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

THE MANCHESTER AND
GLASGOW ROAD

CONTENTS.

WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER

The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days of Old.

The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.

The Bath Road: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.

The Exeter Road: The Story of the West of England Highway.

The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.

The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway.

The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.

The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway.

The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road: Sport and History on an East Anglian Turnpike.

The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road: The Ready Way to South Wales. Two Vols.

The Brighton Road: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway.

The Hastings Road and the “Happy Springs of Tunbridge.”

Cycle Rides Round London.

A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction.

Stage Coach and Mail in Days of Yore. Two Vols.

The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby Legends.”

The Hardy Country: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.

The Dorset Coast.

The South Devon Coast.

The Old Inns of Old England. Two Vols.

Love in the Harbour: a Longshore Comedy.

Rural Nooks Round London (Middlesex and Surrey).

Haunted Houses; Tales of the Supernatural.

The North Devon Coast.[In the Press.

THE MAIL CHANGE.

[By J. Herring, 1844.

THE
MANCHESTER
AND
GLASGOW ROAD

THIS WAY TO GRETNA GREEN

By CHARLES G. HARPER

ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR, AND FROM
OLD-TIME PRINTS AND PICTURES

Vol. I.—LONDON TO MANCHESTER

LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.
1907

PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

PREFACE

“Onward and onward the highway runs to the distant city, impatiently bearing

Tidings of human joy and disaster, of love and of hate, of doing and daring.”

The Golden Legend.

THOSE lines, instinct with the dramatic possibilities of the road in far-off days, call to mind the old engravings and wood-cuts of the Durer school, in whose back-grounds, on the Hill Terrible, sits the City Beautiful, reached along a delectable road that wanders, now across open heaths and then disappears in the welcome shade of hoary woods; reappearing to reach its goal beside mountain streams and torrents, whose boulderous course it spans by high-arched bridges. Down such roads as these, in woodcuts such as those, go horsed and armed knights, very plumy and steely, ladies fair on their palfreys, with high-horned head-dresses; pages, men-at-arms, peasants, and all the mediæval traffic of the highways; while the verminous hermit in his cell by the bridge comes to his door as the wayfarers go by, scratching himself with one hand, and in the other holding a scallop-shell for the alms he, in a pitiful voice and in the name of God and all the saints, implores.

Those lines, in that modern versification of the terrible old legend by Jacobus de Voragine, bring all these things vividly before the imagination. You may almost scent the hawthorn blossom on the wayside hedges, can all but feel the soft breath of the wind, or the heat o’ the sun, and can even smell the hermit, rich in pietistic dirt. Joy and disaster, love and hate, doing and daring, all had their place on the highway in those times: Romance and the Road were terms convertible.

Now all those things are as tales that are told; but for centuries the Road retained that old distinction: the mediæval company had passed away: the knights and the ladies to their altar-tombs in the old country churches, the rest none knows whither; but after then came later generations, all travelling, living, hating, and loving along the highways, and so they continued to do, through the coaching era and until railways for a long series of years rendered the Road an obsolete institution.

When did the immemorial co-partnership of Romance and the Road begin to be dissolved? Let us consider. The first beginnings are found in the introduction of telegraphic signalling, when signal-stations were erected on the hills, and messages were passed on from one to another by means of revolving shutters or semaphore arms. The system originated about 1795, and came into use along this road in 1803. We read in the “Observer” of that period the startling announcement: “A line of communication, by means of telegraphs, is to be established between London and the north, by which intelligence will be conveyed in six hours at the distance of 400 miles.” Here, then, we find the parting of the ways! Instead of the horsed messenger, performing that distance in, let us say, forty-five hours, the telegraphists sent messages through in a fraction of that time, providing conditions were favourable. A very serious draw-back to the system was that in dull or stormy weather it was unworkable.

What the mechanical telegraph began the railways and the electric telegraph completed, and the roads—save for the cycles and the motor-cars from whose presence Romance flies abashed—have lost their intimate touch with life. They are largely removed from the sordid instant, and that is why we love them. Present-day romance will only be found by the next generation when, to adopt an American locution, it has become a “back number”: for ourselves, we are fain to the poor recourse of listening to the elfin harmonies of the winds in the wayside telegraph-poles, and to deduce romantic messages from those sounds; but alas! so little romantic may they be that the wires are probably flashing market reports to the effect that “grey shirtings are quiet,” or “bacon was steady.” Yet, on the other hand, a police message may be passing, to lead to the arrest of some fugitive: some fraudulent Napoleon of finance or one of the smaller fry: you never know!

In the old days, the criminal, visible to our physical eyes, would be seen, fleeing from justice, and after him, at a decent interval, the officers of the law, tailing away in a long perspective, properly exhausted and furious, their horses foaming and reeking with sweat in most appropriate style. You only see that sort of thing nowadays at Drury Lane or the Adelphi, but they do it very well there, even though the foam and the reek be applied with sponge and soap-suds.

He who would now find sights like these along the roads would need to wait long. The fugitives are as many as ever, but they are in yonder train. The telegraph has already outstripped such an one before he has gone a quarter of his journey, and the police are waiting at the other end, where, quite emotionless and regardless of dramatic necessities, they will presently arrest him.

Long stretches of the roads themselves are altered, with the growth of towns, into something new and strange, and where Terror stalked starkly in days of yore and Romance sped, flaunting, by, smug suburbs spread their vistas of red-brick, paved, and kerbed and lighted, and only the doctor, the collectors of rates and taxes, and the cries of the evening newspaper-boys stir the pulses of the inhabitants. The tragedies that sometimes await the doctor’s visits are a poor substitute for the soul-stirring days of old—they are too domestic: and that occasional inability to meet the demands of the tax-gatherer and the rate-collector which even the most respectable suburbs occasionally know is not tragedy in the inspiring sort.

The pilgrim of the roads therefore finds his account in the past; and it is to illustrate the long leagues for him that these pages are wrought out of long-forgotten things. Such an one, cycling, perchance, down the first few tramway-infested miles and cleansing himself after the almost inevitable muddy skid, may make shift to call a Tapleian philosophy to his aid, and exclaim with gratitude: “After all, it is an improvement upon two hundred years ago. Why, if I had been travelling here THEN, I should probably have been robbed and beaten—perhaps even murdered—by the highwaymen!”

CHARLES G. HARPER,

Petersham, Surrey,
October, 1907.

THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD

List of Illustrations

The Manchester and Glasgow Road
I

Beyond any possible doubt, there is more history—and more varied history—to the mile, along the lengthy road from London to Glasgow than on any other highway in this historic England of ours; with the sole possible exception of the road to Dover. The Great North Road itself is romantically historic, and there are 389 miles of it, but it is not so compact of historic and domestic incident as the Manchester and Glasgow Road—and it is not quite so long. The difference, to be sure, is trifling—merely a matter of 11¼ miles—but the long miles to Manchester, and on to Glasgow, are more plentifully set with towns and villages than the Great North Road, which, upon the whole, takes an austere and aloof course; and there is a wealth of detail on the way that presents at times an embarrassing choice for the historian.

The Manchester and Glasgow Road, according to the best modern authorities, measures from the General Post Office, London, to the Royal Exchange, Glasgow, 400¼ miles. Before Telford in 1816, under authority of the Government of that day, took the Carlisle and Glasgow division of it in hand, and eventually shortened it by various engineering expedients, the whole distance was 409¼ miles.

There is not the slightest hesitancy to be entertained about the course of this great road. It suited the Post Office in the old mail-coach days to send the mails along the Great North Road to Boroughbridge, and thence across country to Penrith, and so forward to Glasgow, and the contractors made the distance only 397¾ miles; but the route was that adopted here; through St. Albans, the historic towns of Northampton, Leicester, and Derby, Manchester, Preston, Lancaster, and Carlisle. The mere names of those places conjure up many a scene in the stirring annals of the nation, and suggest crowded incidents in the scarcely less interesting story of industrial progress; while the scenery along the road is in many districts of a high order of beauty, ranging between such extremes as the quiet pastoral country beyond St. Albans, through Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, to the wild moors of Staffordshire, the solemn beauty of Lancaster and Solway Sands, the stark heights of Shap Fell, and the bleak moors between Moffat and Douglas Mill.

THE FIRST GLASGOW COACH

The first stages of the road are common to the Great North Road and the Holyhead Road. At Hadley Green, beyond Barnet, we bid good-bye to the first, and at Hockliffe, 37½ miles from our starting-point, we branch off to the right from the second of those great highways.

II

Through communication between London and Glasgow was undreamed of in the earliest days of coaching; and never, in the very nature of things, was the journey often made without a break, until railway travelling came to entirely alter the complexion of affairs. But Glasgow was early convinced of the necessity for public conveyances between itself and other parts; and at so remote a date as 1678 had succeeded in establishing what would appear to have been a municipally supported coach service between Glasgow and Edinburgh. This coach was maintained by William Hoorn, Hoon, or Hume, “marchand in Edinburge,” who received a grant of £22 4s. 5d., and an annual subsidy of £11 2s. 3d., paid two years in advance, and for a term of five-and-a-half years, from the magistrates. The fare was 8s. in summer, and 9s. in winter; the burgesses of Glasgow to have the preference.

It set forth once a week, and by dint of much labour its six horses dragged it the 44 miles in three days.

How long a time this daring service lasted is not known, but probably not for any extended period. Again, in 1743, the Town Council of Glasgow is found attempting to set up a stage-coach or “lando,” to go once a week in winter and twice in summer. Negotiations were opened with one John Walker, and the fare proposed was 10s.; but it was not until 1749 that regular communication between Glasgow and Edinburgh was established.

