III
Although Shoreditch Church marks the beginning of the Cambridge Road, of the old road to the North, and of the highways into Lincolnshire, it was always to and from a point somewhat nearer the City of London that the traffic along these various ways came and went. Bishopsgate Street was of old the great centre for coaches and vans, and until quite modern times—until, in fact, after railways had come—those ancient inns, the Four Swans, the Vine, the Bull, the Green Dragon, and many another, still faced upon the street, as for many centuries they had done. Coaches were promptly withdrawn on the opening of the railways, but the lumbering old road-waggons, with their vast tilts, broad wheels, swinging horn-lanterns, and long teams of horses, survived for some years later. Now everything is changed; inns, coaches, waggons are all gone. You will look in vain for them; and of the most famous inn of all—the Bull, in Bishopsgate Street Within—the slightest memory survives. On its site rises that towering block of commercial offices called “Palmerston House,” crawling abundantly, like some maggoty cheese, with companies and secretaries, clerks and office-boys, who seem, like mites, to writhe out of the interstices of the stone and plaster. Overhead, on the dizzy roof, are the clustered strands of the telegraph-wires, resembling the meshes of some spider’s web, exquisitely typical of much that goes forward in those little cribs and hutches of offices within. It is a sorry change from the old Bull—the Black Bull, as it was originally named—with its cobble-stoned courtyard and surrounding galleries, whence audiences looked down upon the plays of Shakespeare and others of the Elizabethans, and so continued until the Puritans came and stage-plays were put under interdict. When plays were not being enacted in that old courtyard, it was crowded with the carriers’ vans out of Cambridgeshire and the Eastern Counties generally. “The Black Bull,” we read in a publication dated 1633, “is still looking towards Shoreditch, to see if he can spy the carriers coming from Cambridge.” Would that it still looked towards Shoreditch!
It was to the Bull that old Hobson, the Cambridge carrier of such great renown, drove on his regular journeys, between 1570 and 1631. Hobson was the precursor, the grand original, of all the Pickfords and Carter Patersons of this crowded age, and lives immortal, though his body be long resolved to dust, as the originator of a proverb. That is immortality indeed! No deed of chivalry, no great achievement in the arts of peace and war, shall so surely render your name imperishable as the linking of it with some proverb or popular saying. Who has not heard of “Hobson’s Choice”? Have you never been confronted with that “take it or leave it” offer yourself? For, in truth, Hobson’s Choice is no choice at all; and is, and ever was, “that or none.” The saying arose from the livery-stable business carried on by Thomas Hobson at Cambridge, in addition to his carrying trade. He is, indeed, rightly or wrongly, said to have been the first who made a business of letting out saddle-horses. His practice, invariably followed, was to refuse to allow any horse in his stables to be taken out of its proper turn. “That or none” was his unfailing formula, when the Cambridge students, eager to pick and choose, would have selected their own fancy in horseflesh. Every customer was thus served alike, without favour. Hobson’s fame, instead of flickering out, has endured. Many versified about him at his death, but one of the best rhymed descriptions of his stable practice was written in 1734, a hundred and three years later, by Charles Waterton, as a translation from the Latin of Vincent Bourne—
“In his long stable, Cambridge, you are told,
Hobson kept studs for hire in days of old,
On this condition only—that the horse
Nearest the door should start the first on course,
Then next to him, or none: so that each beast
Might have its turn of labour and of rest;
This granted, no one yet, in college dress,
Was ever known this compact to transgress.
Next to the door—next to the work; say, why
Should such a law, so just, be doomed to die?
Remember then this compact to restore,
And let it govern as it did before.
This done, O happy Cambridge! you will see,
Your Hobson’s stud just as it ought to be.”
IV
Who was that man, or who those associated adventurers, to first establish a coach between London and Cambridge, and when was the custom first introduced of travelling by coach, instead of on horseback, along this road? No one can say. We can see now that he who first set up a Cambridge coach must of necessity have been great and forceful: as great a man as Hobson, in whose time people were well content to hire horses and ride them; but although University wits have sung the fame of Hobson, the greater innovator and the date of his innovation alike remain unknown. It is vaguely said that the first Cambridge coach was started in the reign of Charles the Second, but Pepys, who might have been trusted to mention so striking a novelty, does not refer to such a thing, and, as on many other roads, we hear nothing definite until 1750, when a Cambridge coach went up and down twice a week, taking two whole days each way, staying the night at Barkway going, and at Epping returning. The same team of horses dragged the coach the whole way. There was in this year a coach through to Lynn, once a week, setting out on Fridays in summer and Thursdays in winter.
