII

Regaining the old turnpike at Haygate Inn, the Wrekin broods monstrous on the scene for miles to come, its central bulk reinforced by Ercall to the left, and little attendant Wrekins, crowned with fir-trees, on the right. In midst of this comes Burcot toll-house, situated on a lonely rise, where cross-roads seem to butt up against the great hill on one side and disappear into a valley on the other. This toll-house may well compare for size and solidity with any on the way from London to Holyhead; but why it should, and why a shield carved in stone, and inscribed “W.T., 1835,” should especially distinguish it from its fellows, are things now hid from mortal ken. Nor has “W.T.” achieved the fame he evidently desired, for the initials—to whomsoever they really belonged—are commonly and erroneously ascribed to Telford, whose Christian name was Thomas.

THE WREKIN.

From this point, for a distance of nearly two miles, Telford made what were described in the published projects of that time as “sundry valuable improvements.” He planned and carried out a new line of road through the shoulder of Overley Hill, so that the coaches, instead of toiling over its crest, went through a short piece of rocky cutting below, and left so much of the old Roman road to solitude and decay. Coming from Shrewsbury, even this improved road remains a weary drag; the summit and its little group of villas gained with joy.

Below and beyond comes the Wrekin again, brooding vengefully over the smiling vale, and in wind and storm spreading a greater blackness over the scene: at all times giving a sombre cast to the long straight reaches of the Watling Street. There it has sat, moodily reminiscent, since time began to be. Geologists, who have their reasons for so doing, describe it as “a mass of eruptive greenstone,” and say the Wrekin is “the oldest mountain in England.” Therefore it may well be reminiscent. It has seen mankind emerge from the primeval ooze and floating as invertebrate jelly-fishes in the inland sea that washed its base, and has watched the family history from that interesting era to the present time; through the period of the arboreal ancestor, when the jelly-fishes acquired backbones and prehensile tails and took, as monkeys, to climbing trees; and unless some of the glorified monkeys come meanwhile as engineers and quarry it off the face of the earth, or blast it away, it will probably see the race itself follow the lead given by the governments of this country during the last sixty years, and resume the condition of invertebrata, wallowing in the slime.

The Wrekin has seen the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the coming of the Romans and the going of them; saw the first clearings in the primeval forest, the subjected Britons slaving under Roman taskmasters at the making of the Watling Street, and the brief period, centuries later, of coaching. It has looked down over the vale these last sixty years upon the railway, and the time is ripe for another change. Perhaps we are on the threshold of it.

It is very still and peaceful on the Roman road, and the traveller has it and its memories wholly to himself. Among those memories is the sad story of Robert Bolas, of Uppington, yonder where the church tower and the hedgerow elms occupy the middle distance, with the Wrekin for background.

Robert Bolas came of an old and respected family in Uppington, but that fact did not serve to keep him honest, and it seems that he had long made a practice of stealing wheat from a farm between his village and Wroxeter. It all happened very long ago, but the tale is not likely to be forgotten.

The gradual shrinkage of his grain made the owner, a farmer named Witcomb, suspicious, and, with a man named Matthews, he kept a watch. Bolas duly appeared, with an empty sack over his shoulder, which he was proceeding to fill when Witcomb and Matthews made to seize him. Bolas then picked up a bill-hook, and attacking them so furiously that Matthews was killed and Witcomb left, for dead, made off. But it so happened that Witcomb recovered, and the affair, that had in the meanwhile created a great stir in the neighbourhood, was explained. For some reason or another, Bolas was confident of an acquittal, and cheerfully told his friends he would be home in time to harvest his barley.

But they found him guilty, hanged him at Shrewsbury, and gibbeted his body here by the roadside; and so, although, after a fashion, he came home again, other hands reaped his bearded grain. The thing made so strong an impression upon the countryside that the phrase, “Don’t make so sure of your barley,” became proverbial.

All these things happened in 1722. Matthews was buried in Wellington Churchyard, where his tombstone, stating that he was “barbarously murdered,” stood until the railway came and swept it and others away. “Bolas’s Gibbet” long remained a landmark beside the Holyhead Road, a weatherworn stump bristling with the rusty fragments of nails that had been driven into the post so that it should not be climbed and the body removed. That “the evil that men do lives after them” was exemplified shortly after the body of Bolas came home and was hung upon the gibbet. There still stands, not a great way ahead, an old roadside “public,” the “Horseshoes,” where the road forks to Wroxeter. Here, one dismal night, several youths were drinking and joking, when the conversation turned upon Bolas. Each dared the others to go in the dark to the lonely spot and ask the dead man how he felt, and as no one was sufficiently courageous to go alone, they set off a body. On the way, one more mischievous than the rest drew off unperceived, and hid in the hedgerow beneath the gruesome object.

“How are you to-night?” asked the little group, keeping very close together, and sorry they had come.

“Very cold and chilly,” answered a pitiful voice; and immediately they all took to their heels. One suffered such a shock that he became a raving maniac.

XVIII

Wroxeter lies within a short distance, but only approached along a narrow and uneven lane. Its fine church-tower looks down upon little more than a few farms and bartons; for village, as generally understood, there is none. This simple rural place, aromatic with hay and straw and corn, is the representative of, and takes its name from, the great Roman city of Uriconium, one-third larger than Pompeii, destroyed by the fury of savage hordes more than fourteen hundred years ago. The City of Uriconium,—the “City of the Wrekin”—was established shortly after A.D. 48, when the Roman general, Ostorius Scapula, had driven out the British tribes. He set an important station here, at a crossing of the Watling and the Ikenild Streets, and the place not only served as an armed camp to guard the roads and the ford of the Severn, but grew to be the most important market along the road to Wales. It lasted four hundred years, and only fell some forty years after the Romans had deserted Britain. Uriconium was then taken by the combined onslaughts of the Welsh tribes, and burnt to the ground, and the Romanised British who had remained were all massacred.

