By the beginning of the eighteenth century Britain had a road system but its inadequacies added enormously to the cost of transport and to the price of goods. These problems were retarding the country’s industrial development at a time when the growth of commerce and the needs of public administration increased the demand for and amount of travel. The most effective way of travelling was on horseback and in favourable conditions distances of 30 to 70 miles could be covered in a day. Horse-drawn wagons carrying goods and passengers lumbered along at speeds rarely exceeding 3 miles an hour and pack trains of mules carrying all kinds of articles moved even more slowly. The poor condition of the roads is exemplified by Daniel Defoe’s description of an old woman being drawn to church near Lewes in Sussex by six oxen because horses would not have been able to move through the mire. Even around the capital the situation was no better. In 1736 an anonymous writer complained of the state of the road between Kensington and London, ‘It is grown so infamously bad that we live here in the same solitude as we should do if cast on a rock in the middle of the ocean, and all the Londoners tell us that there is between them and us a great impassable gulf of mud.’
In 1706 Parliament sanctioned a new system which allowed a group of trustees to borrow money to finance road improvements along a specified section of road and to levy charges from road-users. These ‘Turnpike Trustees’ fenced off the designated piece of road and erected toll-levying facilities at both ends and where any other roads joined along the way. The income from tolls was to be used to improve and maintain that particular section of highway. The turnpike idea took root and by the 1830s, the beginning of the railway age, England and Wales had about 1,100 turnpike trusts which between them administered 22,000 miles of main road. This was something like 20 per cent of the rural road mileage. The great drawback of the turnpikes was that the trusts were purely local bodies and no attempt was made to develop a national system of turnpiked highways. It meant that a long journey was likely to involve both turnpiked and ordinary road, the contrast between the two being very obvious. However, the turnpike system did enable road surfaces to be significantly improved and on a few major roads, such as those from London to Edinburgh, Manchester, Shrewsbury, Bristol and Portsmouth, virtually the whole route was turnpiked.
Daniel Defoe, writing in 1724, was impressed with the improvement of the Essex roads as a result of the building of turnpikes: ‘The great road from London . . . towards Ipswich and Harwich, is the most worn with wagons, carts and carriages; and with infinite droves of black cattle, hogs and sheep of any road in England . . . These roads were formerly deeply rutted, in times of flood dangerous, and at other times in winter scarce passable, they are now so firm, so safe, so easy to travellers, and carriages as well as cattle . . . This was first done by the help of a turnpike, set up by Act of Parliament, about the year 1697 . . .’
Turnpikes were not always seen in a positive light at the time. New ones were extremely unpopular with local road users who understandably resented having to pay tolls to travel on roads along which they had previously enjoyed free passage. This antipathy to turnpikes went so far as to spark off the destruction of gates and physical assaults on turnpike employees. For example, at Bristol in 1727, 1731 and 1748 gangs of farmers and miners destroyed the gates and set fire to toll houses, in one case brutally murdering a tollkeeper. Hostility to turnpikes culminated in the ‘Rebecca Riots’ of 1842–3 in South Wales. These were orchestrated by a secret society and were a protest against the burden of tolls at a time of great economic hardship, as well as a demonstration against the hated Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The rioters disguised themselves in women’s clothes and called themselves ‘Rebecca’s Daughters’ after the prophecy in Genesis 24:60 that Rebecca’s seed should possess the ‘gate of those which hate them’. The inauguration of the turnpikes helped to reduce the dangers of highway robbery as one of the gatekeeper’s duties was to inform the authorities and the travelling public if highwaymen were known to be in the area. Additionally, the fencing and gating of the turnpikes made it highly impractical for highway robbers to use these roads because if they did so they almost became trapped.
Competition meant that coaching companies were always trying to accelerate their services. This may have deterred highwaymen but higher speeds were very much a mixed blessing because they increased the likelihood of accidents. There were collisions, horses sometimes bolted or harness broke and faster travel heightened the dangers attendant on coachmen falling asleep, a not uncommon occurrence when they had slaked their thirsts at a succession of inns and posting houses along the route. Sometimes passengers even toppled off the top of coaches and descending hills was a particular problem. Until brakes came into use in the 1830s, the guard had the unenviable task of leaping down from the coach and slipping a skid under the nearside front wheel as the coach approached a steep downhill incline. On one occasion a coach approaching Hounslow at excessive speed slid off the road into a pond, with one passenger being drowned. In fog, a coach passing through a seaside town went out of control and plunged off the quay, resulting in ten passengers being drowned. A coach from Cheltenham to Hereford was proceeding at breakneck speed in exceptionally heavy rain when the coachman failed to spot that a bridge had been washed away. The coach, horses and passengers all plunged into the cataract. In 1784 the Hertford coach overturned, the cause being the weight of twenty-five people riding on the top of the vehicle combined with excessive speed. Given the number of coaches tearing up and down Britain’s roads when competition was at its height, it is surprising that that there were so few disasters on the road.
