Chapter VIII

HERE, as on the other roads, the early advent of the Motor Car, in 1826, caused much commotion. The steam coaches of that period never achieved any success on this route, but caricatures of what might be expected were plentiful, and pictures of the Colchester "Dreadful Vengeance," the Norwich "Buster," and other fanciful conveyances, in the act of exploding and distributing their passengers in little pieces over a wide stretch of country, were popular. The railway itself came in for much abuse, and misguided and fanatical coach proprietors wasted their substance in pitiful attempts to compete with it. Among these was Israel Alexander, that Jewish hero of the Brighton Road in the early forties, who, although a first-class whip, was perhaps chiefly associated with the many upsettings of the Brighton "Quicksilver." He fell out with his noble friends on that highway, and, coming to the Norwich Road, ran a well-appointed coach to Colchester for a little while, until even the Eastern Counties Railway, then the slowest on earth, made the pace too quick for him. His turn-out was given the extraordinary name of the "Duke of Beaufort's Retaliator," and might have continued much longer to carry those who were prejudiced against railways, had it not met with so many accidents.

One who was contemporary with the coaching age has ingeniously divided coaching accidents into three classes:--1. Accidents to the coach; 2. Accidents to the horses; 3. Accidents to the harness. The most common kind of mishap to the coach was, he says, the breaking of an axle. This was not, as a rule, due to any faulty construction of that most essential feature of a public conveyance, but to the overloading either of passengers or goods, to which coaches were continually subject. The sudden snapping of an axle at a high speed or on a down grade produced a tremendous crash which generally shot coachman, guard and "outsides" in all directions. Happy those who, in such a case, were received into the thorny arms of a quickset hedge or the soft embraces of a mud-heap.

Another kind of mishap, not always accidental, was that of a wheel coming off; an incident often caused in early times, before the introduction of patent axle-boxes, by the mischievous removal of the lynch-pin by some unscrupulous rascal in the employ of the rival coach proprietor.

The sudden snapping of a skid-chain while descending a hill, resulting in the coach running on to the horses and a general overthrow, in which horses' legs and passengers heads came into unwonted contact, was perhaps as uncomfortable a kind of disaster as could be imagined. Overloading, too, sometimes had the effect of rendering a coach top-heavy, when a slight lack of caution in running round curves would upset it.

Accidents to the horses were:--casting a shoe, involving lameness, and perhaps a fall; tripping and stumbling on loose stones and rolling over; slipping up in frosty weather; and kicking over the traces or the splinter-bar.

Accidents to the harness usually happened to the traces, which commonly snapped under an uneven strain. To cobble them up with twine, and so complete a stage, was a common practice. In such cases, the thoughts of passengers during the remaining miles were, like those of the poet, "too deep for words." Most nerve-shaking of all these varied and untoward happenings, however, was the breaking of the reins. Rotted by age, by the sun's heat and the winter's frosts, they would "come away" in the coachman's hands at that worst of moments;--when he was holding in his horses downhill. In that contingency, says our ancient, who, in the modern slang phrase, has "been there," it was the approved thing to say your prayers first and then take a flying leap (result, a broken neck, or fractured leg: the bone protruding over the top of the Blucher).

"Then shrieked the timid and stood"--or, rather, sat--"still the brave;" who had this consolation, that if they fared no better than those who jumped, the odds were that they fared no worse.

To be dragged at hurricane pace by four runaway horses (for in such a case they generally _did_ so run) with the broken reins trailing helplessly after them, was to acquire the knowledge of an inner meaning in the word "terror." In escapades of this kind the "insides" were in the most unenviable situation; for the "outsides," including coachman and guard, took the better, if unheroic, part of crawling over the roof and slipping down the back of the coach into the road. The wisdom of their doing so would, in most cases, be proved a few seconds later by the sound of a distant crash as the coach hurtled against some roadside tree and dissolved into matchwork, while the "insides" were stuck as full of splinters as a "fretful porcupine" of quills.

The "human boy" was as much the terror of the old coachman as he is of the modern cyclist. The sight of a boy with a hoop reduced him to a state of purple indignation or of quivering anxiety, according to temperament. Many an one of our great-grandfathers, attired in the odd costume of boys in that period, and trundling a hoop along the road, has felt the lash of the coachman's whip. The following little story will show us why.

"When a very little boy," says one of our forebears, "I once upset a four-horse coach by losing control over my hoop, which, to my consternation, bowled among the legs of the team. I shall never forget the horror with which I for an instant saw the spirited horses floundering about with that hateful hoop among them, or heard the execrations of the coachman and the shouts of the passengers. Abandoning the wretched plaything to its fate, I took to my heels down a bye-lane, the portentous crash that followed only accelerating my speed."

Coach proprietors were favourite targets for Fate's worst shafts. They were a hard-working, much-enduring class of men; up early and to bed late, retiring in good circumstances and rising perhaps ruined through some unforeseen accident. They were "common carriers" in law, and bound under many Acts of Parliament to deliver goods uninjured at their destination. As carriers of passengers, it is true, they were only required to exercise all "due care and diligence" for the safety of their customers, and were exempt from liability in case of mishaps through the "act of God" or the unforeseen; but the observance of due precautions and a daily inspection of the coach had to be proved in case of injury to passengers, or in default they were held liable for damages.

Thus, the carelessness of any one of his many servants might mean a very serious thing to a coach proprietor. In those days the old Anglo-Saxon Law of Deodand was not only in existence, but in a very nourishing and aggressive condition. Indeed, coaching had practically rescued it from neglect. It was a law which, in cases of fatal injuries, empowered the coroner's jury to levy a fine, which might vary from sixpence to a thousand pounds, upon the object that caused the mischief.

The very multiplicity of tribunals before whom the personally unoffending coach proprietor was liable to be haled was in itself terrifying. There was the already-mentioned coroners jury; the jury on the criminal side in trials at the Assizes for manslaughter, and the other "twelve good men and true" who assessed damages in the Sheriff's Court.

How even the most well-meaning of men might thus suffer is evident in the case of a proprietor who was cast in damages from excess of caution. For additional security, and in order to protect it from road grit, he had a part of an axle incased in wood. One day this axle broke and a serious accident happened, resulting in an action against him for damages. He lost the day; the judge ruling that, although no proof of a defective axle was adduced, a flaw _might_ have existed which a proper daily examination would have detected had the extra precaution for safety not been adopted.