ACCIDENTS 205 



their faces were numb and swollen hy the force of the 

 hail and snow, and that never in their lives had they 

 experienced such a storm, an assertion fully borne out 

 by a gentleman who travelled by the Chester mail: 



"After leaving Northampton on Friday night we 

 got on tolerably well notwithstanding the violence of 

 the driving snow, to Broughton field from whence the 

 guard for two miles explored a passage for the horses 

 which could with difficulty be made to facejthe storm. 

 At Hockliff we found numerous other coaches which 

 were unable to proceed. We were told by a person 

 who had just returned with the horses that the heavy 

 Coventry and Chester coaches were stuck fast in the 

 snow on Chalk Hill. 



"Dawn having broken, I with a superintendent of the 

 Post Office set off on horseback, and with much diffi- 

 culty succeeded in reaching Dunstable, where we got a 

 chaise with six horses and arrived in London at 12.30 

 on Saturday night." 



Chalk Hill seems to have been a place of unenviable 

 notoriety in a snow-storm, for in 1808 the Liverpool 

 mail was unable to get up it, and the guard who brought 

 on the mails declared that in many places the roads 

 were ten or twelve feet under snow. 



The same day the Gloucester and Worcester coaches 

 could go no farther than Benson ; the Bristol mail had 

 twice to be dug out of the snow, and the Exeter mail 

 was stopped by the passengers at Overton. 



At Bury St. Edmunds there was a grand subscription 

 dance when one hundred and sixty persons were present, 

 including a number of undergraduates from Cambridge, 