THE “OLD WALL.”

To this great city, its site now under corn and grass land, and inhabited by a handful of peasants, the Roman road led, on its way to Wales and the shores of the Menai, and to its site still leads, but beyond is lost, save to those who study archæology. The only relics left on the spot to tell of that vanished place are the two Roman pillars standing before the church; the font, made out of a carved capital; and that massive fragment of masonry, the Old Wall, standing once in the centre of the city, but now solitary in a field.

WROXETER CHURCH.

Superstition brooded for ages upon this spot, and weird legends were created by the terrors the lonely place had for the ignorant of other times. Dead and gone Romans, who had, perhaps, been very matter-of-fact and commonplace persons in their lives, and gifted with all the small virtues of the hearth-loving citizen, loomed large, menacing, and supernatural before those whose business took them near the ruin, and so it was not until modern times that much was done to unearth what relics might lie deep down below the earth deposited by the changes of so long a period.

It was in 1859 that two acres of land were excavated. What did they find? Many things. Fragments of the red Samian ware on which the Roman citizens served their banquets, and whence they pledged one another, drinking to the eternity of Rome. A rusty key without a lock, and a stylus among bones, wine-cups, and scattered coins; the wooden tablets it wrote upon perished, like the hand that held it. The figure of a cock, modelled in lead, once a child’s toy, and near it the skeleton of a child, doubtless the one that owned that ancient plaything. Three skeletons of older persons were found, crouched up in one of the underground hypocausts. A hypocaust was a basement chamber, constructed to heat a room or house. Into one of these places those persons had fled when the barbarians stormed the city. They intended to creep out when danger was past, but the place was fired, and they perished in their hiding-place. Two of these fugitives were women; the other an old man. Within his grasp lay a pile of Roman coins, 142 in all, and, beside them, all that was left of his cash-box—some fragments of wood and rusty nails.

Roofing-slates, still with nails in many of their holes, were discovered in the ruins; the slate, by its appearance, judged to have been brought from Bettws-y-Coed. Millstones for grinding corn, and a charred heap of the corn itself, were found; brooches, seals, household gods, and fragments of the innumerable intimate articles of everyday life. Even some careless scribbling, such as that often found on the walls of Pompeii, was seen; but before it could be protected some graceless excursionists among the thousands carried by rail at that time to see the novelty of a buried city, obliterated it with their walking-sticks.

The two acres then explored, with the little that has been done since, give the impression that if the three-miles’ circuit of the walls could be excavated, results surpassing the finds at Silchester might be attained.

From Wroxeter, crossing the Severn, the Watling Street went by the two Strettons Wattlesborough, taking its name from being situated on the great road; Rutunium, now Rowton; thence to Mediolanum at the crossing of the river Tanad, under the Breidden, a site now called Clawdd Coch, or “Red Ditch”; Mons Heriri, under the shadow of Snowdon (whose Welsh name is Eryri, or Eagles’ Mountain) at the ancient earthwork known as Tomen-y-Mur, in the Vale of Maentwrog; and to the sea-coast at Segontium, identified with Caer Seiont, near Carnarvon. A branch, with stations of the way at Bovium (Bangor-ys-Coed); Deva, the great fortress of the Twentieth Legion, identical with Chester, on the Dee; Varae, the modern Bodfari; and Conovium, by the Conway (Caer Hên, or Old Fort), traversed the Dee estuary and the coast-line looking out to Anglesey and the Irish Sea.

XIX

Returning from Wroxeter and passing the tiny hamlet of Norton, the way lies flat to Shrewsbury. Flat, because we are now come beside the Severn (which no Welshman calls anything else than Sivern). Away across the watery plain as we advance are the Stretton Hills on the left, volcanic and mountainous in outline, blue and beautiful in colour; and, more distant, ahead, far beyond Shrewsbury, the Breidden Hills, a great bulk starting from the level without any disguise of foothills or preliminary rises to detract from their dramatic effect.

The Tern, a tributary of the Severn, crosses the road beneath a handsome stone balustraded bridge, with views to the right over Attingham Park and along the road, through a mass of overarching trees, toward the village of Atcham. There, in the Park, stands the classical stone building of Attingham Hall, one of those places built a century or more ago at incredible expense, and only to be maintained at a cost far exceeding the resources available to-day. Corn at 50s. and 60s. a quarter built many fine mansions, and nowadays corn at 25s. keeps them empty. Attingham Hall lacks a tenant. It belongs to Lord Berwick, whose title does not, by the way, come from the only Berwick commonly known—the town of Berwick-on-Tweed—but from Berwick Maviston, close by Atcham, the old home of the extinct Malvoisin or Mayvesin family.

The chief entrance to Attingham Park is through the great archway in Atcham village. One side of the village street is made up of church, school-house, post office, a deserted coaching inn, and a number of rustic cottages; the other is the long brick wall of the Park, densely overhung with trees, on to which the village blankly looks. The only opening in this wall is the great archway aforesaid; very tall, Doric, and stony. With a spinal shiver the stranger, who stands wondering awhile where he has seen its like, suddenly realises the resemblance it bears to the entrance of certain great London cemeteries. The arch is flanked by a stag on one side and by a pegasus on the other, with the inscription in gigantic lettering in between: “Qui uti scit ei bona.” A very proper aspiration; but it is just as well that tramps are innocent as a rule of Latin, or they might not inaptly call and ask for something on account.

