The Coaching Era 55 



without a bridge until 1792. The road to Walsall had been 

 " lately made good," and that to Wolverhampton was much 

 improved ; but he speaks of the road to Dudley, twelve miles 

 in length, as " despicable beyond description," and says the 

 " unwilling traveller " was obliged to go two miles about, 

 through a bad road, to avoid a worse. The roads to Stratford 

 and Warwick were " much used and much neglected," and 

 the one to Coventry could " only be equalled by the Dudley 

 Road." 



" A flying machine on steel springs " from Sheffield to 

 London was started in 1760. It " slept " at Nottingham the 

 first night, at Northampton the second, and arrived in London 

 on the third day. Leeds showed equal enterprise. 



The Bath coach, " hung on steel springs," was hi 1765 

 doing the journey in 29 hours, the night being spent at 

 Andover. The improvement of the Bath road allowed of 

 Burke reaching Bristol from London in 24 hours in the 

 summer of 1774 ; but his biographer mentions, by way of 

 explaining how he accomplished this feat, that he " travelled 

 with incredible speed." By 1795, however, Bath had been 

 brought within a single day's journey of London, the traveller 

 who started from the Angel, at the back of St. Clements 

 Danes, at four o'clock in the morning, being due at Bath at 

 eleven o'clock at night. The journey between Dover and 

 London was also reduced to one day, a " flying machine " 

 leaving at four a.m. and reaching its destination in the 

 evening. 



By 1784, in fact, flying coaches had become quite common, 

 and their once incredible speeds even came to be regarded as 

 far from satisfactory for travellers to whom time was of 

 importance. 



The immediate reason, however, for the next development 

 arose through the defective postal arrangements. Hitherto 

 the mails had been carried either by post-boys, whose contract 

 time was five miles an hour, or, in the case of short journeys, 

 by veterans on foot whose rate of progress was much less, 

 though it was then a common practice to make up urgent 

 letters as parcels, and send them by the coaches. John 

 Palmer, manager of a theatre at Bath, finding the mail 

 was taking three days over a journey to London which he 

 himself often did in one, submitted to Pitt, in 1783, a scheme 



