The English Carriage

By Hugh McCausland

Mr Hugh McCausland is an authority on the history and turn-out of English Carriages and Coaches. He has also driven many, if not all, of the coaches that have appeared on English roads.

It had been said that few books of either fact or fiction are written, pictures painted or films made, in which carriages and their equipment have been correctly depicted. Mr McCausland has now fixed this problem with this fine book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: May 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781473386648

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

TRANSPORT claims as rapid and spectacular a development—progress, if you like the word—within the last few generations as any form of human activity or accomplishment. Particularly rapid, revolutionary and recent has been the metamorphosis of road travel.

The older generation of today, born to a world in which the horse was still supreme on the roads and in the streets, see him now a complete back number, nearing obsolescence and very nearly a pensioner dependent on sport for his survival. Within the span of the previous generation horses had been man’s only means of land travel, except he walked. In broad terms, little more than a century separates us from the pre-railway age of long-distance travel by coach and chaise, and half as long from the time when carriages could claim the roads as their own.

Though public railways of a kind began to open in England in the eighteen-twenties, it was not until well into Queen Victoria’s reign that the more important ones made any headway. ‘In 1835’, says Stanley Harris, first-hand historian of coaching times, ‘there was not a railway out of London.’ Not until 1840, according to the diary of John Sopwith, was it that ‘the coaches discontinued running between York and London.’ Decades more elapsed before the four-horse stage coach gave place to the rail for carrying passengers in more remote parts of England; and, with the sport of driving as incentive, it survived disconnectedly right up to the outbreak of war in 1939. Carriages of private use only saw their best days in mid and late Victorian times, long after the coming of railways; their displacement by motors at the turn of the century was gradual enough to leave the reign of King Edward VII a time distinguished by its smart equipages. Two major wars and their consequences—to say nothing of such adverse factors as road surfaces designed for motors and unsuited to horses—were needed, almost, if not quite, to eliminate those who continued to use carriages for the love of the thing.

Only fifty-one years ago was the law repealed which forbade the use of the highway to a mechanically propelled vehicle not preceded by a man carrying a red flag. That occasion was marked by an organized run of motor cars from London to Brighton. With the enfranchised cars making that historic journey down a road replete with driving and coaching history there travelled one coach and four. Two old friends of mine drove the coach; they reached Brighton ahead of most of the cars, passing many on the way—some in motion, some broken down-and one or two in flames. More than once have I heard each of them tell the tale of that drive; and a good yarn they made of it. One of them—Sidney Truett, our senior surviving coach-proprietor—can still be persuaded to tell it in his Sussex home not far from the road down which, as late as the mid nineteen-twenties, he drove the last daily stage coach that ran between London and Brighton. The other, Stanley Cave, whose lifetime of professional activity in the renaissance of road coaching included some twenty seasons on that same London-Brighton road, died but a little more than a year since, when over eighty years of age and known as the ‘Father of the Road’. Other such human links with driving history have been broken only recently by the deaths of such personalities as Harry Milton, one of the most accomplished whips of his time, and the Ward brothers, coach-proprietors and jobmasters of Brompton Road. The former, whose ancestor, Mat Milton, had supplied horses and vehicles for the personal driving of George IV, when Prince Regent, himself found horses for the Royal Mews in King Edward VII’s time and when a boy, as he told me but a few years since, was given his first driving lessons by one Tim Carter, then a very old man; and Tim Carter, be it known, was one of the coachmen of the Telegraph, crack stage coach between London and Exeter in days before railways were known. The Wards could claim an even closer connection with that period, being the sons of the once-famous Charles Ward of the Quicksilver, London and Devonport mail coach.

Facts of this kind serve to bring the coach and the carriage close to the present day, to show how little time really has elapsed since everyday people knew as familiar objects vehicles that now are nearly lost sight of, and are seldom mentioned without some such hackneyed prefix as ‘old world’ tacked on to them. In truth they are but recent things, these English carriages and coaches, when confined to the limits of general interest, however remote they may seem to a generation without recollections of a youth in which horses and horse-vehicles had a place, and grown or growing up to a world dominated by things mechanical, rapidly changing and fast moving.