Opposite this gateway stands what was once the “Talbot,” a first-class posting-house. It looks on to the church in one direction, the entrance to the Park in another, and down upon the Severn in a third, so that its situation is by no means commonplace. When the altered conditions of travelling rendered it no longer possible to carry on a remunerative business here, the hotel was converted into a private mansion, and the gravelled drive walled in and turfed, but it has only been occupied for short periods and has long stood empty. Like the Princess in the fairy tale, it waits and still waits, looking up the road and down the road and over the bridge for the expected. It is weary waiting, and even the rats and mice who lived royally in old times, and were reduced at last to the pitiful expedient of subsisting on the faint smell of what had been, gave it up and lived on one another. The ultimate survivor is believed to have committed suicide in the Severn.

It is a noble bridge that spans the river here, and, built before the art—no, not the art, the science—of constructing bridges in iron was understood, is of stone, and very steep. This steepness added to its narrow proportions was a terror to those nervous coach-passengers whose faith in Sam Hayward of the “Wonder” was not what it should have been, considering the consummate art he displayed as a whip. But possibly they thought that all the artistry in the world would be of little use to save them and the coach if, on one of the wintry nights and mornings when the Severn mists had obscured the road, they came into collision with the parapets and so were hurled into the swirling river; and, moreover, the hours—5.30 in the morning and 10 at night—when the “Wonder” passed this dangerous spot, are not those when courage is high and confidence greatest.

ATCHAM BRIDGE.

It is a gentle rise from here to Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury, passing on the way the old toll-house of Emstrey Bank. On the hill-top, and looking down the Foregate from the summit of his Doric column, stands the statue of “old Rowley.” The personage owning that nickname was Sir Rowland, afterwards Lord Hill, Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief in succession to Wellington. As a Peninsula and Waterloo hero, and a brother-in-arms of Wellington, Shropshire people held him in great honour, for was he not also a Salopian—one of the Hills of Hawkstone—and a fine representative of the county? It was left to a descendant to bankrupt the estate and disperse the medals, warlike relics, and trophies of Hawkstone Park.

LORD HILL’S MONUMENT.

It is perhaps not the sculptor’s fault, but a result of distance and acute perspective, that the gallant general on his elevated post bears an extraordinary likeness to Pecksniff, as pictured by Phiz.

Abbey Foregate must have been the place where Benjamin Disraeli, travelling post to Shrewsbury in June 1839, in company with Sir Philip Rose, to fight for one of the two Parliamentary seats the borough then retained, had his attention drawn by his companion to a huge poster, displayed on the walls of a roadside barn. Disraeli was standing in the Conservative interest, and was at the time head over ears in debt.

“Something about you,” said Rose to his companion, as his eye lighted on the poster. The chaise was stopped, and Disraeli, deliberately adjusting an unnecessary eyeglass—for the bill was set in the boldest and blackest of “display” type—slowly read it from beginning to end.

It began, “Judgment Debts of Benjamin Disraeli, Tory Candidate for Shrewsbury,” and unfolded a long, long list of creditors and the amounts due to them. After long and careful consideration of the lengthy roll, Disraeli turned to his friend, and calmly said: “How accurate they are. Now let us go on.”

Shrewsbury was apparently not so scandalised as it should have been by this revelation of Disraeli’s financial straits, for the electors returned both himself and the other Conservative candidate by thumping majorities.

The Foregate, a broad thoroughfare outside the town walls, was an early suburb on the hither shore of the Severn, which comes winding again athwart the road, presenting, when such things were matters of the first importance, a defence that not the boldest might pass. Whoever held Shrewsbury, girdled by river and ramparted walls for fully seven-eighths of a circle, and with the remaining eighth, the only easy approach, blocked by the frowning dark red turrets of its great castle, was master of the situation. Hence that race between Henry IV. and Hotspur for possession of the town in 1403; a race won by the King, who flung his army into it a day before Hotspur’s Northumbrians and Scots came in sight; hence, too, the repeated attempts of the Welsh to gain possession.

Foregate still keeps something of its old suburban character, the old-fashioned houses partaking both of town and country; curious old inns neighbouring stately mansions, and village shops shouldering the doctor’s or the lawyer’s staid Queen Anne and Georgian residences. But the great feature is the Abbey Church, great even though only a fragment of its former self. Ruddy sandstone of a particularly deep, almost blood-red, hue gives its massive and time-worn tower a suggestion of Shrewsbury’s sanguinary history; just as the great bulk of the Abbey may have been the measure of the sins of that Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury, who founded it and died, a world-renouncing monk, within these walls in 1094. Close upon two hundred years later, in 1283, the first English Parliament was held in the Chapter House; and that would be a place of much historic interest to-day, but, like most of the monastery buildings, it has been destroyed.

XX

“Shrowsbury,” as already noted, is the correct pronunciation of the name of Shropshire’s capital; a mode that still follows the structure of the Saxon place-name, “Scrobbesbyrig.” But it is not reasonable to suppose that the outlander who has never been to Shrewsbury should know all the rights and wrongs of the case, and though it may grate upon the Salopian to hear strangers talk of “Shroosbury,” he can have no possible remedy until he procures a reform in the spelling of the word. Meanwhile, the outlander aforesaid is often severely entreated for his solecism. Sometimes, too, he deserves all he gets, as for example when, somewhere about 1894, the author of “Pictures in Parliament” taunted a Shropshire member with using a “Salopian pronunciation which for some time hid from the ordinary member a knowledge that he was alluding to Shrewsbury.” It did not hide the identity, and moreover, no Salopian ever did or could use any other pronunciation. Now, if that member had said “Salop” there would have been more room for criticism, although by that name Shrewsbury is just as often known in Shropshire. It may be presumed that every one knows the county to be often so-called, but it is a novelty for strangers in these gates to hear the word applied to the town. To this day the railway booking-clerks for at least twenty miles round Shrewsbury are commonly asked for tickets to “Salop,” and the very milestones adopt the same name. The Earls of Shrewsbury, on the other hand, are (it may not be generally known) miscalled by that title, and are really Earls of Salop. Not, let it be noted, of the town of Salop, but of the county; as seen in the original patent of nobility granted to the ancestral Talbot in 1442. But, although there is not the shadow of a warrant for their adoption of the “Shrewsbury” title, they appear never to have used any other, and in literature, from Shakespeare downwards, the same custom has always been observed. But why? Is it possible that the ill meaning of the French word “Salop” has forbidden the use?