In 1753 a newer era dawned. There were then two conveyances for Cambridge, from the Bull and the Green Dragon in Bishopsgate: one leaving Tuesdays and Fridays, the other Wednesdays and Saturdays, reaching the Blue Boar and the Red Lion, Cambridge, the same night and returning the following day, when that day did not happen to be Sunday.
Each of these stage-coaches carried six passengers, all inside, and the fares were about twopence-halfpenny a mile in summer and threepence in winter. The cost of a coach journey between London and Cambridge was then, therefore, about twelve shillings.
Hobson’s successors in the carrying business had by this time increased to three carriers, owning two waggons each. There were thus six waggons continually going back and forth in the mid-eighteenth century. They took two and a half days to perform the fifty-one miles, and “inned” at such places as Hoddesdon, Ware, Royston, and Barkway, where they would be drawn up in the coachyards of the inns at night, and those poor folk who travelled by them at the rate of three-halfpence a mile would obtain an inexpensive supper, with a shakedown in loft or barn.
The coaches at this period did by much effort succeed in performing the journey in one day, but it was a long day. They started early and came late to their journey’s end; setting out at four o’clock in the morning, and coming to their destination at seven in the evening; a pace of little more than three miles an hour.
In 1763, owing partly to the improvements that had taken place along the road, and more perhaps to the growing system of providing more changes of horses and shorter stages, the “London and Cambridge Diligence” is found making the journey daily, in eight hours, by way of Royston, “performed by J. Roberts of the White Horse, Fetter Lane; Thomas Watson’s, the Red Lyon, Royston; and Jacob Brittain, the Sun, Cambridge.” The “Diligence” ran light, carrying three passengers only, at a fare of thirteen shillings and sixpence. There were in this same year two other coaches; the “Fly,” daily, from the Queen’s Head, Gray’s Inn Lane, by way of Epping and Chesterford, to the Rose on the Market Hill, Cambridge, at a fare of twelve shillings; and the “Stage,” daily, to the Red Lion, Petty Cury, carrying four passengers at ten shillings each.
We hear little at this period of coaches or waggons on to Ely and King’s Lynn. Cambridgeshire and Norfolk roads were only just being made good, after many centuries of neglect, and Cambridge town was still, as it always had been (strange though it may now seem), something of a port. The best and safest way was to take boat or barge by Cam and Ouse, rather than face the terrors of roads almost constantly flooded. Gillam’s, Burleigh’s, and Salmon’s waggons, which at this time were advertised to ply between London and Cambridge, transferred their loads on to barges at the quays by Great Bridge. Indeed it was not until railways came that Cambridge ceased to depend largely upon the rivers, and the coals burnt, the wine drank, and the timber used were water-borne to the very last. Hence we find the town always in the old days peculiarly distressed in severe winters when the waterways were frozen; and hence, too, the remonstrance made by the Mayor and Corporation when Denver Sluice was rebuilt in 1745, “to the hindering of the navigation to King’s Lynn.”