Within these limits I place only those carriages which appeared since roads were worthy of the name, those that qualify as the graceful, decorative and practical adjuncts of travel or sport, a credit to those English methods of coach building, appointment and driving which once set a standard of perfection to the world. Roughly one may eliminate from this definition most vehicles in use before the latter end of the eighteenth century. About the year 1790 is taken by most of the old authorities on vehicles as the turning point in carriage design. Then, according to William Felton, a practical coachbuilder of that time, ‘The art of coachbuilding had been in a gradual state of improvement for half-a-century past, and had now arrived at a very high degree of perfection, with respect to the beauty, strength and elegance of our English carriages’. Felton, though, published his treatise in 1794 and had no inkling of the heights to which those of his craft, inspired by good roads and high-bred light horses, were to rise in the next hundred years.

The evolution of carriages was dominated by the roads more than by any other factor. Only as roads ceased to be rutted tracks and morasses of mud could the coach and the carriage used for long-distance travelling shed weight and clumsiness. The highway and the wheeled means of travelling upon it in comfort developed together, and up to the end of the eighteenth century they progressed but slowly. Though the English Turnpike system of maintaining roads by charges exacted from travellers as they passed through tollgates dated from the seventeenth century, only with the latter half of the eighteenth did it become properly established or productive of any marked advance in road making. An incident of some historical importance in the Scottish Rebellion of 1745 is said to have played an early part in awaking public consciousness in this country as to how bad the roads were and how much better they might and should be; an impassable track frustrated the movement of cavalry and artillery from General Wade’s headquarters at Newcastle to Carlisle, and failure to relieve the latter city was the result; eleven years later, as the outcome, the same troops were employed in making a road to carry vehicles between the two towns.

That such primitive road conditions of but two centuries ago were not confined to the far North many contemporary commentators have testified, giving evidence of a similar state of things in all parts of the kingdom. When Horace Walpole journeyed to Arundel in 1749 his opinion of Sussex roads and vehicles formed the theme of a letter to a friend: ‘If you love good roads, conveniences, good inns, plenty of postilions and horses, be so kind as never to go into Sussex . . . Coaches grow there no more than balm or spices; we were forced to drop our postchaise, that resembled nothing so much as a harlequin’s calash, which was occasionally a chaise or a baker’s cart . . . Sussex is a great damper of curiosity.’ In the same county two years later, Doctor John Burton found ‘all that was most bad . . . a land desolate and muddy, whether inhabited by men or beasts a stranger could not easily distinguish, and roads which were, to explain concisely, Sussexian! No one would imagine them to be intended for the people and the public, but rather the byways of individuals, more truly the tracks of cattle drovers . . . Why comes it that the oxen, the swine, the women, and all other animals are so long legged in Sussex? Can it be from the difficulty of pulling the feet out of so much mud by the strength of the ankle, so that the muscles become stretched as it were, and the bones lengthened?’ And this little more than thirty years before George, Prince of Wales, ‘discovered’ Brighthelmstone, soon afterwards to build there his palace, the Pavilion, and to bring the world of fashion flocking, by the turn of the century, from London by countless types of carriage and coach along the most famed of English roads!

Yet, later than Walpole and Burton, between the years 1768 and 1771, Arthur Young, an entertainingly quotable critic, brought a pithily censorious pen to the description of varied highways he travelled on his Tours in the Southern Counties and the North of England. While he singled out an Essex road close to London—from Billericay to Tilbury—as unequalled by any of ‘all the cursed roads that ever disgraced this Kingdom in the very ages of barbarism’, he had terms as forceful for many others. In East Anglia he found the way from Bury St. Edmunds to Sudbury ‘as infamous a turnpike as ever was beheld,’ with ‘ponds of liquid dirt and a scattering of loose flints just sufficient to lame every horse that moves near them.’ ‘But,’ says he, of the West Country, ‘what am I to say of the roads in this country! the turnpikes! as they have the assurance to call them and the hardiness to make one pay for? From Chepstow to the halfway house between Newport and Cardiff they continue mere rocky lanes full of hugeous stones as big as one’s horse, and abominable holes. The first six miles from Newport they were so detestable, and without either direction posts or milestones, that I could not well persuade myself I was on the turnpike, but had mistook the road, and therefore asked everyone I met, who answered me, to my astonishment, Ya-as ’. Elsewhere he called the road from Newport Pagnell to Bedford, ‘a cursed string of hills and holes by the name of a road’; that from Newton to Stokesley in Cleveland, ‘extremely bad . . . this part of the journey made at the hazard of my neck’; the turnpike to Preston, ‘very bad’; to Castle Howard, ‘infamous . . . I was near being swallowed up in a slough’; to Wigan, ‘this infernal road. To look over a map and perceive that it is a principal one, not only to some towns but even to whole counties, one would naturally conclude it to be at least decent; but let me most seriously caution all travellers who may accidentally purpose to travel this terrible country to avoid it as they would the devil; for a thousand to one they break their necks or their limbs by overthrows or breakings down. They will meet with rutts which I actually measured four feet deep and floating with mud only from a wet summer; what therefore must it be after a winter? The only mending it receives in places is the tumbling in some loose stones which serve no other purpose than jolting a carriage in the most intolerable manner’.