In the eighteenth century the long-distance stagecoach system developed rapidly, reaching its peak in the 1830s, when it then succumbed quickly to railway competition. An extremely comprehensive network of services was built up and the comfort and speed of coaches were taken to the limits practical for this form of transport. The stagecoaches themselves and the large industry that arose to service the horses and conveyances and to provide hospitality for the travellers engendered a sense of affection and well-being in many observers:
As we drove into the great gateway of the inn, I saw on one side the light of the rousing kitchen fire beckoning through a window. I entered and admired the neatness and honest enjoyment that is the kitchen of an English inn . . . hams, tongues and great flitches of bacon were suspended from the ceiling; a smoke-jack made its ceaseless clanking beside the fireplace; and a clock ticked in one corner. A well-scoured deal table extended along one side of the kitchen, with a cold round of beef and other viands upon it, surrounded by foaming tankards . . . trim housemaids were hurrying backwards and forwards under the direction of a fresh-faced bustling landlady who still seized an occasional moment to exchange a flippant word and have a rallying laugh with the group around the fire.
Similar sentiments are expressed in George Eliot’s novel Felix Holt, the Radical (1866): ‘Five and thirty years ago the glory had not yet departed from the old coach roads; the great roadside inns were still brilliant with well-polished tankards, the smiling glances of pretty barmaids and the repartee of jocose ostlers; the mail still announced itself by the merry notes of the horn; the hedge-cutter or the rick-thatcher still knew the exact hour by the unfailing yet meteoric apparition of the pea-green Tally-Ho or the yellow Independent . . .’ Tobias Smollett in his little-known novel Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762) warms to the same theme when describing the inn-kitchen: ‘It was paved with red bricks, remarkably clean, furnished with three or four windsor chairs, adorned with shining plates of pewter, and copper saucepans nicely scoured that even dazzled the eyes of the beholder, while a cheerful fire of sea coal blazed in the chimney.’
William Cobbett was not an easy man to please. In his Rural Rides published in 1830 he fulminated against the economic and social changes he considered to be undermining the quality of English life. However he had a soft spot for the coaching industry: ‘Next to a fox-hunt the finest sight in England is a stage coach just ready to start . . . in a stage coach you see what man is capable of performing. The vehicle itself; the harness all so complete and so neatly arranged, so strong and clean and good; the beautiful horses, impatient to be off; the inside full, and the outside covered, in every part, with men, women and children, boxes, bags, bundles; the coachman, taking his reins in one hand and the whip in the other, gives the signal with his foot, and away they go, at the rate of seven miles an hour.’ The writer Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) best known for his Confessions of an Opium-Eater, clearly loved the experience of coach travel: ‘Seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. The vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible. We heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest among brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hooves.’
These quotations all convey a strong sense of the affection and regard for the coaches and the inns they stopped at. The height of the ambition of countless young men, and many not so young, was to ride with the coachman and perhaps take over the reins for a short distance. Coachmen were heroes whose swagger and hauteur every schoolboy tried to emulate and whose job they envied in much the same way that later generations of boys and men admired engine drivers. There is little doubt that the coaching system at its peak stirred the imagination in a way that was perhaps not seen again until the London, Midland and Scottish and the London and North Eastern Railways launched their competing streamlined steam-hauled express trains from London to Scotland in the 1930s.
The American man of letters Washington Irving (1783–1859) gave this description of a coachman in 1819: ‘A broad, full face, curiously mottled red; he is swelled into jolly dimensions by frequent potations of malt liquours and his bulk is still further increased by a multiplicity of coats in which he is buried like a cauliflower, the upper one reaching to his heels. He wears a broad-brimmed low-crowned hat; a huge roll of coloured handkerchief about his neck; knowingly knotted and tucked in at the bosom; and has in summer time a large bouquet of flowers in his buttonhole; the present, most probably, of some enamoured country lass.’ Not everyone, however, was so favourably impressed by the coaching industry. One writer grumbled, ‘. . . the usual coach dinner – a coarse fat leg of mutton, roasted to a cinder, a huge joint of boiled beef, underdone, and gritty cabbage’. This view is echoed by another traveller: ‘The innkeepers are insolent, the ostlers are sulky, the chambermaids are impertinent; the meat is tough, the wine is foul, the linen is dirty, and the knives are never cleaned . . . I look upon an inn as the seat of all roguery, profaneness and debauchery . . . for the sake of hasty gain, innkeepers hire horrid servants and provide but bad provisions and poisonous liquors.’ Viscount Torrington writing in the 1780s gives a very similar view: ‘My sheets were damp and the blankets so dirty and stinking and the room smelt so strongly of putresence that I slept very little, though I took off the sheets and employed all the brandy, nearly a pint, in purifying the room and sprinkling the quilt and the blankets . . .’