In 1796, the roads now moderately safe, a stage-coach is found plying from Cambridge to Ely and back in one day, replacing the old “passage-boats”; but Lynn, as far as extant publications tell us, was still chiefly approachable by water. In this year Cambridge enjoyed a service of six coaches between the town and London, four of them daily; the remaining two running three times a week. The Mail, on the road ten years past, started at eight o’clock every night from the Bull and Mouth, London, and, going by Royston, arrived at the Sun, Cambridge, at 3.30 the following morning. The old “Diligence,” which thirty-three years before had performed the journey in eight hours, now is found to take nine, and to have raised its fares from thirteen shillings and sixpence to one guinea, going to the Hoop instead of the Sun. The “Fly,” still by Epping and Great Chesterford, has raised its fares from twelve shillings to eighteen shillings, and now takes “outsides” at nine shillings. It does not, however, fly very swiftly, consuming ten hours on the way. “Prior’s Stage” is one of the new concerns, leaving the Bull, Bishopsgate Street, at eight in the morning on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and, going by Barkway, arriving at some unnamed hour at the Red Lion, Petty Cury. It conveys six passengers at fifteen shillings inside and eight shillings out, like its competitor, “Hobson’s Stage,” setting out on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays from the Green Dragon, Bishopsgate Street, for the Blue Boar, Cambridge. “Hobson’s” is another new-comer, merely trading on the glamour of the old name. The “Night Post Coach” of this year, starting from the Golden Cross, Charing Cross, every afternoon at 5.30, went by Epping and Great Chesterford. It carried only four passengers inside, at fifteen shillings each, and a like number outside at nine shillings. Travelling all night, and through the dangerous glades of Epping Forest, the old advertisement especially mentions it to be “guarded.” Passing through many nocturnal terrors, the “Night Post Coach” finally drew up in the courtyard of the still-existing Eagle and Child (now called the Eagle) at Cambridge, at three o’clock in the morning.
The next change seems to have been in 1804, when the “Telegraph” was advertised to cover the fifty-one miles in seven hours,—and made the promise good. People said it was all very well, but shook their heads and were of opinion that it would not last. In 1821, however, we find the “Telegraph” still running, and actually in six hours, starting every morning at nine o’clock from the White Horse in Fetter Lane, going by Barkway, and arriving at the Sun at Cambridge at 3 p.m. This is the coach shown in Pollard’s picture in the act of leaving the White Horse. In the meanwhile, however, in 1816 another and even faster coach, the “Star of Cambridge,” was established, and, if we may go so far as to believe the statement made on the rare old print showing it leaving the Belle Sauvage Yard on Ludgate Hill in that year, it performed the journey in four hours and a half! Allowing for necessary stops for changing on the way, this would give a pace of over eleven miles an hour; and we may perhaps, in view of what both the roads and coaching enterprise were like at that time, be excused from believing that, apart from the special effort of any one particular day, it ever did anything of the kind; even in 1821, five years later, as already shown, the “Telegraph,” the crack coach of the period on this road, took six hours!
Let us see what others there were in 1821. To Cambridge went the “Safety,” every day, from the Boar and Castle, Oxford Street, and the Bull, Aldgate, leaving the Bull at 3 p.m. and arriving at Cambridge, by way of Royston, in six hours; the “Tally Ho,” from the Bull, Holborn, every afternoon at two o’clock, by the same route in the same time; the “Royal Regulator,” daily, from the New Inn, Old Bailey, in the like time, by Epping and Great Chesterford; the old “Fly,” daily, from the George and Blue Boar, Holborn and the Green Dragon, Bishopsgate, at 9 a.m., by the same route, in seven hours; the “Cambridge Union,” daily, from the White Horse, Fetter Lane and the Cross Keys, Wood Street, at 8 a.m., by Royston, in eight hours, to the Blue Boar, Cambridge; the “Cambridge New Royal Patent Mail,” still by Royston, arriving at the Bull, Cambridge, in seven and a half hours; the “Cambridge and Ely” coach, every evening at 6 p.m., from the Golden Cross and the White Horse, arriving at the Eagle and Child, Cambridge, in ten hours; and the “Cambridge Auxiliary Mail,” and two other coaches, which do not appear to have borne any distinctive names, the duration of whose pilgrimage is not specified.
Cambridge was therefore provided in 1821 with no fewer than twelve coaches a day, starting from London at all hours, from a quarter to eight in the morning until half-past six in the afternoon. There were also the “Lynn and Wells Mail,” every evening, reaching Lynn in twelve hours thirty-three minutes; and the “Lynn Post Coach,” through Cambridge, starting every morning from the Golden Cross, Charing Cross, and reaching Lynn in thirteen hours. The “Lynn Union” ran three days a week, in thirteen and a half hours, through Barkway. Other Lynn stages were the “Lord Nelson,” “Lynn and Fakenham Post Coach,” and two not dignified by specific names.