The town presents a hold front from this side of the river, crossed in these peaceful times without let or hindrance by the English Bridge, a beautiful seven-arched stone structure built in 1774. It looks not a little foreign when viewed from the river-banks, with the osier-grown islands in mid-stream; houses and church spires clustered beyond, and the Castle turrets closing the view on the right; while the approach over the bridge discloses a street so steep that it fills the untravelled Londoner with as much astonishment as it did the lawyer come to Shrewsbury for the first time by the “Wonder” coach. “I think I’ll get off,” he said nervously, touching Hayward on the arm.

THE ENGLISH BRIDGE.

“You be d——d!” shortly replied that past master of the whip and ribbons, as, springing his team up the hill, he brought the coach round in a circular course, and, shooting his wheelers and pointing his leaders, made with the certainty of an arrow through the archway, and into the stony courtyard of the “Lion.”

The hill leading in this astonishing fashion into Shrewsbury is Wyle Cop, the main thoroughfare in old days. Its name, meaning “Hilltop,” is sufficiently descriptive. The “Lion” still stands on the summit, on the left hand, its coach-entrance yawning as of old; the streets, as narrow as ever, giving point to Sam Hayward’s clever feat of coachmanship.

“Pleasant and chatty,” says one who frequented the Holyhead Road in those days, “was Ash, the guard of the ‘Wonder’ coach, but the coachman, one of two brothers, Hayward[^[1]] by name, could by no means be so called. The other brother drove the Holyhead Mail. The coachman of the ‘Wonder’ was grimly silent. ‘I will wager,’ said one of this taciturn Jehu’s passengers to another, ‘that you don’t get a word out of him from the “Hen and Chickens” at Birmingham to the “Lion” at Shrewsbury, barring a pure answer to a question.’” The bet was won, for Hayward kept silence all the way.

[1]. The authority here quoted says “Hodgson,” but that is an error. Nor even was there a Hodgson driving the Holyhead Mail, but a guard of that name who accompanied it on to Holyhead. Many of the statements made by writers on old coaching days are, indeed, surprisingly inaccurate, even when they have been contemporary with those times. Thus, Colonel Corbet sanctions the frontispiece to his Old Coachman’s Chatter, showing the “Wonder” from London ascending Wyle Cop at one minute to twelve, noon. The “Wonder” reached Shrewsbury at 10.30 every night; the midday coach was the Holyhead Mail.

But he was no misanthrope. A naturally cheerful nature was overlaid by an undue sense of responsibility to the proprietors of the “Wonder,” whose law was “ten miles an hour, including stoppages; or put the paint-brush over the name of the ‘Wonder’ on the dickey.” Had his road not been one of the best in the world—true almost to the spirit-level, and constructed of hard dhu-stone—he could not have kept that excellent time, day by day, and from year to year. As it was, the doing of it absorbed the man’s very existence. He might hum an air to himself, but talk he would not.

“What the deuce ails you, Hayward?” asked one of his box passengers, “are you dumb, man?”

Then the Sphinx broke silence: “Can’t drive and talk, too,” he said; and, closing his mouth like a steel trap, spoke no more.

That he was not only a master of the ribbons, but also of a peculiar feat in driving, has already been hinted. This exploit, only once known to be attempted by any other,[^[2]] was repeated every time he brought the “Wonder” into Shrewsbury, and never failed to draw an appreciative knot of spectators, or to transfix with horror any strangers who might chance to be among the outside passengers. There was always some difficulty in driving up the steep and narrow Cop and into the “Lion” yard, standing on the near side. Other coachmen quartered slowly up, and then, having first drawn to their off side, turned carefully across and slowly piloted their teams through the narrow entrance of the “Lion.” Hayward’s method was radically different. Galloping up the hill and almost scraping the near-side kerb, he would pass the inn, and then, suddenly thonging his leaders, smartly turn them round in their own length opposite the street called “Dogpole.” Then, calling to the “outsides” to “mind their heads,” he would drive the coach at a trot into the yard, with an inch to spare.

[2]. Stephen Howse, of the Ludlow night mail, was the hero of that occasion. He was born in 1809, and died in 1888.

When the “Wonder” was driven off the London road, and became only a two-horse coach, running between Shrewsbury and Birmingham, Hayward drove the “Greyhound” between Shrewsbury and Aberystwith. Then, following the example of Tony Weller, he “took a widow and a pub.” This house, the “Raven and Bell,” next door to the “Lion,” was long since pulled down. He died November 1st, 1851, but his widow was still in business in 1856. Hayward lies near the scene of his daily exploit, in the churchyard of St. Julian’s, under the shadow of the square tower seen in the accompanying view of Wyle Cop. The flowers bloom fresh at the head of his grave.

