The Post Office and Its Story. Edward Bennett
miles, twenty-seven hours. The time-bills of the old mail coaches are most interesting, and they show how complete was the organisation of the service. There was a column for the distance between each place, another column for the time allowed, and another column for the actual arrival and starting times. The numbers of the coach and the timepiece which it carried were recorded, and the delivery of the timepiece “safe” was always signed for at the conclusion of the journey.
The coachman, though not a Post Office servant—he was employed by the contractors—always wore a brilliant uniform; and the mail guard, an officer of the Postmaster-General, also arrayed in bright uniform, carried firearms. The mail guard had to see that time was kept, and especially that there was no delay in the time allowed for refreshments. The instructions to guards bring home to us the ways of the road a hundred years ago. At the beginning of the last century the chief superintendent of mail coaches was Thomas Hasker, an official of the Post Office. His instructions, written in homely language, seem to be instinct with a vitalising influence which was speeding up the whole system. What to him was the safety of mere passengers compared with the punctual delivery of his Majesty's mails? To the postmaster of Ipswich he wrote: “Tell Mr. Foster to get fresh horses immediately, and that I must see him in town next Monday. Shameful work—three hours and twenty minutes coming over his eighteen miles!” On the Exeter road the mail guards were instructed by him as follows: “You are not to stop at any place whatever to leave any letters at, but to blow your horn to give the people notice that you have got letters for them. Therefore if they do not choose to come out to receive them don't you get down from your dicky, but take them on to Exeter and bring them back with you on your next journey.” Again an instruction to the mail guards reads: “If the coachman go into a public-house to drink, don't you go with him and make the stop longer, but hurry him out.”
The halt for refreshments was always an annoying necessity to Hasker. A guard had attempted to hurry out the passengers as well as the driver. And the passengers had complained. “Sir,” wrote Hasker, “stick to your bill and never mind what passengers say respecting waiting overtime. Is it not the fault of the landlord to keep them so long? Some day when you have waited a considerable time (suppose five or eight minutes longer than is allowed by the bill), drive away and leave them behind.” We can imagine a guard acting on this instruction and losing his tips!
The guards were expected to be as regular as clock-pieces, but even Mr. Hasker had sometimes to reckon with them as human beings. “The superintendents,” he writes in another memorandum, “will please to observe that Mr. Hasker does not wish to be too hard on the guards. Such a thing as a joint of meat or a couple of fowls or any other article for their own family in moderation he does not wish to debar them from the privilige of carrying.” But he was against the guards assisting the poachers.
Even in those days Post Office servants were obliged to give written explanation of their misdeeds, and they occasionally scored against their fault-finders. A mail guard had been reported for impertinence by certain contractors who were notorious for the indifferent lights with which they supplied their coaches. The mail guard admitted his offence, “but,” he slyly added, “perhaps something may be said for the feelings of a guard that hears the continual complaints of passengers against bad lights and the disagreeable smell of stinking oil, especially when through such things the passengers withhold the gratuity which the guard expects.” There is some dignity in this way of putting the matter.
The mails were of course the first consideration on the coaches. The available room after the loading of the mails was given to passengers' luggage, and this had frequently to be reduced by the passenger himself before starting. The great trouble with the guards was the temptation to overload the coaches. A contributor to the Quarterly Review in 1837 said: “Yet notwithstanding the moral improvement of the drivers, the improved state of the high roads throughout the kingdom, stage-coach travelling is more dangerous than it was before owing to the unmerciful speed of the swift coaches and the unmerciful loads which are piled upon the others like Pelion upon Ossa, or suspended from them, wherever they can be hung on. 'Coachman,' said an outside passenger who was being driven at a furious rate over one of the most mountainous roads in England, 'have you no consideration for our lives and limbs?' 'What are your lives and limbs to me?' was the reply, 'I'm behind my time.'” Sometimes the driver himself suffered after a spell of bad weather which had rutted the roads. Mr. Hasker reported that “the York coachman and guard were both chucked from their seats going down to Huntingdon last journey, and coming up the guard is lost this morning, supposed from the same cause, as the passengers say he was blowing his horn just before they missed him.” These were strenuous days, and weather conditions, especially after a fall of snow, were formidable enemies to the timekeeping of the guards. Robberies of the mail were far less frequent than in the days of the post-horses, and the roads, thanks to the splendid efforts of the great engineers Telford and Macadam, were immensely improved, but snow and flood were still to be reckoned with. It was one of the sights of London to see the mail coaches start at night from the Swan with Two Necks and the Bull and Mouth in Aldersgate Street. A small crowd was usually to be seen at Hyde Park Corner watching the westward-bound coaches go by on their night journey.
The great coaching event of the year was the procession of mail coaches which took place in London on the King's Birthday, and heading the procession was usually the oldest established mail, the Bristol coach. In 1834 there were twenty-seven coaches in the procession. At the start from Millbank “the bells of the churches rang out merrily, continuing their rejoicing peals till the coaches arrived at the General Post Office.” I quote from a book, Annals of the Road: “In the cramped interior of the vehicle were closely packed buxom dames and blooming lassies, the wives, daughters, or sweethearts of the coachmen or guards, the fair passengers arrayed in coal-scuttle bonnets and in canary-coloured or scarlet silk. But the great feature after all was that stirring note so clearly blown and well drawn out, and every now and again sounded by the guards and alternated with such airs as 'The Days when we went Gipsying,' capitally played on a key-bugle. Should a mail come late, the tune from a passing one would be, “Oh dear! what can the matter be?”
I have already spoken of the mail-coach era as the romantic age of the General Post Office. English literature and English art have drawn upon the real and legendary history of the period for much of their inspiration. Nobody has revealed to us with more vivacity the humours of the mail coach than Charles Dickens—did not Mr. Tony Weller drive a coach?—nobody has written of the glories of the mail coach with greater power than Thomas de Quincey. De Quincey has described one journey in particular which lives in our literature. The mail was carrying with it into the country districts the news of a great victory. “From eight P.M. to fifteen or twenty minutes later, imagine the mails assembled on parade in Lombard Street, where at that time and not at St. Martin's le Grand was seated the General Post Office. In what exact strength we mustered I do not remember, but from the length of each separate attelage we filled the street, though a long one, and though we were drawn up in double file. On any night the spectacle was beautiful. The absolute perfection of all the appointments about the carriages and the harness, their strength, their brilliant cleanliness, their beautiful simplicity—but more than all, the royal magnificence of the horses—were what might first have fixed the attention. Every carriage on every morning in the year was taken down to an official inspector for examination, wheels, axles, linchpins, pole, glasses, lamps were all critically probed and tested. … But the night before us was a night of victory, and behold! to the ordinary display what a heart-shaking addition!—horses, men, carriages, all are dressed in laurels and flowers, oak-leaves and ribbons.” Then De Quincey describes how in every village they pass through there are people waiting for the news; how the cheers are taken up all along the road, as the mail coach in the days before the telegraph carried the good tidings through the Kingdom. The coach bore not only letters but newspapers, and these were increasing every year. What a change from the time of the old postboys! Sir Walter Scott said that a friend of his remembered the letter-bag arriving in Edinburgh during the year 1745 with but one letter in it!
There is something quite tragic in the fact that at the very time when travelling by road had reached its perfection in this country as regards speed and punctuality, a new force was at work which was to overthrow the mail coach not gradually, but within a few years. On the introduction of the railway in any district the coach service collapsed