It is hardly to be wondered at, that proprietors of stage coaches—so called—up to this period generally concluded advertisements of the painfully slow journeys of these vehicles with some such sentiment as ‘Performed if God permits.’ To add to road troubles was the still present and active menace of highway robbery. The horses in use were heavy, underbred, plodding animals whose function was to drag an almost deadweight through mud and ruts, rather than to put up any pretence of speed. The pace of the infrequent public coaches of the seventeen-forties was no more than that of a waggon, some forty miles a day; a journey from London to Oxford was a two days undertaking entailing putting up for a night on the road. In 1754 what was announced with great pride as a ‘Flying Coach’ ran between London and Manchester; its flying speed for the single journey was four days and a half. Such vehicles were but little finer than waggons in the structure of the undercarriage; the appearance of the body of one of them can be judged from a description given by G. A. Thrupp, author of The History of Coaches: ‘Covered with dull black leather, studded by way of ornament with broad-headed nails, with oval windows in the quarters, the frames painted red. On the panels were displayed in large characters the names of the places where the coach started and whither it went. The roof rose in a curve with an iron rail around it. The coachman and guard sat in front upon a high narrow boot, often garnished with a spreading hammer-cloth with a deep fringe. Behind was an immense basket supported by iron bars in which passengers were carried at lower fares. The whole coach was usually drawn by three horses, on the first of which a postillion rode, in a cocked hat and long green-and-gold coat. The machine groaned and creaked as it went along with every tug the horses gave it, and the speed was frequently but four miles an hour.’ Such was the means of mid-eighteenth century travel; a contrast indeed to the next century’s ‘Golden Age’ of rapid and punctual mail and stage coaches, beautifully designed and finished vehicles in themselves, drawn by teams of four blood horses, frequently changed, artistically driven, smartly turned out and serving every important place in Britain.

Gentlemen’s coaches and carriages of private use from 1750 onwards were in that ‘gradual state of improvement’ spoken of by Felton. While many country squire’s vehicles were little better than those of Pepys’s day—rough, cumbersome and often completely without springs—others, particularly those intended for town use on going that was smooth compared to country roads, forecast in the shape, if not in the finish, of their bodywork the elegance of the town coaches and posting chariots of half-a-century later. Suspended by leather braces, at each corner of the body, attached to upright springs from the perch undercarriage, such carriages by about 1770 were increasing in number and improving in quality. Most were characterized by excessive height from the ground, achieved by this method of suspension and by enormous wheels. This tendency to unnecessary height of body and boxseat became a fashion extended to many types of Georgian vehicle, even to some of the gigs, curricles and similar carriages for the owner’s personal driving in the Regency; the Highflyer or perch-high phaeton, beloved of George IV when Prince of Wales and the sporting friends of his younger days, being a notable example.

The chariot, in either posting or driving form, would seem to have been the vehicle most complimentary to British craftsmanship before the final decades of the eighteenth century, and as early as 1770 one Monsieur Rubo, a French authority, criticises an English chariot design beginning to find favour in Paris in terms that leave no doubt of his sentiments: ‘I see no beauty or grace in the voiture a l’Anglaise, but it is no doubt sufficient that the invention of this vehicle comes from England, to make all the world desire to have