By 1828 the average speed was greatly improved, for although no coach reached Cambridge in less than six hours, there was, on the other hand, only one that took so long a time as seven hours and a half. The Mail had been accelerated by one hour, throughout to Lynn, and was, before driven off the road, further quickened, the post-office schedule of time for the London, Cambridge, King’s Lynn, and Wells Mail in 1845 standing as under:—
| London (G.P.O.) | 8.0 | p.m. |
| Wade’s Mill | 10.32 | ″ |
| Buckland | 11.43 | ″ |
| Melbourn | 12.32 | a.m. |
| Cambridge | 1.36 | ″ |
| Ely | 3.31 | ″ |
| Brandon Creek | 4.27 | ″ |
| Downham Market | 5.21 | ″ |
| Lynn | 6.33 | ″ |
| Wells | 10.43 | ″ |
In the ‘forties, up to 1846 and 1847, the last years of coaching on this road, the number of coaches does not seem to have greatly increased. The “Star” was still, meteor-like, making its swift daily journey to the Hoop at Cambridge, and the “Telegraph,” “Regulator,” “Times,” and “Fly,” and the “Mail,” of course, were old-established favourites; but new names are not many. The “Regulator,” indeed,—the daily “Royal Regulator” of years before,—is found going only three times weekly. The “Red Rover,” however, was a new-comer, between London and Lynn daily; with the “Norfolk Hero” (which was probably another name for Nelson) three days a week between London, Cambridge, Ely, Lynn, and Wells. Recently added Cambridge coaches were the Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday “Bee Hive,” and the daily “Rocket”; while one daily and two triweekly coaches through Cambridge to Wisbeach—the daily “Rapid”; the Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday “Day”; and the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday “Defiance,” make their appearance.
How do those numbers compare with the number of trains run daily to Cambridge in our own time? It is not altogether a fair comparison, because the capacities of a coach and of a railway train are so radically different. Twenty-nine trains run by all routes from London to Cambridge, day by day, and they probably, on an average, set down five hundred passengers between them at the joint station. Taking the average way-bill of a coach to contain ten passengers, the daily arrivals at Cambridge were a hundred and sixty, or, adding twenty post-chaises daily with two passengers each, a hundred and eighty. These are only speculative figures, but, unsupported by exact data though they must be, they give an approximation to an idea of the growth of traffic between those times and these. The imagination refuses to picture this daily host being conveyed by road. It would have meant some thirty-five coaches, fully laden, and as for goods and general merchandise, the roads could not possibly have sufficed for the carrying of them.
V
Coaching on the road from London to Lynn has found some literary expression in the Autobiography of a Stage Coachman, the work of Thomas Cross, published in 1861. Cross was a remarkable man. Born in 1791, he may fairly be said to have been born to the box-seat, his father, John Cross, having been a mail-contractor and stage-coach proprietor established at the Golden Cross, Charing Cross. The Cross family, towards the end of the eighteenth century, claimed to rank with the county families of Hampshire, and John Cross was himself a man of wealth. He had inherited some, and had made more by fetching and carrying for the Government along the old Portsmouth Road in the romantic days of our long wars with France. He not only had his establishment in London and a town house in Portsmouth, but also the three separate and distinct country seats of Freeland House and Stodham, near Petersfield, and the house and grounds of Qualletes, at Horndean, purchased in after years by Admiral Sir Charles Napier, and renamed by him “Merchistoun.” John Cross was always headstrong and reckless, and made much money—and lost much. The story of how he would fill his pockets with gold at his bank at Portsmouth and then ride the lonely twenty miles thence to Horndean explains his making and his losing. No cautious traveller in those times went alone by that road, and the highwaymen tried often to bag this particularly well-known man, who carried such wealth on him. “Many a shot I’ve had at old John Cross of Stodham,” said one of these gentry when lying, cast for execution, in Portsmouth Gaol; adding regretfully, “but I couldn’t hit him: he rode like the devil.”