XXI

Coaching enterprise, from the earliest to the latest days of the coaching era, flourished better at Shrewsbury than any other town along the Holyhead Road. An early mention of public coaches is found in Sir William Dugdale’s diary under date of May 2nd, 1659, when he says:—“I set forward towards London by the Coventre coach,” and is followed in June, 1681, by a reference to a journey from London to his country seat in Warwickshire by the “Shrewsbury coach.” This was an extremely deliberate conveyance. It trundled as far as Woburn the first evening and stopped there the night, for at that period when the state of the country was unsettled, and roads uncertain, and infested with bad characters, no one thought of travelling after sundown. The second evening it lay at Hillmorton, near Rugby, and thence proceeded, on the third day, to Coleshill. Sir William alighted there, leaving the coach to reach Shrewsbury by way of Sutton Coldfield, Aldridge Heath, and Wellington in another two days.

By the light of later coaching history, which shows that coaches between London and Shrewsbury were established principally at Shrewsbury to go to London—proving that the desire of country folk for the metropolis was greater than that of Londoners for the country—it would seem that this pioneer coach was also a Shrewsbury venture. It probably did not continue long, for even sixty years later Pennant describes how the able-bodied rode horseback to London, while the rich, who were the only people who travelled frequently, had their own carriages, leaving a very inconsiderable and uncertain number to support a regular conveyance. Thus it is that in 1730, when three Shrewsbury ladies visited the capital, we find them riding horseback, escorted by five gentlemen and six servants. Such goods as then passed between the two places came and went by pack horses, and it is not until 1737 that another glimpse of vehicles plying regularly along the road is obtained. From Shrewsbury in that year began the long-drawn journeys of the “Gee-ho,” whose establishment was due to a very shrewd and enterprising soldier, appropriately named Carter. He had been billeted at the “Pheasant,” on Wyle Cop, where the pack horse business was then located, and so enslaved the heart of the widowed Mrs. Warner, who kept the inn, that she married him. The old house is still on Wyle Cop, changed only in name, and that only by an addition. It is now the “Lion and Pheasant.”

The “Gee-ho” in part supplemented, but in greater measure supplanted, the pack horses. It was chiefly intended to carry goods, and was drawn by eight horses, which, with an extra couple to pull it out of the sloughs, brought the lumbering and creaking vehicle to or from London in seven, eight, or nine days, according to the condition of the roads.

Even in 1749, twelve years later, we do not find the failure of the first stage-coach of 1681 forgotten, for a certain Pryce Pugh, who was then landlord of what his advertisement calls the “Red Lion on Wild Cop,” in drawing attention to his house, mentions room for a hundred horses, and notes the starting of a stage-waggon for London, but says nothing of a coach. The horses, doubtless, were post-horses for riders.

But if passengers were still scarce and not worth the provision of a coach, something could be done, and was done, to expedite the waggons, so that passengers and goods could be conveyed at once. Imagine, then, the stir created by the announcement on October 22nd, 1750, that the “Shrewsbury Flying Stage-waggon will begin to fly on Tuesday next, in five days, winter and summer.” They were, of course, only the poorer classes who were thus catered for——people who had no objection to being wedged in between the rolls of Welsh flannel, the butter and lard, and miscellaneous consignments being conveyed; or else we should not in the same year find a lady, anxious to reach London, riding twenty-two miles to Ivetsey Bank, across country, to catch the Chester and London stage-coach, which, taking six days over the whole journey, would not have brought her to town any sooner.

But times now began to move rapidly, and the close of 1750 saw a new conveyance on the road. This was the “Caravan,” an affair greatly resembling modern gipsy-vans, and fitted up inside with benches for eight, twelve, or even, at a pinch, eighteen persons. It was drawn by “six able horses,” and professed to reach London in four days, but often occupied the whole of five. If it had taken the direct way, instead of wandering off to the Chester road, this promise could have been kept, as it was in 1752, when the proper way was adopted, and Birmingham reached the first night. The fare to London by the “Caravan” was 15s.

The roads were then, under the operation of various Turnpike Acts and the General Highway Act of 1745, beginning to lay aside something of their pristine horrors, and Shrewsbury coaching enterprise was once more aroused to great issues. In April, 1753, the “Birmingham and Shrewsbury Long Coach, with six able horses, in four days,” started from the “Old Red Lion” (the “Lion,” Wyle Cop), and went to the “Bell,” Holborn. The fare was only 18s., not more than 5s. over and above the price of a third-class railway journey that nowadays takes you either way in something less than three hours and three-quarters. Competition began at Shrewsbury in less than three months after the establishment of the “Long Coach,” for in the following June Fowler’s “Shrewsbury Stage-coach in three and a half days” began to set out from the “Raven and Bell” to the “George and White Hart,” Aldersgate Street; fare one guinea, outside half-price. It is not on record how these rivals regarded one another, but they seem to have continued, each going to London once a week, for thirteen years before circumstances warranted the intrusion of a third.

In April, 1764, however, a “Machine” was started, to go three times a week and do the journey in two days, at a fare of 30s. The continually increasing fares up to this point were balanced by the lower hotel expenses on the shorter time taken, and so the “Machine” became popular in summer. But this celerity of motion could not be sustained during the winter, when the journey was extended to three days. In the spring of 1765, when it returned to its fine weather rapidity, it received the name of the “Flying Machine,” with the fare raised to 36s.; but in August, 1772, when its time was reduced to one and a half days, the price came down by a couple of shillings. The reason for this combined acceleration of pace and reduction of fare is instantly apparent—opposition was threatened. It came with the spring of the following year, but did not directly challenge the supremacy of the “Flying Machine,” for the “new Flying Machine,” as it was called, by John Payton, of Stratford-on-Avon, and Robert Lawrence, of the “Raven and Bell,” Shrewsbury, took the Stratford-on-Avon and Oxford route to London, was half a day longer on the journey, and charged 2s. more. The proprietors of the original “Flying Machine” must have felt relieved when those particulars were disclosed; but their nerves received a worse shock in the spring of 1774, for the confederates who had started the “new Flying Machine” re-named it the “London and Shrewsbury New Fly,” and announced several alterations and improvements. It was to perform the journey in a day and a half, to go three times a week, and, fitted “quite in the modern taste” and with steel springs, it offered decided advantages over the old favourite. In addition came the unkind announcement that, “notwithstanding the Fly sets out after the old coach, it will be in London as soon.” How sweet a sop for lazy travellers, none too eager to rise, and how bitter the taunt to the old firm!