Meanwhile there was nothing in the nature of a coach service between Glasgow and London. To reach the metropolis by public conveyance, you were obliged to go first by this rate-aided conveyance of Mr. William Hume, and then, arrived at Edinburgh, to secure a seat for the tremendous journey southward. It is no mere figure of speech to name that early coach-journey to London “tremendous”; for it took, according to circumstances and the season of the year, from nine to twelve days. The enterprise of Glasgow, it will thus be perceived, was not equal to so great an undertaking.

At a time when the able-bodied—who, after all, were the only people who could endure this kind of thing—were the only people who travelled, except under the extremest pressure of necessity, a horseman would ride the distance in six or seven days, and the postboys who carried the mails before the establishment of mail-coaches commonly did it in five; and so, possibly, those enterprising Glasgow town-councilmen considered there was no necessity at that period to support a coach to London.

STAGE AND MAIL TO GLASGOW

It was thus comparatively late in the history of coaching that Glasgow and London were connected by a direct coach service, but London and Carlisle Post Coaches were announced, going by Boroughbridge, and starting from December 26th, 1773. They travelled between the “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn, and the “Bush,” Carlisle; setting out from London on Wednesday evenings, and from Carlisle on Sunday evenings, and performing the journey in three days. They held six inside passengers, and two outsides; and the fares were, inside, £3 16s., and out, £2 6s. Passengers taken up on the road paid from twopence to threepence per mile. Dogs were strictly forbidden, under a penalty of £5.

It is not until 1788 that we learn of “Plummer’s Glasgow and London Coach,” which travelled the distance in sixty-five hours. In the same year, on July 7th, the first mail-coach arrived at Glasgow from London, after a journey of sixty-six hours; at a speed averaging about 6 miles an hour. Its route was along the Great North Road, so far as Boroughbridge, whence it continued by Leeming Lane, Catterick, Greta Bridge, and Brough, on to the Manchester and Glasgow Road at Penrith. Arrived at Carlisle, it halted, and a second coach took up the running to Glasgow.

In the era of mails carried on horseback, thus brought to an end, Glasgow had received and despatched its London post through Edinburgh, at second-hand, as it were, and this newly won independence wrested from the rival city was greeted with becoming enthusiasm, crowds of rejoicing citizens riding out to view the coming of the mail, and to escort it to its destination.

What the mail looked like in the first twelve years or so of its existence we perceive in the illustration after James Pollard, on the [opposite page]; although we may be quite sure that the coach never in its slowest time progressed in the slow and stately fashion—resembling the mournful deliberation of a funeral—pictured here. This is merely the early Pollard convention, seen in many of his productions.

The first Glasgow mail was by no means direct, and between Boroughbridge and Penrith it passed over wild and difficult country, so that it often did not succeed in keeping time. But, in spite of these difficulties, this route was kept—varied only by occasional divagations taking in Leeds and Ripon—until 1835, and, owing to road improvements between London and Doncaster, a number of accelerations were even possible.

THE GLASGOW MAIL, ABOUT 1800.

[After J. Pollard.

It must have been at an early period of these revisions of the time-table that Professor John Wilson, the athletic “Christopher North,” accomplished the walking exploit credited to him. Disappointed at not securing a place on the up mail from Penrith to Kendal, he gave his coat to the coachman and set off to walk the 26 miles, arriving at Kendal some time before the coach. He then walked on to his home at Elleray.

ACCELERATIONS

When that fine old sportsman, Colonel Hawker, travelled from London to Glasgow in 1812, the journey occupied close upon fifty-seven hours of continuous unrelaxing effort on the part of the many relays of coachmen, guards, and horses, and of passive fortitude on that of the travellers, who, after all, had the worst of it; for while horses, guards, and coachmen were changed frequently on the way, and passed like fleeting ghosts before their wearied vision, they endured to the bitter end. Well for those who were obliged to go through at one sitting, if it were summer when these three nights and two days of discomfort were being endured; but the stoutest might have quailed before the prospect of such a journey in winter.

In 1821 the coach arrived at Carlisle in what was considered the excellent time of 41 hours 40 minutes from London, a speed, for the 311 miles, of something under 7¾ miles an hour. But still it was only at 1.40 on the afternoon of the third day that the mail entered Carlisle; reaching Glasgow at 4.50 the next morning. Time, from London to Glasgow, 56 hours 50 minutes.

By 1825, however, a further acceleration was made. The mail came dashing into Carlisle at 6.7 a.m.; so much as 7 hours 33 minutes earlier. People held up their hands in astonishment, and were of opinion that wonders would never cease: a frame of mind fully shared by the Glasgow folk, who with satisfaction ill-concealed by natural Scottish calm, saw the mail draw up at the Post Office proportionately early.

They were absolutely correct: wonders did not cease; for in 1837 a further saving of 1 hour 50 minutes was effected to Carlisle, the mail-coach arriving at 4.17 a.m. on the second morning from London, time, 32 hours 17 minutes; and drawing up at Glasgow at two o’clock that same afternoon: forty-two hours for the entire journey. This truly astonishing advance upon early performances was only made possible by the long series of improvements effected on the road between Carlisle and Glasgow from 1798 to 1834, by which not only had the gradients and the surface been improved, but newer and shorter stretches of road had been struck out, reducing the actual mileage from 405 miles to 397 miles 6 furlongs.[1]

The mail at this final period was not, throughout, one of the crack coaches run under the direction of the Post Office; coming only thirteenth in the list for speed, and showing a performance of an average 9·34 miles per hour as compared with that of the swift Bristol mail, speeding along the road at 10·3, almost a mile an hour quicker. Analysed, however, it discloses for the 95 miles along Telford’s splendid Carlisle and Glasgow Road an even slightly higher speed than that of the Bristol mail itself; and there were for many years after the disappearance of the coaches admiring oldsters who recollected with an admiration not unmixed with terror the terrific speed of the up Glasgow mail as it tore down the side of Stanwix Brow, outside Carlisle.

THE MAILS

The accompanying official time-bills of the London and Carlisle and the Carlisle and Glasgow mails, as run in 1837, will prove interesting:

GENERAL POST OFFICE-THE EARL OF LICHFIELD. HER MAJESTY’S POSTMASTER-GENERAL.

In their last years, however, the Carlisle and Glasgow and the Carlisle and Edinburgh mails were run to clear 11 miles an hour: the time between Carlisle and Glasgow being cut down to 8 hours 32 minutes. Cautious folk steered clear of such performances, for accidents were frequent. But it was not speed that caused the dreadful accident to the up Manchester mail from Carlisle, overturned at Penrith on September 25th, 1835. The coach was passing the “Greyhound” inn when the horses, startled by a sudden thunderstorm, upset the coach. A gentleman on the roof was killed, and three other outsiders and the coachman were stunned.

But this was not the full measure of the Glasgow mails. The London and Manchester mail, once proceeding no further than Manchester, was extended by a second coach to Carlisle. This and the regular old Glasgow mail were in later years timed to meet at Penrith at four o’clock in the morning, and went on together to Carlisle. Carlisle was thus a busy centre for the mails, and in addition sent out, besides its local coaches and a mail for Edinburgh, a four-horse mail-coach for Portpatrick, carrying the mails for the north of Ireland. This also went along the main road so far as Gretna, whence it branched for Dumfries; continuing from that town to Portpatrick as a two-horse affair.

The cost of being conveyed by mail-coach from London to Glasgow was enormous. It is possible to voyage in these days to America, a distance of 3,000 miles, for less. In 1812 it cost an inside passenger, all the way to Glasgow, for fare alone, apart from the necessary tips to coachmen and guards, and exclusive of expenditure for food and drink all those weary hours, no less than £10 8s.: at the rate of about 6¹⁄₈d. a mile. To-day, the fastest train takes exactly eight hours, and the first-class fare, answering to the mail-coach fare, is £2 18s.; while one may travel, third class, in greater luxury than the old passengers by mail, for 33s.

III

DISCOMFORTS OF TRAVELLING

No one ever in coaching days thought it worth while to write the story of the Glasgow mail. The hard, dry facts of it may be sought, and with some diligence found and collated, in Parliamentary Papers, and in the pages of Cary, or in the coaching information common to directories of that age; but intimate accounts are sought in vain. Travellers who experienced the miseries of long-distance journeys were only too glad to be done with them, and to dismiss the memory of their sufferings. To have passed nearly forty-two hours continuously on the roof of a coach in severe weather, with every hair standing up like a porcupine’s quills, and with rain, dew, and hoar-frost as one’s dreary portion, forbade all that glamour with which that old era is regarded at this convenient distance of time.

Those who could endure such a journey without a break were few; and to those few, obliged from any cause to hasten from end to end, the recollection must have seemed a veritable phantasmagoria of dimly shifting scenes and aching, weary limbs.

THE GLASGOW MAIL LEAVING THE YARD OF THE “BULL AND MOUTH.”

[After C. Cooper Henderson.

