OLD COACHING DAYS--STAGE WAGONS AND STAGE COACHES.
Many readers, whose lives carry them back before the "forties," taking their stand beneath the broad gateway or pebbled court-yard of our old inns--the Red Lion, the Bull, or the Crown--would require a very slight effort of memory to recall the exhilarating spectacle of the arrival and departure of the stage coach of fifty or sixty years ago. Such a person will once more hear in imagination the cheery coach horn at the town's end; and, watching for only a minute, he knows what to expect--yes, there around that critical corner at the Cross, come the steaming leaders, then a handful of reins, the portly form of the coachman, and then the huge embodiment of civilization itself comes { 143} swinging round the corner like a thing of life! Clattering up the High Street! the driver pulls them up promptly at the Lion, or the Bull, and performs that classic feat of swinging his lusty eighteen stone from the box seat with an easy grace which is the envy of every stable boy in the town! He sees once more the busy scene of bustle and animation as the steaming horses are replaced by other sleek animals fresh from the stables, and the old coach rolls on for another stage of the journey.
This, the ideal view of locomotion in the palmy days of stage-coaching, was really an evolution from something much less smart and efficient. Of that interesting evolution of the older locomotion, our old town, by the necessity of the route, saw most of the varied phases, for during many years of the century coaches rattled through our streets with kings, queens and princes, duellists and prize-fighters, daring highwaymen and Bow Street runners, romantic lovers off to Gretna Green, and School boys--poor little Nicklebies off to a Squeers' Academy--jostling inside the body of the lumbering coach, or dangling their legs from the roof as outsiders!
In glancing at the salient points of this evolution as it passed before the eyes of our grandfathers, it may be necessary to go back to the "composite" order of locomotion with the mixture of goods and passenger traffic.
A journey to London, or a distant town, for the purpose of trade or a visit, was a tedious experience full of discomfort. Following the sturdy caravan of pack-horses, the lumbering coaches, and broad-wheeled wagons of last century came the "fly wagons" in the early years of this century, and with them the possibility of poor people once in a life time getting a few miles from home, in case of absolute necessity. The old tilted fly-wagon was used not only for taking up and delivering goods too heavy to go by coach, but persons who could not afford the coach fare of 3d. a mile or thereabouts, would find a place wedged in among the goods at the back of the tilted wagon, sometimes packed away in straw to keep warm. In this way, a whole family, placed under the necessity of moving to a distant part, a comparatively rare occurrence though, have had to remain doubled up in a cramped position day and night, while the slow-going wagon creaked along its ponderous way, till the younger members of the family party peeped out of their hole and caught sight of the splendours of "the lights of London," in the long rows of oil lamps which then illuminated Kingsland Road, by which London from the north was entered, and anon the rendezvous at the "Vine," or "Four Swans," in Bishopsgate, was reached, to the intense relief of all!