It is not to be supposed that they tamely submitted to this impudence. Their reply was soon forthcoming. It stated that the proprietors of the “original London and Salop Machine,” in the modern taste, on steel springs (the Machine, not the proprietors) and bows on the top, called upon all travellers to observe “that the road through Coventry, being several miles nearer than through Oxford, will fully demonstrate the most speedy conveyance to London.” The “bows on the top” were seats for the outsides, who, if carried before, must have been accommodated in the “basket,” a wicker-work structure, hung on behind. Unfortunately for the “original,” it had very determined competitors to deal with. Its business suffered, just as, thirteen years before, it had come upon the scene and cut up the trade of the “Long Coach” and Fowler’s “Shrewsbury Stage.”

WYLE COP AND THE “LION”

The rivals even put on another conveyance, the “Diligence” they called it, conveying three passengers at the express speed of Shrewsbury to London in one day, at £1 11s. 6d. each. This startling innovation was announced to go three times a week.

There were thus in 1776 three modes of getting to London. Rivalry, however, had outrun custom, and discretion had far out-distanced both. The “Original” slipped back to a two days’ journey, twice a week, the “Fly” dropped one weekly journey during the winter, and the “Diligence” soon ceased to run at all.

But Robert Lawrence, the landlord of the “Raven and Bell,” and partner in the newer coaching enterprises with Payton, of Stratford-on-Avon, was a remarkable man. Given a wider sphere of action, there is no knowing to what greatness he might have developed. As it was, he did much for Shrewsbury in his time, and greatly influenced the traffic along the Holyhead Road, from end to end. The route had until then been invariably by way of Chester; but the casual inspection of any map will soon show that that city lies at a considerable distance to the north of a direct line drawn from London to Holyhead, and that Shrewsbury is placed much more centrally. It occurred to Lawrence that the difficulties and dangers of the route by what we now call the Holyhead Road, viâ Llangollen and Capel Curig, were much exaggerated, and that time might be saved and the dangerous ferry (as it then was) of Conway missed by avoiding Chester altogether. In that case Shrewsbury would regain much of the trade that belonged to it by virtue of its geographical position.

These prime facts grasped, Lawrence set himself to alter the course that traffic had taken for centuries, and devoted his life to this one aim. It was, as may readily be supposed, no easy matter, and he was obliged to begin his reforms slowly. Thus, on July 3rd, 1779, we find him setting up a post-coach to Holyhead by Wrexham, Mold, St. Asaph, and Conway, three times a week, and in one and a half days, in conjunction with other innkeepers. The fare was £2 2s.

This ceased in 1783, but in the meanwhile, in conjunction with some London innkeepers, he had started the first stage-coach to perform the whole journey between London and Holyhead. This was established in May, 1780, going through Coventry, Castle Bromwich, Birmingham, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury, Llangollen, Corwen, Llanrwst, and Conway. In November of that year Lawrence removed from the “Raven and Bell” to the “Lion,” next door, a larger house, and announced his determination to pursue with unremitting industry the object he had in view, of securing the Chester traffic for Shrewsbury.

This bold pronouncement roused the Chester proprietors and the innkeepers along that route to fury. They threatened Payton with opposition to his Birmingham, Oxford, and London coaches if he did not break his connection with Lawrence, and when Payton declined to listen to them, established themselves as a confederacy at the “Raven and Bell,” just vacated by his partner, and put the “Defiance” coach on the road to London, by Worcester. Lawrence, in his turn, perhaps somewhat alarmed by the storm he had raised, issued an advertisement, thanking the public for their patronage, and entreating further support in his attempts to open up a direct road to Holyhead. Without this encouragement, he said, “several years’ labour and great expense he has been at (together with the great advantage to the town of Shrewsbury) would be entirely lost.”

He was not content with advertising, but travelled largely, and waited upon many people of influence for their interest in obtaining the improvement of the route on which he had set his heart; and prevailed upon several persons who had been upper servants in great English families to establish inns at the several stages. His exertions were not fruitless. Several of the principal travellers began to travel the Shrewsbury route, and not only saved some miles and avoided the Conway ferry, but had the additional advantage of superior accommodation. Lawrence had a powerful ally in the press, and the Shrewsbury Chronicle is early found recording successes. Thus, February 3rd, 1781, the Editor “is happy to inform the publick that the travelling through this town daily increases,” and from that time proceeded to record the names of important personages who passed through, in preference to Chester. In the same year Lawrence still further enlarged his views, and inspired the Chronicle with the statement: “We have not a doubt, from the rapid increase of business on this road, that, if proper application is made, one, if not both, of the Irish mails will pass through the town.” He had, in fact, been making interest with the Post Office to that end. The mails of that day, however, were not coaches, but mounted postboys; the first mail-coach in England not being established until August, 1784.

Lawrence indeed went to surprising lengths, and seems to have constituted himself a species of informal road-authority, to judge from the Shrewsbury Chronicle of April 13th, 1782, in whose columns care is taken to “inform the publick that the new road through Wales, viâ Llanrwst, has by the activity of Mr. Lawrence been kept open, notwithstanding most other roads were rendered impassable by the heavy falls of snow.” In the September of that year, Lawrence had another triumph, for Earl Temple, the new Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, travelled by Shrewsbury, and lay at the “Lion,” where he was received in state by the Mayor and Corporation. “His lordship,” we learn, “said he was extremely glad the Shrewsbury road had been recommended to him, as he found it not only considerably nearer, but the accommodations were in every respect perfectly to his satisfaction.”