Thus it is that we obtain only brief and disconnected glimpses of the mail’s progress. The most eloquent picture of misery is undoubtedly that presented by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, writing in November 1800, describing a journey from Carlisle to London:

“After passing a sleepless night at Carlisle, I was hurried away next morning without a morsel of breakfast, and grew so very sick and ill in a little while that I had almost fainted twice. When we stopt at Penrith and took up an old gentleman, I then got a large dram of gin, which did me much service; and we proceeded through snow and ice far and far, and farther than I can tell, till I fell asleep and got a much better night’s rest than at that accursed Carlisle. During the night (but Heaven knows where) we picked up two men going to London; and, lo! about daylight another qualm seized me. And when we got to Stilton, it blew such a hideous storm, with hail, snow, and wind, that for an hour and twenty minutes the six horses would not move forward, but attempted always to retreat to the stables. Such kicking, such rearing of beasts, such cursing and swearing of men (who had a stronger smack of the big brute in them than even their cattle), I never met with before; and after every cudgel in the house—yea, even my landlady’s private stick wherewith she corrects her spouse—had been bent or broken over their backs, they got on so slowly that we reached London only at eight in the morning. Here was no peace for the wicked. The ‘Bull and Mouth,’ which is the filthiest place you ever saw, gave me such an aversion to remaining where I was, that I took a place in the heavy coach which went on at one that day, and lay down on a bed till the time for departure. Here my head grew very bad indeed, so that I slept not a wink.”

AN AFFECTED TRAVELLER

“Stinking, noisy stye,” he elsewhere calls the “Bull and Mouth,” but we must recollect that Sharpe was very affected, a bundle of fine feelings, and a poseur: one, in short, born a hundred years before his time, and by no means one of those robust Englishmen to whom noise and stable-smells were but the ordinary and commonplace incidents of coach-journeys and coaching hostelries.

Nothing, you clearly perceive, could have roused Sharpe to enthusiasm. But there were some wildly enthusiastic people on the road then, and they had often cause, in the stirring news they brought with them, to feel exultation of spirits. For with the mail came news of the Battles of the Nile, of Trafalgar, of Waterloo; and many a wayside park was despoiled of laurel branches to deck out the coach in the emblems of victory. Many a time did the mail enter Glasgow in that fashion: decorated with the bays, a red flag flying from the roof, the guard in his best scarlet coat and gold-laced hat, sounding his bugle as the horses galloped at a thundering pace along the Gallowgate. Arrived at the foot of Nelson Street, at about seven o’clock in the morning, his duty was, on these historic occasions, to thrice discharge his blunderbuss in the air. Every one then rushed to the “Tontine” coffee-room to learn the news and get the papers: some one with a stentorian voice being generally elected to read the despatches aloud, for the common benefit.

A thrilling story of those old days, when we were generally at war with France, is that of one Archibald Campbell, a Glasgow merchant who had omitted to insure one of his ships, and, in the last few weeks before she fell due, repented of his omission. Alarmed, he sought to effect insurance with a Glasgow office, but found the premium so high that he resolved to insure ship and cargo in London. Accordingly, he wrote to his London broker, instructing him to insure on the best terms possible. The letter was posted and left by the up mail-coach at 2 p.m. At seven o’clock that night he received an express from Greenock, announcing the safe arrival of his ship, and instantly despatched his head clerk in pursuit of the coach, with instructions to overtake it if possible, or, if he could not do so, to proceed to London and deliver a note to the broker, countermanding the insurance.

But, in spite of making every effort to urge on the postillions, the clerk was unable to overtake the mail, with its five hours’ start. He arrived in London shortly after, and proceeded, early in the morning, to the residence of the broker, before the morning delivery, and thus countermanded the order; with the result that an insurance which would have cost £1,500 was saved at the expense of £100.

FASTER THAN THE MAIL

Such were the incidents that accompanied the mail on its long journey; but they had already faded from general knowledge, and were treasured chiefly in the memories of a few oldsters, when its last days were come, in February 1848. They had been “piping times of peace” ever since the echoes of Waterloo had died away, in 1815; and for two reasons the news of great issues was no longer brought by the mail. Firstly, because great national events had become more rare; and secondly, because when there was especially momentous intelligence, enterprising folks, travelling even faster than the mail-coach, and setting out at any hour they chose, had stolen away the prime position of that old-time national intelligencer. For example, when at length the great Reform Bill passed the House of Lords, after a long period of hazardous political agitation, at 6.35 in the morning of Saturday, April 14th, 1832, a Mr. Young, of The Sun newspaper, left the Strand sixty-five minutes later in a post-chaise and four, with copies of The Sun he had caused to be printed between 6.30 and 7.30, containing a report of the debate and division, and travelled literally “post-haste” to Glasgow. At 7.30 p.m. on the next day, Sunday, he alighted at the house of his agent, Thomas Atkinson, Miller Street, Glasgow, having performed the journey in 35 hours 50 minutes: a speed, including stoppages for changing horses, of 11¼ miles an hour throughout.

There were, it would appear, others on the road on this occasion, similarly engaged, for John Bright spoke in after years of having travelled up from Manchester to London at the time, by the “Peveril of the Peak,” and of having, in common with the other passengers, “observed something coming towards us. We saw horses galloping, and carriages coming at great speed. By-and-by we saw two chaises with four horses, each chaise with two or three men inside. They were throwing out parcels from each window as they went past, galloping as fast as it was possible for horses to travel. These were express chaises, coming from London, bringing the news to all the people of the country—for there were then no telegraphs and no railways—of the glorious triumph of popular principles, even in the House of Lords, for that House had sat all night, and it was not until the morning that the House divided and the second reading of that great measure was carried by a majority of nine votes.” Men thought the millennium was come, but events have proved that it had not; and, according to latest advices, it has not been signalled, even yet.

IV

THE “FLYING COACH”

Manchester, less than half the way to Glasgow, was in later years very abundantly supplied with coaches from London; but London and Manchester were not in direct communication by coach until 1754; and had London been left to establish a line of coaches to Manchester, the date would no doubt have been much later. Indeed, it is to be noted that, almost without exception, the earlier coaches between London and the provinces were established by provincials seeking to reach London. The metropolis was always magnificently indifferent; but when the provincial manufacturing towns began to arise, the manufacturers, seeking business with that greatest of markets, and finding nothing for it but to ride horseback to and from London, speedily set up coach services. Thus it was that the first coach ever to run between Manchester and London was established by an association of Manchester men. This was the “Flying Coach” of 1754, which was announced with the statement that “However incredible it may appear, this coach will actually (barring accidents) arrive in London in four days and a half after leaving Manchester.”

Really and truly! as the children say. Here we smile; but those eighteenth-century projectors manifestly took things very seriously, as they had every reason to do; and doubtless considered the establishment of this flier a wonderful achievement.

Six years later, in 1760, Messrs. Handforth, Howe, Glanville & Richardson’s coach is found performing the journey in three days “or thereabouts”; and in 1770 the “London Flying Machine,” by Samuel Tennant, began to wing its way every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in summer, in two days, from the “Royal Oak,” Market Street. It set out in summer at the shocking hour of one o’clock in the morning, but conceded 4 a.m. in the winter months; when, however, it required another whole day for the journey.

The earlier coaches seem to have been discontinued, for Tennant’s “Flying Machine” was in 1770 the only one between London and Manchester; but for the less moneyed and more leisured classes whose time was of small value, and expedition was therefore of little moment, there were Matthew Pickford’s stage-waggons (“Flying Waggons” he called them), which, generally at a penny a mile, conveyed passengers and goods between London and Manchester in four and a half days. They went from the “Swan,” Market Street Lane, on Wednesdays and Saturdays; but had several rivals: notably Bass’s waggons, on Fridays, from the “Fountain”; Cooper’s, from the “Star,” Deansgate, on Wednesdays and Saturdays; Hulse’s, from the “Windmill,” on the same days; Washington’s, from the “Pack Horse,” Mill Street Lane, Tuesdays; and Wood’s, from the “Coach and Horses,” Deansgate, Wednesdays and Saturdays.

THE MANCHESTER MAIL

In 1776-7, serious competition began for the coaching traffic between London and Manchester, two rival concerns—the “London New and Elegant Diligence” and the “New Diligence”—each setting out from Manchester three times a week and taking only two days to perform the journey. The “New and Elegant” competitor set out from the “Upper Royal Oak” inn, Market Street Lane, and went by Macclesfield and Derby. Its complement was thirteen passengers, who were allowed 14 lb of luggage each, free; and the fare was £2 6s. or 3d. a mile. Among the proprietors of this coach occurs the name of Pickford.

The “New Diligence” (which appears to have been established before its “New and Elegant” fellow) went by way of Matlock and Derby.

The next great event was the establishment of the Manchester mail, in 1785. It left the yard of the “Swan with Two Necks,” in Lad Lane, every weekday evening at 7.30 p.m., and the General Post Office half an hour later, and came to H. C. Lacy’s “Bridgewater Arms,” Manchester, at 6 p.m. the next day. Time, 22 hours; a speed of close upon 8½ miles an hour. At its best period, from 1825 to the end, in 1837, it accomplished the journey in exactly 19 hours, at the average speed of 9·66 miles per hour.

Meanwhile, during the fifty-two years that witnessed the whole career of the mail-coach, down to its final run, stage-coaching along the road to Manchester was utterly revolutionised. Rivalry and competition, as fierce as that on any road, brought the coaches to such a degree of perfection that for comfortable travel, as then understood, it was ahead of all other routes; and to such a turn of speed that it was equal to the best for rapid transit.

During all this period, the districts north of Manchester were more or less beyond the ken of the London stage-coach proprietors, to whom the comparatively lean traffic of the road on to Lancaster, Carlisle, and Glasgow offered no great inducements for through bookings. Moreover, Manchester and Carlisle were themselves great coaching centres, whose coach proprietors were very well able to work by themselves and take such long-distance competition at a disadvantage. From the “Bridgewater Arms,” High Street, Manchester, went numbers of branch mails; from the “Star” inn, Deansgate, and the “Mosley Arms,” Market Place, went a long list of stage-coaches to Lancaster, Kendal, Carlisle, and Glasgow, as well as others along the important cross-roads; while from the “Swan” inn, the “Flying Horse,” the “Palace” inn, and the “Talbot,” Market Street; the “Golden Lion” and “Bush,” Deansgate; “Lower Turk’s Head,” Shude Hill; “Buck,” Hanging Ditch; “Boar’s Head,” Hyde’s Cross, and others a swarm of short-distance coaches set out.