This fine reckless character lived to dissipate everything in ill-judged speculations, and misfortunes of all kinds visited the family. We are told but little of them in the pages of his son’s book, but it was entirely owing to one of these visitations that Thomas Cross found his whole career changed. Destined by his father for the Navy, he was entered as a midshipman, but he had been subject from his birth to fits, and coming home on one occasion and going into the cellars of a wine business his father had in the meanwhile taken, he was seized by one of these attacks, and falling on a number of wine-bottles, was so seriously injured that the profession of the Navy had to be abandoned. We afterwards find him as a farmer in Hampshire, and then, involved in the financial disasters that overtook the family, reduced to seeking an engagement as coachman in the very yard his father had once owned. It is curious that, either intentionally or by accident, he does not mention the name of the coach he drove between London and Lynn, but calls it always “the Lynn coach.” There were changes on the road between 1821, when he first drove along it, and 1847, when he was driven off, but he is chiefly to be remembered as the driver of the “Lynn Union.” He tells how he came to the box-seat, how miserably he was shuttlecocked from one to the other when in search of employment, and how, when the whip who drove the “Lynn coach” on its stage between Cambridge and London had taken an inn and was about to relinquish his seat, he could obtain no certain information that the post would be vacant. The bookkeeper of the coach-office said it would; the coachman himself told a lie and said he was not going to give up the job. In this condition of affairs Cross did not know what to do, until a kindly acquaintance gave him the date upon which the lying Jehu must take possession of his inn and of necessity give up coaching, and advised him to journey down to Cambridge, meet the up coach there as it drove into the Bull yard, and present himself as the coachman come to take it up to London. Cross scrupulously carried out this suggestion, and when he made his appearance, with whip and in approved coaching costume, at the Bull, and was asked who he was and what he wanted, replied as his friend had indicated. No one offered any objection, and no other coachman had appeared by the time he drove away, punctual to the very second we may be quite sure. An old resident of Lynn, who has written his recollections of bygone times in that town, tells us that Thomas Cross “was not much of a whip,” a criticism that seems to be doubly underscored in Cross’s own description of this first journey to London, when he drove straight into the double turnpike gates that then stretched across the Kingsland Road, giving everyone a good shaking, and cause, in many bruises, to remember his maiden effort.
Cross had a long and varied experience, extending to twenty-eight years, of this road. At different times he drove between London and Cambridge, on the middle ground between Cambridge and Ely, and for a while took the whole distance between Ely and Lynn. He drove in his time all sorts and conditions of men, and instances some of his experiences. Perhaps the most amusing was that occasion when he drove into Cambridge with a choleric retired Admiral on the box-seat. The old sea-dog was come to Cambridge to inquire into the trouble into which a scapegrace son had managed to place himself. He confided the whole story to the coachman. By this it seemed that the Admiral had two sons. One he had designed to make a sailor; the other was being educated for the Church. It was the embryo parson who had got into trouble: very serious trouble, too, for he had knocked down a Proctor, and was rusticated for that offence. The Admiral, in fact, had made a very grave error of judgment. His sons had very opposite characters: the one was wild and high-spirited, and the other was meek and mild to the last degree of inoffensiveness. Unfortunately it was this good young man whom he had sent to sea, while his devil’s cub he had put in the way of reading for Holy Orders.
“I have committed a great mistake, sir,” he said. “I ought to have made a sailor of him and a parson of the other, who is a meek, unassuming youth aboard ship, with nothing to say for himself; while this, sir, would knock the devil down, let alone a Proctor, if he offended him.”
The Admiral was a study in the mingled moods of offended dignity and of parental pride in this chip of the old block; breathing implacable vengeance one moment and admiration of a “d——d high-spirited fellow” the next. When Thomas Cross set out on his return journey to London, he saw the Admiral and his peccant son together, the best of friends.
Cross was in his prime when railways came and spoiled his career. In 1840, when the Northern and Eastern line was opened to Broxbourne, and thence, shortly after, to Bishop Stortford, he had to give up the London and Cambridge stage and retire before the invading locomotive to the Cambridge and Lynn journey. In 1847, when the Ely to Lynn line was opened, his occupation was wholly gone, and all attempts to find employment on the railway failed. They would not have him, even to ring the bell when the trains were about to start. Then, like many another poor fellow at that time, he presented an engrossed petition to Parliament, setting forth how hardly circumstances had dealt with him, and hoping that “your honourable House” would do something or another. The House, however, was largely composed of members highly interested in railways, and ordered his petition, with many another, to lie on the table: an evasive but well-recognised way of utterly ignoring him and it and all such troublesome and inconvenient things and persons. Alas! poor Thomas! He had better have saved the money he expended on that engrossing.