In February, 1784, we still find Lawrence “determined to use every effort to establish effectually what he has so long laboured at a great expence to accomplish,” but it was not until 1802 that his exertions procured the commencement of a shorter line of road, branching off at Pentre Voelas from his previous route by Llanrwst and Conway and going to Bangor by the present route, viâ Bettws and Capel Curig. He was aided in this by the Lord Penrhyn of that time, with whom it had long been a favourite scheme, and who, to ensure its popularity with travellers, built the great inn beside it at Capel Curig. By the completion of this road a saving of eight miles was effected.

Meanwhile Palmer had established mail-coaches, and Lawrence had secured an “Oxford, Birmingham, and Shrewsbury Mail, on Mr. Palmer’s plan,” so early as September 5th, 1785. But it went no further until 1808, when it was extended to Holyhead.

New times, however, had now dawned, and the modernised Holyhead Road was coming into existence, under the control of greater forces than Lawrence could have brought to bear. The Government and Telford between them planned the “New Parliamentary Road,” which by July 1817 was sufficiently advanced for the mails to be sent this way. The “Oxford, Birmingham and Shrewsbury Mail” was therefore discontinued beyond Birmingham, and the “New Holyhead Mail” began to run from London by the present Holyhead Road, in thirty-eight hours. Shrewsbury had at last achieved its due, and the “Chester and Holyhead Mail,” a slower coach, by Northampton and Stafford, was regarded as altogether an inferior affair.

XXII

When at last Lawrence was gathered to his fathers and new men took up the business of coaching, the daily Mail-coach to Holyhead and the two stages, running twice a week, were increased to seven coaches to or from London daily, in addition to numerous local stages. There were the “Oxonian Express,” through to Holyhead, by High Wycombe, Oxford, and Birmingham; the “Union,” by the same route, going no further than Shrewsbury; the “Shamrock,” to Holyhead, by Coventry and Birmingham; the “New Mail,” to Holyhead by the same route; the “Prince of Wales,” to Holyhead, by Oxford and Birmingham; and two Post-coaches. One could then actually do the journey between London and Shrewsbury in eighteen hours. There were also Crowley’s and Hearne’s vans and waggons, three-horsed and six-horsed, for the carriage of goods, plodding very soberly and with much jingling of harness and whip cracking, accomplishing the distance in three or four days.

But to accomplish the journey by coach in eighteen hours did not satisfy the new spirit come upon the scene. Isaac Taylor, who had taken the “Lion” coach-office and appears to have separated the businesses of inn-keeping and coach-proprietorship—that house being then occupied by William Tompkins, who was succeeded by Mrs. Basnett in 1835, and by Mrs. Brown in 1842—started the celebrated “Wonder” between Shrewsbury and London, in 1825, to “perform,” as the old coach advertisements expressed it, the journey of one hundred and fifty-eight miles in sixteen hours. The “Wonder” set the fashion of day coaches running long distances, and was the first to accomplish over a hundred miles a day. The proprietors’ complete satisfaction and pride in what they had found it possible to do are seen clearly reflected in the name given to the coach. Taylor had a strong company of allies to work the enterprise. It was horsed out of London from the “Bull and Mouth” by Sherman, and by the most reliable men at Coventry, Birmingham and Wolverhampton; while at Shiffnal and Hay gate were two of his own brothers.

According to the time bill here appended, there were sixty-five minutes consumed in stops on the way. Add to these fifteen minutes for the fourteen or fifteen changes at the various stages down the road, and the result is eighty minutes to be deducted from the running time, thus giving a net average speed of a little over eleven and a half miles an hour.

This was a programme kept with surprising punctuality throughout the year; a punctuality and an evenness of working obtained only by the large number of horses kept and the frequent stages. The Shrewsbury “Wonder” thus came to be regarded with such veneration for its time-keeping qualities that watches and clocks were regulated by its passing. When the swift yellow coach hove in sight at the end of a village street, the inhabitants, finding their timepieces fast, would not assume the lateness of the “Wonder,” but would put back the hands with a thorough and well-merited belief in the coach.

The stud of horses kept for the “Wonder” numbered one hundred and fifty, all sleek and plump. None of the horses worked more than one hour out of the twenty-four, being required merely on one of the ten-mile stages, which they frequently performed in five minutes under schedule time, and then were taken fresh and vigorous from the traces. They were fed liberally, with the view of keeping them heavy, rather than muscular; strength for short and powerful exertion being required, rather than endurance. Their average value was £20 and they were seldom worked more than four years on this fast coach. Well groomed and cared for, theirs was a lot to be envied.

The surprising performances of the “Wonder,” and its financial success, at last raised up a spirit of rivalry in the breasts of others in the horsey and coaching way, so that in 1834 a competitor was put upon the road, named (from the pseudonym adopted by C. J. Apperley, that famous sporting writer), the “Nimrod.” Jobson, landlord of the “Talbot” inn, horsed the “Nimrod” out of Shrewsbury. From London it was horsed on alternate days by Horne, from the “Bull,” Holborn, or by Robert Nelson from the “Belle Sauvage,” as far as Redbourne. The proprietors of the “Wonder,” whose enterprise had in its success raised up this competition, were furious, and determined to put another coach on the road. Accordingly, the “proud Salopians” were astonished by the appearance of an advertisement in the Shrewsbury Chronicle during July, 1835, announcing a new coach, designed to supplement the celebrated “Wonder.” It ran:—

Isaac Taylor, ever grateful for the distinguished support he has received from the public, announces a new and elegant fast day coach, called the “Stag,” every morning at a quarter before five, arriving at the “Bull and Mouth,” opposite the General Post Office, at seven the same evening. I. T. has been induced to commence running the “Stag,” to prevent the celebrated “Wonder” being in any way injured by racing or at all interfered with in the regularity which has hitherto been observed.