THE “COURIER,” MANCHESTER, CARLISLE, AND GLASGOW COACH.

[After C. B. Newhouse.

The chief mail contractor at Manchester in the early days of coaching was Alexander Paterson, who removed from the “Lower Swan” inn, Market Street Lane, to the “Bridgewater Arms” in 1788. He was succeeded by H. C. Lacy, who in 1827 removed to what had until then been a private mansion at the corner of Market Street and Mosley Street, and opened it as the “Royal Hotel and New Bridgewater Arms.”

The older inn has long since been converted into warehouses, occupied at the present time by Messrs. Woodhouse, Hambly & Co.

THE DAY COACHES

Among the few stage-coaches advertised to run through the whole distance from London to Manchester and Glasgow was the “Courier,” which was started in later years and ran until the opening of the railway. It set out from the “Belle Sauvage,” Ludgate Hill, and from the “Castle and Falcon,” Aldersgate Street, every weekday at 3 p.m., and connected by a branch coach at Carlisle with Edinburgh.

V

Strange portents were seen upon the road to Manchester in the early years of last century. About 1824 began the era of the fast day coaches, and fine vehicles, handsome horses, and decent harness were provided for the travelling public, instead of the springless tubs, wretched cattle, and harness composed chiefly of odd pieces of worn leather eked out with string, which made up the uncomfortable old night coaches. It was a new era in more than one sense, for this was that now historic period when horseless vehicles were first put upon the public roads.

The ’twenties of the nineteenth century were almost as remarkable for those early horseless vehicles, the steam carriages, as the present era is for petrol-driven and electric motor-cars. Railways, too, began early to threaten stage-and mail-coaching; and long, whirling, and involved controversies on road and rail traffic occupied the columns of the press, and overflowed into innumerable pamphlets.

Few people had sufficient imagination to foresee an era of mechanical locomotion; but one pamphleteer, who unfortunately elected to remain anonymous, published in 1824 what modern journalists with an insufficient English vocabulary would doubtless call a brochure on the subject. This booklet, entitled The Fingerpost, is, according to its title page, “By???.” Whoever he may have been who thus veiled his identity behind those triple notes of interrogation, he certainly was a seer. He foresaw our own times with limpid vision—and smelt them, too.

He thought it “reasonable to conclude that the nervous man will ere long take his place in a carriage drawn or impelled by a Locomotive Engine with more unconcern and with far better assurance of safety than he now disposes of himself in one drawn by four horses of unequal powers and speed, endued with passions that acknowledge no control but superior force, and each separately, momentarily, liable to all the calamities that flesh is heir to. Surely an inanimate power, that can be started, stopped, and guided at pleasure by the finger or foot of man, must promise greater personal security to the traveller than a power derivable from animal life.”

A GLANCE INTO THE FUTURE

“I must ask him,” he continues, “to indulge his imagination with an excursion some twenty or thirty years forward in the regions of time; when the dark, unsightly, shapeless machine that now offends him, even in idea, shall he metamorphosed into one of exquisite symmetry and beauty, and as superbly emblazoned with heraldic honours as any that are now launched from the floors of Long Acre—a machine that may regale his nostrils with exhalations from some genial produce of the earth whose essence may be extracted at an insignificant cost, and its fragrance left on the breeze for the sensitive traveller’s gratification; that, instead of the rumble of coaches, may delight his ear with the concord of sweet sounds.”

Wonderful man: penetrating intuition! But barbaric conservatism blocked the way, and not thirty years, but a weary period of seventy-two, intervened between his day and the fulfilment of his dream. In 1896 the Motor Car came, and we have now our fill of “exhalations,” whose “fragrance” is “left on the breeze” in the form of stinking petrol and fried lubricating oil; while streets and roads are smothered in dust and, in a “concord of sweet sounds,” resound to the crashing of gears and the bellowing of motor-horns, like the bulls of Bashan afflicted with bronchitis.

But in that early experimental period a London and St. Albans Steam Carriage Company (among others) was formed, and made several trips with its uncouth monsters. Proposals were even made to establish a “steam-coach” service to Manchester, the coach to haul behind it a number of goods-waggons; but the turnpike authorities at Dunstable, anxious for the condition of their roads, hearing early of this proposition, were prepared for the unwelcome visitors, and, procuring cartloads of immense stones, strewed the highway with them. They certainly brought the “steam-coach” to a halt, but at the same time nearly wrecked the down Manchester mail; and it was a long while before the Post Office allowed them to forget their excess of zeal.

VI

THE “DEFIANCE”

Up to 1821 there had been comparatively little coaching competition along the Manchester Road. In that year there ran along the Coventry, Atherstone, Lichfield, and Congleton route to Manchester (which is not the Manchester Road as considered in these pages) the “Prince Cobourg” coach, which set out from the “Swan with Two Necks,” and was at Manchester in exactly twenty-six hours; but the “Defiance” was in the first flight upon the route adopted here. It was not very swift, for it set out at half-past two every afternoon from the “Swan with Two Necks,” Lad Lane, and did not arrive at the “Bridgewater Arms,” Manchester, until 5.30 the next afternoon: twenty-seven hours. That was just before the era of the great Chaplin, and at that time the “Swan with Two Necks” was still kept by one Kingsford, while the Coach Office in its yard remained in the hands of William Waterhouse, who had carried on business there as a mail contractor and coach proprietor since 1792, and was well content with the old leisurely ways. Such as it was, the “Defiance” was only equalled in that year by the “Regulator,” which, running from the same establishment, was no competitor, having a slightly different route, taking it through Buxton. It also performed the journey in twenty-seven hours. The “Manchester Telegraph” at that time took thirty hours.

But in 1822, probably nerved to great deeds by the establishment of a smart rival, the “Independent,” which worked on alternate days from Nelson’s “Bull” inn, Whitechapel, and the “Spread Eagle,” Gracechurch Street, and leaving London every evening at 6 p.m. reached Manchester in twenty-four hours, he did manage to expedite the “Defiance” by two hours and a half. In that year it made the journey in twenty-four and half hours. In 1826 it had become the “Royal Defiance,” and, starting at 6.30 p.m., was at Manchester in twenty-four hours.

These successive accelerations were probably due to William Chaplin, who seems to have become interested by degrees in the business so long carried on by Waterhouse, and to have finally succeeded him about 1825.

The “Defiance” had in its earlier years very little to contend against. In 1821 there was a “Manchester Telegraph” from the “Castle and Falcon,” Aldersgate Street, also starting at 2.30 p.m., but taking no less than twenty-nine and half hours to perform the journey: a very modest pace of some six miles an hour. But in 1823 a powerful rival appeared in Edward Sherman, who then established himself at the “Bull and Mouth,” St. Martin’s-le-Grand, as a coach proprietor. He had come up to London as a boy, from Wantage, Berkshire, with the traditional half-crown in his pocket; and found work in Oxford Market as a boy-porter, earning 8d. a day. Out of this scanty wage he saved a daily 2d. According to some accounts, he found his way on to the Stock Exchange, in some connection with one Levy, a wealthy farmer of the turnpike tolls, who helped to establish him at the “Bull and Mouth.” He was a tall, dark, fine-looking man; one of the very few who at that time wore a moustache, the mark then of the fast, wild young fellow. He married the wealthy widow proprietress of the “Oxford Arms,” Warwick Lane. She soon died, and was not long afterwards followed by her sister, who left him her property. He then married his wife’s niece.

MAILS LEAVING THE YARD OF THE “SWAN WITH TWO NECKS,” 1834

[After J. Pollard.

Eventually he raised himself to the first rank of coachmasters; almost rivalling the great Chaplin himself, and running several coaches in keen competition with him. He rebuilt the “Bull and Mouth,” and in his prime owned seven hundred horses. Over fifty mail and stage-coaches, chiefly for the northern and north-western roads, left his capacious yard every twenty-four hours. The great stables were likened to a small town.

He was not a horsey man, but his horses and coaches were of the best. The coaches were easily distinguishable among all others, their lower panels and wheels being painted a light yellow, and the upper quarters black.

THE MANCHESTER TELEGRAPH

The famous “Manchester Telegraph” day coach, established by Sherman in 1833, left the “Bull and Mouth” at 5 a.m. and reached Manchester at half-past eleven o’clock the same night. As competition with Chaplin’s “Defiance” grew hotter, its speed was accelerated by a half, and then by one whole hour; when the pace, allowing for twenty minutes at Derby, where “the coach dined,” and reckoning the various changes, worked out at just under twelve miles an hour.

To safely negotiate this, in parts, hilly road at so high an average rate of speed, the “Telegraph” coach was especially designed and constructed with flat springs, which gave it a comparatively low centre of gravity.

The strict conduct of coaching business may readily be perceived by a glance at the appended time-sheet carried on every journey:

Observe.—That a fine of 1s. per minute will be incurred by each proprietor for every minute of time lost over his stage or stages, to one-half of which the coachman and guard will be held equally liable between them, should their employers see sufficient cause for enforcing the same.

