26 ON THE TRACK OF THE MAIL-COACH 



edition of 1830, a lively picture of stage-coach travel- 

 ling on the Great Western Eoad : 



' Even so late as 1804, the writer of this note travelled from 

 London to Derry Hill — a place between Chippenham and Calne 

 — on his road to Bath in a four-wheeled lumbering carriage — 

 a mulish vehicle, between a broad- wheeled waggon and a stage- 

 coach — in company with ten inside, sixteen outside, including 

 guard and coachman, and with baggage piled up full six feet 

 above the roof. This compact but discordant mass of live and 

 dead lumber, regularly booked but not legally ensured, left 

 London about three o'clock in the afternoon and was broken 

 down at Det^-yHill at nine o'clock the following morning, having 

 moved over about ninety miles of ground in eighteen hours. 

 The smash was tremendous — the screams, the groans, the ex- 

 clamations, the curses, and the prayers of twenty -six persons, 

 were various, discordant, and even ludicrous, but distressing. 

 Some suffered severely, some trivially, and others not at all. 

 The note-ist and two other persons walked to Chippenham, 

 about two miles distant, hired a post-chaise, drove to Bath, 

 and compelled the coach-proprietor to pay for the same. Other 

 passengers were confined for some weeks at the White Hart 

 Inn, Chippenham, by bruises or broken limbs.' 



Whatever may have been the actual state of mail- 

 coach travelling, there is no doubt that the Post- 

 Office, stimulated perhaps by Committees of Enquiry, 

 strained every nerve to bring about perfection. 



It was necessarily a nice question with the depart- 

 ment, in 1835, whether new mail-coach services should 

 be put up to public competition or arranged by agree- 

 ment with persons of known substance and ability. 

 Efficiency was best secured by the latter course, but 

 economy and the task of procuring the assent of the 

 Treasury to fresh expenditure pointed to the ex- 

 pediency of adopting the former. 