Many coach travellers complained about the company that they were forced to endure within the very close confines of the stagecoach itself. The hazards included the portly gentleman who paid for just one seat while in reality occupying two, the querulous, peevish traveller venting his spleen on everybody and everything, the garrulous know-all providing a running commentary on every wearisome subject under the sun, the drunkard, the snorer and the amorously inclined lecher. One unknown traveller made a very pithy comment: ‘My fellow-passenger had the highest of all terrestrial qualities which for me a fellow-passenger can possess – he was silent.’ An additional hazard was the guard who wished to entertain the passengers by blowing the coach-horn incessantly, others who performed continuously on the bugle and those who believed they were virtuoso singers. A traveller recalls the everyday hazards of coach travel: ‘I did climb to the outside seat I had taken, and the guard blew his horn and we drove off. The day was fine . . . But when we had covered scarce half our journey . . . the off leader shied at a hen flying across the road, and before we had scarce time to think what was afoot, the Coach lurches, and then tumbles into a ditch, the road being soft with mud at that point. The ditch was deep but none was hurt bad; but two women inside began to scream most piercing, being badly shook in their wits . . .’
It made good sense to book a seat beforehand. A gentleman from Edinburgh of very ample girth made a habit of booking two seats every time he travelled so as to ensure his own comfort. He must have been greatly disconcerted on the occasion that he arrived at the coaching inn to find that his servant had indeed reserved two seats for him but one seat was inside and the other on the top of the coach! A German traveller did not enjoy the experience of riding on the coach roof: ‘The getting up alone was at the risk of one’s life, and when I was up, I was obliged to sit just at the corner of the coach with nothing to hold on to but a sort of little handle fastened on the side and the moment we set off, I fancied I saw certain death await me! At last the being continuously in fear of my life became insupportable . . . I crept from the top of the coach and got snug into the basket. As long as we went up hill it was easy and pleasant. I was almost asleep among the trunks and packages; but how was the case altered when we came to go down hill, then all the trunks and parcels began, as it were, to dance around me, and I every moment received such violent blows that I thought my last hour was come!’
Travellers on horseback, by postchaise or private carriage could avoid many of the perils that beset travellers by public coach – instead they ‘posted’. Many wayside inns kept horses that could be hired to draw a private carriage onwards to another posting house. Highwaymen, however, were particularly interested in this expensive form of travel because those who used it were likely to be well-to-do. The threat of theft and robbery was ever-present, and it was not just highwaymen who exacted plunder from travellers. Much of the theft that took place was less obvious. Gangs of pickpockets frequented the yards of coaching inns and found rich pickings in the disorganised mêlée that occurred, particularly at busy times.
Sometimes pickpockets even bought tickets to ride in coaches and found easy pickings especially on hot days when passengers replete with food and drink dozed off in the stuffy interior of the coach. When the coach stopped at a wayside inn, travellers often alighted, stretched their legs or went in for food and drink. They were often careless with their parcels and other possessions and no sooner had they turned their back than these were spirited away by opportunist thieves. In 1820 the Bristol mail coach was robbed of parcels with contents worth about £400. Four men booked the inside of the coach to themselves from Bath and had silently broken through the fabric of the carriage, seized the strongbox under the driver’s seat, unlocked it, removed the contents and then replaced it. Other highly skilled robbers used a skeleton key to open a double lock and a padlock under the driver’s seat of the Gravesend coach in 1825. Robbery of a different kind was carried out by coachmen, waiters and all the others who ministered to travellers’ needs. They expected tips and the way in which they solicited for these often amounted to demanding money with menaces.
The peak of the coaching system was short-lived and was reached in about 1835 when there were no fewer than 700 mail coaches in operation and some 3,300 stagecoaches. In the late 1830s 1,476 long-haul coaches left London daily, with 50 coaches running daily between London and Brighton and 22 to Birmingham. So great was the business at the height of the coaching era that at Hounslow, the first and last changing place for coaches and carriages travelling into and out of London on the road to Bath and Bristol, the coaching inns between them kept a total of no less than 2,500 horses. In the 1820s, the upkeep of these horses was estimated at £2 per week, which meant that in terms of horses alone £5,000 circulated in the town weekly. The coaching industry was a major employer, the care of horses being particularly labour intensive and there were many jobs in industries dependent on coaching such as coach-building, harness-making, smithying and wheel-wrights. Just as the early nineteenth century was the peak of the coaching industry, it also marks the start of the decline of the highwayman’s predatory activities.