Misdating the time-bill, or neglecting to date at all (either with pen and ink or pencil), at any of the above places, the moment he arrives, will subject the guard to a fine of 5s. for each default. The guard is also to leave his time-bill in the office on his arrival at the “Bull and Mouth,” or forfeit 5s. for each omission.

THE “MANCHESTER TELEGRAPH,” 1834

[After Robert Havell.

Sherman’s “Estafette” was a great advance in coaching luxury, and was a product of the keen competition in the last few years of coaching. The interior was lighted with a reflector lamp, illuminating an elegantly engraved ivory tablet, showing a table giving all towns on the route, distances, and intermediate times.

SPEED AND LUXURY

A very prosperous coach in later years, always loading well, was the “Peveril of the Peak,” competing with the “Telegraph” and the “Defiance” by dint of leaving London at a somewhat later hour. Another fast night coach was the “Red Rover,” by Robert Nelson, of the “Belle Sauvage,” Ludgate Hill. It started at 7 p.m. and accomplished the journey, by way of the comparatively level Holyhead Road to Birmingham and Wolverhampton, and thence by Newcastle-under-Lyme and Congleton, in twenty hours. There was no mistaking the “Red Rover,” for not only was the coach itself red, but the guards wore red hats and red coats. Sherman soon bought out Nelson, and took the “Red Rover”; but Nelson immediately put on another along the same route, calling it the “Beehive.” It went to the other extreme, and set out at 8 a.m., arriving at Manchester at 4 o’clock the next morning. It sounded the last note in coaching convenience, for not only was it fitted inside with a reading-lamp, and the inside seats provided with spring cushions, but every seat was numbered in order to avoid disputes.

In 1834, competition between coach proprietors on the chief routes grew so keen that a war of extermination broke out; the stronger men striving to crush the smaller by reducing fares below a paying level. On this road it became possible for a while to travel at half the former fares, and to journey the 186 miles to Manchester for 40s. inside, and 20s. out; but cheap travel was dearly bought in the accidents occasioned through this extravagant rivalry. In addition, were the usual and inevitable mischances of the highway. Thus the Manchester “Defiance” was upset in August 1835 at Brailsford, through the horses shying at a white gate, when a Mr. Holbrook was killed; and the “Peveril of the Peak” was overturned in September 1836, a passenger and the coachman being crushed to death.

Those coach proprietors with the longest purses would, of course, in time have crushed the smaller men in this war of cheap prices; and already, before the railway came to sweep big men and little into one common limbo, those with slender resources were feeling the pinch of daily expenses, and could sometimes hardly settle their turnpike accounts—especially heavy on this road.

The onerous burden of the tolls payable by stage-coaches can scarcely be realised, save by stating a specific example. The amount incurred on a single journey to Manchester was no less than £5 13s. 5d., and this was by no means exceptional. Of course, the coach did not stop to pay toll at every gate, the practice being to settle monthly. The burden seems a heavy one for coach proprietors, but was, like every other tax, levied in the end upon the consumer, being finally paid by the coach passengers in their fares, calculated on the basis of the coach proprietors’ expenses.

At last, in 1837, with the opening of the London and Birmingham Railway to Manchester, this petty warfare was stilled, and the business of the coach proprietors seemed to be ended. In 1836, when the railway had been opened as far as Birmingham, Chaplin and Benjamin Worthy Horne, two of the largest proprietors, had been induced to withdraw from the road, and to throw their interest on the side of the new methods; but Sherman refused to hear anything of the kind. He was the most courageous, not to say the most obstinate, of men; thoroughly British in the characteristics of doggedness and unwillingness to own himself beaten. He did not believe in railways, until the stern fact of his coaches running empty along the road convinced him, at a considerable loss; and when in 1837 temporary trouble arose between the public and the railway, and some were already regretting the old days, he dashed in and re-established his “Red Rover” coach, which lasted a year or more, losing money heavily when the Manchester people and the railway had composed their quarrel.

EDWARD SHERMAN

The character-sketch of Sherman, here begun, may here be fitly concluded. Without doubt a man of strong character, he had many peculiarities, among them a decided taste for extravagance in dress and jewellery, remarkable even at that time, when dress was very exuberant indeed. Instead of sporting a shirt front, his chest displayed an expanse of black satin, plentifully covered with diamond pins. One day a thief came behind him in the street, reached a hand over his shoulder, and made off with a valuable specimen. Sherman afterwards had them all attached to a chain.

His fighting temper, if it stood him in good stead among his fellow coach proprietors, certainly, as we have seen, involved him in heavy losses in quarrelling with railways, before he found them too strong for him. To lose money was to him an especial grief. The very sight of sovereigns was a solace to him, and he kept a hundred in a tankard, deposited in his safe at the “Bull and Mouth,” so that he might always have the pleasure of handling the gold.

He had—according to private information—a number of children “that he ought not to have had,” whatever that may mean. His last years were sad, for his relatives exploited his temper and some eccentricities he had developed, and procured his committal, as a lunatic, to Bethlem Hospital, where he died in 1866. There are those yet living who remember him there, and tell how he was put away with little legitimate excuse.

The “Bull and Mouth” was carried on by his executor, E. Sanderson, until 1869, when it was purchased by the late Quartermaine East, and re-named the “Queen’s Hotel.”

Nowadays, the most ruinously low coach fares of that competitive time before railways are made to look absurdly high by even the ordinary third-class railway fare, 15s. 5½d., to Manchester: and excursions are frequently run at the price of a few shillings.

VII

THE COACHMEN

We cannot well leave the subject of coaching without some fleeting reminiscences of the coachmen and guards who worked up and down the road. Not all of them have earned a measure of fame. They formed, indeed, a very considerable body of men, and there were some generations of them; beginning with the poor old red-nosed and many-caped Tobys who, wrapped up in many wrappings and swathed about the feet and legs with hay-and-straw bands, sat on the box like partly animated mummies; and ending with coachmen who were in many attributes considered gentlemen. A love of strong spirits was common to the earlier and later generations, but those of the earlier were merely “drivers,” if you please, and the later were “coachmen.” The old Tobys drove chiefly through the night, and in times when speed did not exist and skill was not essential: the rather flashy “swell” coachmen of a later era cut a dash in the daytime, with a cigar between their teeth, and had extraordinary skill with the reins. These were the two chief classes, subdivided again and again by individual peculiarities; and then there were the guards.

Coaching experts were never tired of sounding the praises or noting the peculiarities of the fine coachmen on this road. Bob Snow, of the “Telegraph,” was, according to “Nimrod,” who took his position as a coaching critic very seriously indeed, “all right—a pink in his way, and as well dressed for the road as a gentleman ought to be for Almack’s.” Great, too, was his admiration for Harry Douglas, another coachman on the “Telegraph.” He was “about the size of two ordinary men.” Not only could he gallop a coach without it swinging, but he could drink as much as would scald a porker. As Dibdin sang of Tom Bowling, “his virtues were so rare.” He was, moreover, “a great favourite with the Manchester gentlemen, and an artist of the first order. His right arm”—for taking it out of the horses in tender places with the whip—“was terrible. Jovial, singing many excellent songs,” he appears to have been a prominent figure.

But Joe Wall was the unapproachable, the unsurpassed, at whose magnificence the road gaped with astonishment. In the height of his fame he drove the “Telegraph” the thirty-seven miles between London and Hockliffe. He was “a tremendous swell,” keeping one or two hunters at that place, and thus occupying the hours he passed there, waiting to take his seat on the up coach. On one occasion he had a fall in the hunting field, preventing him taking the “Telegraph” up to town that night. Fortunately an able and experienced amateur hand was on the coach, and took his place. None other less accomplished could have been trusted with so fast a coach, going at night through the crowded approach to town.

WHIPS OF THE “TELEGRAPH”

Meecher, on the other hand, although a competent whip on the “Telegraph,” was a satirical and gloomy person: a kind of masculine Gummidge. He was a reduced gentleman, and as such found the world out of joint. In revenge, he “took it out of” the commercials travelling on the coach, and lost much by refusing to allow any one who was not also a gentleman to treat him. Exactly how he arrived at his estimate of gentility or the want of it does not appear.

His humour was certainly of the sardonic kind, as appears by a story told of him. “Pity those women have nothing to do,” exclaimed a passenger on the box-seat, eyeing a gossiping group in the road.

“I’ll give them something,” said the saturnine Meecher; and, pulling up to them, he asked in his gloomiest tones if any of them missed any of their children; “for,” said he, “I’ve just run over and killed one, down the road.” They all flew off, agonised, and Meecher grinned.

He came at last, in the general ruin of coaching, to drive a one-horse railway omnibus; but he never ceased to consider himself a gentleman.

Another whip on the same coach, Samuel Inns, who—if names go for anything—should certainly have become an innkeeper, became, instead, a farmer, and grew prosperous; and yet another, Tom Davies, was discovered, years afterwards, as a rural postman.

William Jervis, of the “Defiance,” was almost as “gentlemanly” as Meecher, and a good deal more impudent, He would hold forth to the box-seat passenger unfortunate enough to travel by his coach upon the happy days when he had been in service with the Marquis of Exeter—although, to be sure, he had been nothing more than a stable-boy at Burghley House—and would affect to deplore those days, “when he associated with gentlemen.” “And now, sir,” he would bitterly remark, “I’ve got to drive d—d cotton-spinners and calico-printers.” It mattered not at all that it was probably a calico-printer or a cotton-manufacturer who was sitting by him at that moment. Indeed, there was that in his nature which led him to seize the opportunity to hurt the feelings of worthy Manchester men. It naturally followed that the tips he received suffered in number and in value from this extraordinary bias towards quarrelling with his inoffensive passengers: and the balance was not redressed by the rare occasions on which he found a peer or a landed proprietor by his side.