What became of him? I will tell you. For some years he benefited by the doles of his old patrons on the “Union,” sorry both for him and for the old days of the road, gone for ever. He then wrote a history of coaching, a work that disappeared—type, manuscript, proofs and all—in the bankruptcy proceedings in which his printers were presently involved. Then he wrote his Autobiography. He was, you must understand, a gentleman by birth and education, and if he had little literary talent, had at least some culture. Therefore the story of his career, as told by himself, although discursive, is interesting. He had some Greek and more Latin, and thought himself a poet. I have, however, read his epic, The Pauliad, and find that in this respect he was mistaken. That exercise in blank verse was published in 1863, and was his last work. Two years later he found a place in Huggens’ College, a charitable foundation at Northfleet, near Gravesend; and died in 1877, in his eighty-sixth year, after twelve years’ residence in that secure retreat. He lies in Northfleet churchyard, far away from that place where he would be,—the little churchyard of Catherington beside the Portsmouth Road, where his father and many of his people rest.
VI
Few and fragmentary are the recollections of the old coachmen of the Cambridge Road. A coloured etching exists, the work of Dighton, purporting to show the driver of the “Telegraph” in 1809; but whether this represents that Richard Vaughan of the same coach, praised in the book on coaching by Lord William Pitt-Lennox as “scientific in horseflesh, unequalled in driving,” is doubtful, for the hero of Dighton’s picture seems to belong to an earlier generation. Among drivers of the “Telegraph” were “Old Quaker Will” and George Elliott, just mentioned by Thomas Cross; himself not much given to enlarging upon other coachmen and their professional skill. Poor Tommy necessarily moved in their circle; but although with them, he was not of them, and nursed a pride both of his family and of his own superior education that grew more arrogant as his misfortunes increased. As for Tommy himself, we have already heard much of him and his Autobiography of a Stage Coachman. The “Lynn Union,” however, the coach he drove down part of the road one day and up the next, was by no means one of the crack “double” coaches, but started from either end only three times a week, and although upset every now and again, was a jogtrot affair that averaged but seven miles an hour, including stops. That the “Lynn Union” commonly carried a consignment of shrimps one way and the returned empty baskets another was long one of Cross’s minor martyrdoms. He drove along the road, his head full of poetry and noble thoughts, and yearning for cultured talk, while the shrimp-baskets diffused a penetrating odour around, highly offensive to those cultured folk for whose society his soul longed. People with a nice sense of smell avoided the “Lynn Union” while the shrimp-carrying continued.
Contemporary with Cross was Jo Walton, of the “Safety,” and later of the “Star.” He was perhaps one of the finest coachmen who ever drove on the Cambridge Road, and it was possibly the knowledge of this skill, and the daring to which it led, that brought so many mishaps to the “Star” while he wielded the reins. He has been described as “a man who swore like a trooper and went regularly to church,” with a temper like an emperor and a grip like steel. This fine picturesque character was the very antithesis of the peaceful and dreamy Cross, and thought nothing of double-thonging a nodding waggoner who blocked the road with his sleepy team. Twice at least he upset the “Star” between Royston and Buntingford when attempting to pass another coach. He, at last, was cut short by the railway, and his final journeys were between Broxbourne and Cambridge. “Here,” he would say bitterly, as the train came steaming into Broxbourne Station, “here comes old Hell-in-Harness!”
Of James Reynolds, of Pryor, who drove the “Rocket,” of many another, their attributes are lost and only their names survive. That William Clark, who drove the “Bee Hive,” should have been widely known as “the civil coachman” is at once a testimonial to him and a reproach to the others; and that memories of Briggs at Lynn should be restricted to the facts that he was discontented and quarrelsome is a post-mortem certificate of character that gains in significance when even the name of the coach he drove cannot be recovered.