The figures quoted above give a journey of fourteen hours and a quarter, a speed not approached within half-an-hour by the “Wonder” itself at its very best. But this kind of thing could not, and did not, last, and while it did continue must have been cruelly hard on the horses.

The “Stag” was designed to run a little in advance of the “Nimrod,” while the “Wonder” followed it. In the expressive language of the road, the “Nimrod” was “well nursed,” and only by the greatest good luck chanced to pick up any passengers on the way. They raced along with such a hearty rivalry all the way that the three coaches often arrived simultaneously at Islington, two hours before time. It is surprising, both that nothing ever happened to them, and that Shrewsbury could at that time have had sufficient intercourse with London to render this wholesale competition, in view of the other coaches running at the same time, a paying speculation.

The rivals then commenced cutting one another’s throats by actually rendering the affair unprofitable, and paring down the fares by one third, trusting that those with the longest purse would be able to survive, and recoup themselves when the others had been driven off the road. Fifteen hundred pounds were lost in twelve months by the proprietors of the “Stag” and “Wonder” in this way; but they had the satisfaction of seeing the “Nimrod” off the road, and though the “Emerald” and “Hibernia” night coaches, extended for a time from Birmingham, loaded well from the rival yard, the famous “yellow belly,” as the “Wonder” was fondly called, went on, with fares raised again to 48s. inside and 30s. out, from the 30s. and £1 to which, in competition, they had fallen.

Thus did the “Wonder” maintain its pre-eminence in the little time left before the London and Birmingham Railway came, in 1838, to cut its journey short, and the Shrewsbury and Birmingham Railway, in 1849, to complete the work of sweeping all the coaches off the road into the limbo of obsolete institutions. In its last few years the “Wonder” was accelerated by one hour on both up and down journeys, for, starting an hour later, it reached its destination at the same time as before. Indeed, at the very time when railway enterprise cut it off in mid-career, a further acceleration was contemplated. It was proposed to perform the journey in thirteen hours. To do this it would have been necessary to establish six-mile, instead of ten-mile stages, and to abandon all stopping for taking up intermediate passengers.

But in the last days of its entire journey the “Wonder” was made to do a remarkable thing. It left the “Bull and Mouth” at the moment when the train for Birmingham steamed out of Euston, and reached Birmingham twenty minutes earlier. That extraordinary feat was not repeated, and was only possible even then by reason of the rails being slippery with rain and the locomotive wheels losing grip, causing great delay. From 1839 the “Wonder” ran only between Shrewsbury and Birmingham, by way of Ironbridge and Madeley, and ended its career, as a two-horse coach, in 1842.

XXIII

If Shrewsbury was a place to and from which came and went many fast coaches, it certainly sent forth one coach that was phenomenally slow. The “Shrewsbury and Chester Highflyer,” at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was very much less of a flyer than might have been expected from its name.

Those two places are forty miles apart. The “Highflyer” set out from Shrewsbury at eight o’clock in the morning, and arrived at Chester, under favourable circumstances, at the same hour in the evening. This snail-like crawl of little over three miles an hour is so remarkable that it invites investigation, whereupon some extraordinary things are revealed. At Wrexham, for example, two hours were allowed for dinner, and if his passengers wanted to linger over another bottle, Billy Williams, the coachman, who had looked in at the coffee-room door to announce the starting, would affably say, “Don’t let me disturb you, gentlemen.”

“Billy Williams,” as he was to one class, “Mr. William Williams” to another, “Chester Billy” and “Shrewsbury Billy” to the rest, was—need it be said?—a Welshman, and if any one wished for a little extra time in which to see Wrexham Church and its tower—one of the “wonders of Wales”—his patriotic ardour could not withstand the application for a further halt. Then, when Ellesmere was reached, another long stop was made to sample the cwrw da, the famous ale of that place; and, in fact, stops anywhere and everywhere, so that the wonder was, not that the journey occupied twelve hours, but that it did not take twenty-four. It must, indeed, have required some sharp driving, between whiles, to perform the distance in a dozen hours, and it was probably during one of these spurts that another coachman—one Jem Robins—was killed by being crushed under the coach when on one occasion it was overturned at an abrupt corner.

Billy Williams, however, made a peaceful end. He retired, or was retired by the railway’s usurpation of his line of country. He was what our grandfathers called an “original,” and a protégé of the Honourable Thomas Kenyon, at Pradoe, to whom he gave an excellent reason why horses should seem to go better at night.

“Hang me, Billy!” the honourable had exclaimed, “I’ve tried to account for it, but never could.”

“Why, I’m surprised at you,” said Billy; “do you mean you don’t know that?” “Why, of course I don’t,” replied the squire. “Well, then,” said Billy, “if you want to know the real reason, it’s because you’ve had your dinner.”

Billy was the hero of a story that long made a laughing-stock of him. The Honourable Thomas Kenyon was driving on one occasion to Chester races, but before setting out with his party from Pradoe thought that, as it was a particularly hot day, Billy might feel more comfortable if he exchanged his breeches and leather tops for lighter raiment. He accordingly told him to go upstairs and put on a pair of his own white trousers. Billy went up, and came back attired in a manner his host had never contemplated, for he had put the trousers on over the other garments!