How the coachmen found themselves so constantly and so plentifully in choice cigars of the most expensive kind must remain mysterious. Jervis—who, by the way, refused to be known as “Bill” and was always addressed as “Mr. William Jervis”—smoked the best Havanas as a rule, and could not endure inferior brands. One memorable day, a passenger beside him was puffing happily away at a cheap and nasty smoke—a real Flor de Cabbage—when Jervis turned upon him, and, without further ado, snatched it from his mouth and threw it away.

“Can’t stand a bad cigar,” said Jervis, in not very adequate explanation: “take one of mine.”

The end of this bold and haughty fellow was sad. When railways superseded coaching, he hanged himself behind a stable-door of the “Swan with Two Necks.”

THE GUARDS

The guards were, to a man, of more consideration and urbanity. Their cue was a general heartiness to every one, from an ostler to a county magnate; but there was much scope for development in the character of a guard, for he came into intimate personal relations with the passengers in general, while the coachman had but one companion—the passenger beside him on the box-seat. Guards were entrusted, not only with parcels of all kinds, but with buying-commissions in town for rural customers; and acted frequently, as was sufficiently well known to the more shady characters of the countryside, as interested intermediaries between poachers and those poulterers in London who did not mind dealing in poached game.

Comparatively little has come down to us, save in general terms, of the guards who manned the coaches on this road; but Venables, one of those upon the “Manchester Telegraph,” stands out prominently. He was not, like so many of his brethren, a performer upon the key-bugle, but possessed a beautiful tenor voice which he lifted up in sentimental song along the roads on sunny days, greatly to the delight of passengers, and to his own profit. He had at least one dramatic experience, in being very nearly chloroformed and flung off the coach by three confederated thieves, who had by some means learned of an extremely valuable case of jewels that had been entrusted to him, which he had, for greater safety, deposited in a locked box under his seat. With the exception of the box-seat passenger, these enterprising would-be jewel thieves formed the only passengers on the roof, and they had reckoned on stifling the guard and heaving him over the side, in the darkness between Ashbourne and Leek, trusting to the noise made by the coach to drown the sound of any scuffle. What they would then have done, after securing the jewels, is only to be guessed at, for the behaviour of the conspirators had early attracted Venables’ suspicions, and no sooner had one whipped out his chloroform-pad than he felt himself struck full in the face with stunning force. The coachman’s attention was aroused, and the coach was on the point of being stopped when the three jumped off the roof and disappeared in the night.

Venables in later years became a guard on the London and Birmingham Railway.

JIM BYRNS

Skaife, himself a man of some musical abilities, and a good performer on the bass-viol, became landlord of the “Graham Arms,” Longtown. Jim Byrns, guard on the Glasgow mail between Preston and Carlisle, was in the next era station-master at Preston, and saw the trains go by on their way to Shap, whose bleak uplands he had travelled thousands of times. Standing up for miles together, and blowing his horn continually to prevent a collision on foggy nights; or wading through the drifts of a snowstorm and saddling one of the leaders to ride off to a farmhouse and rouse the farm-labourers to come and help with their shovels to dig out His Majesty’s mails, he had earned all he received, and a bit over. “Jim,” says one who knew him, “was the right man in the right place, a rare hand at the head of a fatigue-party with shovels, and a perfect master of the carpenter’s tools in case of a break-down.”

VIII

No traveller along this road, not excepting even kings and queens, statesmen, and other great historical figures, has left so striking and interesting an account of travelling along it as the narratives of two pedestrian journeys between London and Manchester, written by Samuel Bamford. These accounts are supremely interesting in themselves, because they were written by one of the people, and because they put on record, as no other chronicler has done, or could have done, the England of 1807 and 1819, as seen by an intelligent and thinking working-man on tramp. It is an England removed not only by the space of a century from our England, but a crowded century such as never before was seen.

But if we would thoroughly understand Bamford’s intensely interesting narratives, which I do not scruple to reprint here at length, we must learn what manner of man he was who wrote them.

SAMUEL BAMFORD

Samuel Bamford was born in 1788, at Middleton, near Manchester, and was a weaver and a descendant of weavers. He was by temperament something more; was, indeed, blest, or curst, with the literary taint in its extreme form; was, in short, a poet. At the time when Bamford was growing up, and an eager recipient of ideas, England—and especially the operatives’, the artisans’, and the agricultural labourers’ England—was not the free country it is now. The working-classes had no votes, practically no education, and only too often, as the result of troubles caused by incessant foreign warfare, insufficient food. The country seethed with discontent—not a passing discontent, but a long, wretched era of sullen ill-will that outlasted Bamford’s own active period, and culminated in the Chartist agitation of 1839. Bamford, of course, was not fully informed. His writings teem with pictures of the wrongs of Lancashire operatives, while from his descriptions of rural England it might almost be supposed that the agricultural labourer of that time lived an ideal existence; which of course was by no means the case. He only knew at first hand the case of the weavers and the cotton-spinners, which was desperate enough; for that was the era when machinery began to supplant the hand-loom, and manufacturers were growing rich while many of the workers starved in the combined circumstances of dear food and lack of employment. For himself, as a youth, he seems to have been light-hearted enough, and it was the sufferings, the wrongs, and the disabilities of others, rather than of himself, that eventually led him to become a political agitator. He could, however, scarce help being a rebel, for he came of those who had been convinced Jacobites, and had, later, become Methodists; and was himself, as we have seen, an idealist and something of a homespun poet.

His career was that of not a few intelligent working men of his time. He was a “peaceful” agitator at a period when even the arguments of the peaceful were met by Governments with the more stern, and in their own way unanswerable, arguments of force. To-day, when agitators spout violence, and advocate reform by explosive bomb, and are regarded with indifference by the authorities, they come at last to Cabinet rank in governments; but in Bamford’s day a mere assemblage was considered by the authorities a dangerous thing, and was generally dispersed. Bamford himself was arrested, with others, in 1817, on suspicion of high treason, and sent up by coach, in chains, to London, to be examined before the Privy Council. He escaped that time; but, two years later, was arrested in connection with the famous Reform meeting in St. Peter’s Field, Manchester, August 16th, 1819, which resulted in the tragedy of “Peterloo.”

“This time,” he was assured, “you will certainly be hanged,” but the proceedings resulted in a year’s imprisonment at Lincoln, where he was regarded as an amiable poetic visionary, and greatly indulged and liked. As he grew older, his opinions mellowed, and by the time of the Chartist agitation he had to all intents and purposes ceased to be a Radical, and was decidedly Whiggish. The trend of events since then has so altered the outlook that Bamford would probably be now considered a Tory.

In 1852 the Government offered him a post at Somerset House: a position he accepted for a while, and then resigned with disgust, as being a sheer waste of time. It was not an exalted post, the duties consisting of arranging and cataloguing a vast number of dusty and useless papers connected with forgotten inland revenue affairs: papers that only a Government department would save from the waste-paper dealer. Clearly Bamford was born before his age. Were it all to do now, he would be standing, the head of his Department, in the House of Commons. It is really—this coming into a world not yet ripe for you—a tragedy, if you do but consider it; but there are compensations. He might have been born a century earlier, when, for such as he, life would have ended in a veritable tragedy of flesh and blood. Happy, perhaps, after all, in being born into the midmost era, he died at last, in his eighty-fourth year, in 1872.

So much for a broad view of his career, which, had he followed an early impulse, would have been very different. In his nineteenth year he took to seafaring, shipping aboard the Æneas, a coasting brig plying between South Shields and London. Soon growing tired of the life, he determined to give it up, and with seven shillings in his pockets, deserted his ship in the London Docks. That was in 1807, when likely looking sailormen were always in danger of being snapped up by the press gang. His plan of walking the 185 miles home to Manchester was therefore, with so little money, and at such risks, highly adventurous. He hung about in an eating-house in Ratcliffe Highway until dusk, and then set out upon the long journey.

IX

BAMFORD’S WALK TO MANCHESTER

“I thence,” he says, “went into the city, to St. Paul’s, inquiring my way into Aldersgate Street, and when there I ventured to accost a respectable-looking person and requested him to be so kind as to direct me towards Islington, which, of course, he did, and I passed through that suburb without stopping or being questioned. An officer, in naval uniform, whom I met, certainly took more notice of me than was quite to my liking, but he passed on and did not speak. I next inquired the way to Highgate, knowing that if I got there I should be on the direct great northern road, and at Highgate, whilst stopping at a public-house, I ascertained that the next place on my route would be Whetstone, and the next after that Barnet. I accordingly walked through Whetstone and through Barnet without stopping. I now considered myself fairly launched on my journey. I had been fortunate in getting clear of the vicinity of the shipping and of the city without being questioned, and was now ten miles from St. Paul’s. I once more breathed the sweet country air; the smell of mown meadows sometimes came across my path. I had seven shillings in my pocket, and though as yet uncertain of my success, I was full of hope and delighted with the present enjoyment of freedom. I had not gone far, however, before I became somewhat embarrassed, the night was getting far advanced, the country less populous, and I was uncertain both as to the name of my next stage and the course I should keep. I had not gone far, however, before I met a man to whom I put the necessary questions, and who told me to keep on the broad highway, to the left, and that the next town of any note which I should arrive at would be St. Albans. I thanked the man for his information, when he said, ‘stop; I know what you are, and what you are about.’

“‘Do you?’ said I, rather surprised, but in a good-humoured manner.

“‘Indeed I do,’ replied the man; ‘you are a sailor, and are running away from your ship.’

“‘You might be a wizard,’ I said, ‘for what you say is perfect truth.’

“‘Well, now,’ said he, ‘as you have been as candid as I was frank, I’ll tell you something which may be of use to you.’

“I thanked him.

DANGERS OF THE ROAD

“‘At St. Albans,’ he continued, ‘a party of marines are stationed, who press every sailor that appears in the town. They even press them off the coaches, or other vehicles, if they get a sight of them. Through St. Albans, however, you must go, and you will be pressed if you appear in the streets; you must, therefore, get through the town without being seen, if possible. Fortunately it may be done. In a short time you will overtake a waggon, which carries goods on this main road. You must get to ride inside of it, get stowed amongst the packages, and never show your face until you are clearly on the other side of the town.’

“I thanked him most gratefully for his information, and begged that he would not mention to any one having seen such a person as myself on the road. He desired that I would make myself easy on that score, and so with expressions of thankfulness on my part, and of kindly wishes on his, we separated.

“It was now about midnight; all was still and silent on the road. I was about eight miles from St. Albans, and by the time I had shortened the distance by three I overtook the waggon, the tail of which being full of soldiers’ wives and their children, I could not get in there; the driver, however, offered me a snug place in the hay-sheet—a large and strong horse-hair cloth which fastened in front of the vehicle, and presented a resting-place as comfortable as a hammock, and quite large enough to conceal me. I, therefore, got into my hiding-place, and was almost instantly fast asleep. I must have ridden about four miles, though to me it seemed but a few minutes since I got in, when the driver awoke me and asked which road I was going when I got through the town?

“‘Why, the main road, to be sure,’ I said.

“‘Yes, but which main road?’ asked the man.

“‘The main road down into the north; into Lancashire,’ I said. ‘There is no other, is there?’

“‘Oh, yes,’ said the man, ‘there is the main road to Bedford and those parts, and that’s the road I’m a-going.’

“Instead of saying, ‘Well, drive me to Bedford then, or anywhere else, so you don’t land me here in sight of the press-gang;’—instead of so considering in my own mind, I might have suddenly become demented, for I alighted from my covert, and shaking the hay-seeds from my clothes as well as I could, I gave the man some copper, and walked right into the broad street of St. Albans.

“It was a very fine summer’s morning, and being Saturday, the market-place was occupied by numbers of country people setting out their standings of butter, eggs, poultry, and vegetables. Directly through the midst of these market people lay my way, and I stepped it with seeming equanimity, and as much of real indifference as I could muster, for, after all, as I reflected, if the very worst happened, I should only be disappointed in present hope, and be sent on board a ship of war as many hundreds had been before me. So I walked forward, the people almost lifting their eyes in wonder at seeing a tall, gaunt, weather-browned sailor traversing that perilous ground.

THE PRESS-GANG

“I had got clear of the market-place, and was proceeding down a flagged footpath leading to the outskirts of the town, and already breathing more freely, when the sound of a light slip-shod step approached behind me. I thought it was some servant girl going out for her morning’s milk or hot roll, and never turned my head. A slap on the shoulder, however, and the salutation, ‘Hollo, shipmate,’ caused me to face about, when what should stand before me but a marine, in his blue overcoat and girdled hat without feather.

“At that moment I felt as little ruffled as if we had been old acquaintance, determined, however, not be taken if either presence of mind or resistance could prevent it.

“‘Hollo, shipmate,’ said I.

“‘What are you?’ asked the man.

“‘What am I? I’m a servant,’ I replied. A term not used in the Royal Navy, but by which persons under contract are distinguished in the trade of our Eastern Coast.

“‘A servant?—what’s that?’

“‘Why, a servant—that’s all,’ I replied.

“By this time three other marines had joined us.

“‘Where’s your pass, to pass you through the country?’ asked the first man.

“‘I have no pass,’ I said; ‘I’m a free-born subject of this kingdom, and can travel this or any other high-road without carrying a pass at all.’

“The men looked at each other, and then at me. They could not comprehend the reason of my cool manner and unusual language. They had no idea of free-born subjects, nor of sailors travelling without passes.

“‘Then you have no papers?’ said the first man, who seemed to be the superior of the party.

“‘Why, as for that,’ I said, ‘I daresay I can show a kind of a small matter which will, perhaps, satisfy you for the present.’ Saying which, I took my protection from an old black pocket-book which I carried in my hat.

“‘Oh, if you have any written papers to show,’ he said, ‘you must go with us to our captain: I can’t read writing.’

“So much the better, I thought, and straightway displayed the document at length, knowing if it could do me no good, neither could it do me any harm. ‘Do you see that?’ I asked, pointing to the broad seal of the Admiralty, stamped with an anchor.

“‘Oh! be d—d,’ said the man; ‘you have been discharged from a man-of-war.’

ESCAPE

“‘Why, you lubber,’ I said, in a half-familiar way, ‘do you think if I hadn’t I should have come here?’

“‘Ah! he won’t do,’ said one or two of the party.

“‘You may go about your business,’ said the first man, turning to walk off with the others.

“‘Ahoy, there,’ I said, ‘are you going to stop a shipmate on shore this way, without standing so much as a glass of grog for him?’

“‘You be d—d,’ said the corporal, and hastened up the street to join his comrades.

“Several decent-looking farmers, who had left their produce in the market, stood in the cart-road watching the whole proceeding, and when the marines had left, they said, ‘Well, young fellow, you are the first blue-jacket that has slipt through the fingers of yonder scoundrels this long time.’ I entered into friendly conversation with these men, and as they were going my way I had their company on the road as far as Redbourn, where, after partaking with them a glass or two of ale, we parted.

“I next passed through Market Street, and Dunstable, always concealing myself, as well as I could, when I heard a coach coming either way, until it passed. At Hockliffe I rested some time, and had a good sleep behind a hedge. I thence went through Woburn, and afterwards through Newport Pagnell, and when night came, and the glow-worms were shining in the hedges I found myself opposite to a small lone public-house, near the village of Stoke Goldington, in Buckinghamshire, and about eleven miles from Northampton.

“Into this humble hostelry I entered and got some bread and cheese and ale for supper. The house appeared to be kept by an elderly couple, with a woman servant, and when I mentioned my wish to stop there for the night, they said they could not find me a bed in the house, but if I would put up with a good litter of straw in the stable, I should be welcome to rest there. I accepted their kind offer with pleasure, and lay down, thanking God that I could rest without the hated ‘starboard watch, ahoy’ breaking my slumbers; and save that once or twice I was awaked by rats tripping over me, and by the cackling of fowls and the quacking of ducks, a king never enjoyed sounder repose. In the morning, it being Sunday, I brushed my shoes, washed myself well at the pump, and turned my linen the cleaner side out, after which I got a basin of milk and bread for breakfast, and demanding my shot, the old folks told me I had nothing to pay, and so with truly grateful thanks for their kindness I bade them farewell, and continued my journey.

COUNTRY DELIGHTS

“It was a lovely morning, and my way lay through a tract of country which at every bend and undulation of the road, presented some object, or group, or opening upon scenery, which was continually suggestive of the fact, that this was indeed a land where men and women knew how to live and be happy at their own homes. Here, on one hand, would be a substantial farmhouse, with its open door displaying much plenty within, its strong-limbed hinds feeding the horses or cleaning the stables, and its ruddy-brown damsels milking the kine, which stood sleepily lashing their tails on their backs or flapping their ears in the sun. The next habitation would probably be a little white cottage, with a low door, and small leaded windows shadowed by vinery, and the eaves of the thatch slouched down, as if to prevent the wind from upturning them. A whine and a grunt would be heard in the stye, and a broad garden, darkened at one end by fruit trees, would be abundant

Of herbs and other country messes.

Next a clear tiny rill comes trickling by the road-side; soon we are under a tall young wood, with an old tree here and there matted with ivy or robed in hoar lichen. Soon we perceive a house of the higher order, with its palisades, its gravelled walk, its bright evergreens, its clean steps, and its stately and decent quietude; although if the white blinds were rolled up instead of being down, it would seem all the more frank, cheerful, and Christian like. Next, perhaps, we have a glimpse of a spire rising above tall trees, or the turret of a grey old-looking bell tower sends forth its summons to the villagers for their morning’s devotion. Wending on our journey, hills and vales, with meads, pastures, and green crops spread all over their ridges and down to their brook margins, are laid out luxuriantly before the ever-pleased eye; whilst far off, in the opening of hoary old woods, are seen tower and battlement of some lordly hall.

THE GIPSIES

“Through such a country as this, and breathing an air sweeter than which none ever wafted over Paradise, had I walked some five or six miles, when the bark of a dog, and the appearance of sundry low tents, a horse, a mare and her foal, an ass or two, a heap of panniers, a lurcher and a couple of terriers, pans, pots, and a kettle on a fire, which a lad was blowing into red heat, made me aware that I was, for the first time, about to behold a family of gypsies, in their favourite state of encampment. The tribe consisted of three stout men and as many women, one of them very old and deformed, and one, a superb being, with majestic golden pendants, that touched the crimson hood on her shoulders; a coil of luxuriant hair lay across her knees, as thick as a mainshroud and as glossy as a skein of silk, whilst her magnificently black and darkly shadowed eyes were like two gems, light-emittent through midnight. Two of the men and one female were asleep in tents, some children were also at rest, a boy or two were engaged with the dogs; the horses and the asses were pasturing, one man was smoking a short pipe, and skinning a rabbit the while, the queen sat plaiting what seemed to be a girdle of many colours, and the old one was tending a cake in the embers. A young damsel sat there—a beauty such as I had never before beheld, not even in Lancashire, for she was different from them all, though not surpassing—nothing human could do that—but this had a feminine grace, and a faultless beauty of a type which was entirely new to me. A scarlet strap and a short sleeve were the only covering to her shoulders, her neck and arms being entirely bare. Over the front of a laced bodice of various hues, hung a small bib of fine linen, which so far covered her bosom as modesty required. A green kirtle bound her waist and fell below her knees, leaving her legs and feet, which were models of symmetry, as innocent of hose or pumps as they were at her birth. Her complexion was a clear olive, whilst her features I can only describe as being strikingly impressive from their beauty, and much like those which I had seen in the portraits and on the statues of Oriental nymphs and goddesses of antiquity. Her hair, of raven lustre, was plaited and wreathed on her head, where it was bound with ribbons of bright and grave colours mingled, and held by a comb, and thence dividing, fell in graceful locks over her shoulders, and below her bosom. She was on her knees, sipping broth from a china basin, and with a silver spoon. I accosted the party with the usual salutation of ‘good-morning,’ to which the man and the two women replied. We chatted as I stood there respecting various matters, as the road, the weather, fellow wayfarers whom I had met, and things of that kind, and in the course of our conversation the man informed me that my best way to Leicester would be through Welford, and not through Market Harborough, which was the more common route. After satisfying my curiosity as well as I could consistently with a decent observation, I bade them good-bye, and was coming away when the mistress of the party, or queen, as I may call her, asked me if a mess of broth would be acceptable. I had been thinking before that never had broth smelled so temptingly as this did; I therefore expressed my thankful acceptance of her offer, and taking a seat on the sod I partook of a breakfast such as I had little expected to find at such a table, for besides the broth, the young nymph, by direction of the queen, placed before me bread, cold mutton, fowl, cheese, with mustard, and green onion as a relish, so I laid to as freely and as plenteously, according to my wants, as ever did alderman at a corporation feast. My kind entertainers seemed the more pleased the more freely I partook, and after making a most excellent meal, during which I was neither annoyed by many questions, nor embarrassed by ceremony—for they mostly spoke to each other, and that in a language I did not understand—I again expressed my sincere thanks and pursued my journey, deeply interested by the scene I had quitted, and particularly so by the two amazing beauties I had beheld.

SUNDAY

“Northampton, a garrison town, was the next place through which I had to pass, and as a recruiting party of marines was stationed there—as my friend the gypsy had informed me, though whether or not they had orders to press he could not tell—I waited outside until the quiet hour when people had all gone home from church, and had got seated at their dinners, before I essayed the perilous experiment of walking through. The wished-for time soon came, the bells had all ceased tolling, and the streets were nearly deserted, when I stepped at a leisurely calm pace, as if in no great haste to be gone, along the clear broad causeway of that neat and cleanly town. Everything seemed to my wish; it was a hot day: the sun glared on the pavement and against the windows; the blinds and curtains were nearly all closed; the doors were open to let in air, and I could hear the children laughing, the mothers scolding, and the knives and forks clattering as the good folks were partaking their happy meal. I envied them not, I only wished in my heart that every soul in the place might be compelled to eat, and never cease eating, until I had walked clear and far away of that burning pavement and blistering flag-road; and in sooth I began to think it certainly would be so, the streets were so quiet, when all at once, pondering as I went, and with my hat pulled over my brow, I found I was approaching a marine, who was crossing me at right angles. I would have given the world if the fellow had only been like the townsfolks, quietly employed with his pudding, instead of being where he was, but I took care not to betray any outward sign of either alarm or dissatisfaction. He was alone, and no other person was in sight, and if he stopped me, and my old protection trick failed, I had nothing to do but either to out-run him, or knock him down, or both, and so decide the matter. These thoughts, however, and these resolves, which came as quick as a throb, were no sooner present, than, to my surprise as well as satisfaction, the man merely looked at me in an ordinary way, and nodding, said, ‘Good voyage, shipmate,’ to which I readily replied, ‘Good quarters, shipmate,’ and each passed on.

“And now, as the protection which I have once or twice mentioned will not be any more alluded to, I may as well explain, that these documents, which were given to apprentices, were no protection at all save whilst the apprentice was on board the ship to which he belonged, or if on shore, was engaged in the lawful service of his master. If the navy was greatly short of hands, not only apprentices were seized despite of their protections, but even carpenters and mates of coasting vessels would sometimes be made free with. In my case, therefore, who was absconding from my service, the document, had it been perused, instead of being a protection would have been a detection, inasmuch as it would have required a degree of ingenuity beyond my command to have shown why I, an apprentice on board a coasting vessel on the North Sea, should be found traversing the streets of St. Albans, or of Northampton, the king’s veritable terra firma—instead of being on his other element, the ocean.

RURAL ENGLAND

“This escapade was a great relief to my mind, since having now passed this second garrison town I had not much fear of being interfered with by press-gangs, though, wherever there was a party of marines, it was possible that I might be questioned. The weather was, as I have intimated, that of a truly English summer’s day. Towards evening, when the heat was mitigated to a joyous coolness, came a breeze that swept odours from the wild rose and the honey-bine. Then, by the hill-sides, or along the valleys, or up the meadow paths, appeared young and happy couples, the lads in their clean smock-frocks, and the lasses in their new pumps, smart caps, and ribbons, and all seemingly so full of happy, contented, and hopeful love, that the tears dimmed my eyes as I looked towards them. ‘Ah!’ I thought, ‘and will not I be walking with one as dear and as bonny as any of them before long?’ And thus as I wandered forward waned that sweet Sabbath eve, and small indeed was the amount of ‘cash in my locker’ wherewith to procure a lodging, but on I went, and I must have passed some seven or eight miles beyond Welford, when, it being nearly dark, I stopped at a good-looking public-house, and after paying for a glass of beer, which took nearly the last copper I had, I asked the landlord if there was not a snug corner in his stable or hay-loft in which I could be allowed to rest till morning? He said the cattle all slept and pastured out, and he had not so much as a lap of straw on the premises; but if I would walk on a couple of miles or so, I should arrive at a place called Wigston, where the yearly feast was being held, and if I only got amongst the young fellows there, I would have all I wanted, and that too for nothing. So thus discouraged in one respect, and encouraged in another, I again commenced my journey, and walked a long way, the eve settling into darkness, and not a glimmer from a house, nor the bark of a sheep-dog, nor any other indication of inhabitants to be seen or heard. I kept on in this way until I became quite tired, and looked in vain for some barn, or outhouse, or cattle-shed, in which I might lay down, but not a vestige of cattle or cattle-shed was to be seen. Not even the tinkle of a sheep-bell could be heard in that vast stillness. At length I thought I espied something like swathes of grass on the other side of a low fence, and climbing over, I found them to be what I expected. I straightway therefore commenced making my bed, and collecting a number of swathes together I lay down on part of them, and pulled the remainder over me until I was pretty well covered, and so, with a bunch under my head for a pillow, and my hat for a sleeping cap, I bade good-night to one star which hung winking above, and in a moment care was no more. When I awoke it was broad day, and the lark was singing overhead. I jumped up, shook off the dewy grass and clover, and thanking God for so excellent a bed, with freedom, I leaped over the fence, and pursued my journey.

WAYS AND MEANS

“It was now evident that unless I could hit upon some plan whereby I could procure sustenance on the road, my travels must soon cease. My last penny had been expended that morning in the purchase of a cake, and I had not a single halfpenny towards carrying me eighty-six miles. As for having recourse to dishonest means, that never entered my thoughts, whilst to beg I could not yet bemean myself. Something, however, must be devised, and as I wore under my trousers a pair of stout woollen drawers, nearly new, I concluded on selling them, if I could meet with a customer; and accordingly I went over the hedge into a quiet little corner, and stripped off my drawers, tying them up in a small pocket-handkerchief which I had taken care to preserve. I was so entirely satisfied with this proceeding, so easy with respect to present means of subsistence, that I fell into a profound sleep, and so continued during a considerable time. On arriving at Leicester, I stopped at a clothes shop, at the door of which an elderly female stood, of a very decent appearance. I accosted her, and entering the shop, offered her my drawers on sale. She examined them, and asked how much I expected for them? ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I should not be very particular, but I thought they would be cheap at two shillings.’

“‘Two shillings!’ said the dame her keen eyes fixed upon me—‘Why, young man, I would not give two shillings for all the clothes you have on your back.’

“I said I was sorry to hear her say that, but how much would she give, then?

“‘You are a sailor, I suppose.’

“‘I am, or at least have been,’ I replied.

“‘I have a son that is a sailor also,’ she said.

“‘I wish him a safe return then,’ I replied.

“‘Aye, a safe return, with plenty of prize money,’ she quickly added.

“‘Be it as you wish,’ I replied.

“‘Are you going to see your friends?’ she asked.

“‘I’m going to stay with them, I hope.’

“‘Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ said the dame. ‘I’ll just give you sixpence for the drawers, and that’s what I call dealing handsomely with you.’

“‘Could you not give me something more, mother,’ I said, trying to soften her by that tender appellation, though but with small hope of success.

“‘Not one half-farthing more shall I give, if you talk till night,’ said the dame, ‘and if I ever get the money back again, I shall be lucky.’

“I still chaffered with her, trying to obtain a small advance, but it was of no use, and considering that I might dodge round the whole town, and be no better, I resigned the drawers.

“‘Where’s the napkin they were tied in?’ she asked.