lo THE EXETER ROAD 



many years as carriers between London and the West, 

 and at a later date — from tlie '20's until the close 

 of the coaching era — were the proprietors of an 

 intermediate kind of vehicle between the waggon at 

 one extreme and the mail coaches at the other. This 

 was the ' Fly Van,' of which, unlike their more 

 ancient conveyances which set out only three times 

 a week, one started every week-day from either end. 

 This accommodated a class of travellers who did not 

 disdain to travel among the bales and bundles, or to 

 fit themselves in between the knobbly corners of heavy 

 goods, but who would neither walk nor consent to the 

 journey from the Far West occupying the l^est part of 

 a fortnight. So they paid a trifle more and travelled 

 the distance between Exeter and London in two days, 

 in times when the ' Telegraph,' according to Sir 

 William Knighton, conveyed the aristocratic pas- 

 senger that distance in seventeen hours. He whites, 

 in his diary, under date of 23rd September 1832, 

 that he started at five o'clock in the morning 

 of that day from Exeter in the ' Telegraph ' coach 

 for London. The fare, inside, was £3 :10s., and, 

 in addition, four coachmen and one guard had to be 

 paid the usual fees which custom had rendered 

 obligatory. They breakfasted at Ilminster and dined 

 at Andover. ' Nothing,' he says, ' can exceed the 

 rapidity with which everything is done. The journey 

 of one hundred and seventy-five miles was accom- 

 plished in seventeen hours ^ — breakfast and dinner were 

 so hurried that the cravings of appetite could hardly be 



^ Yes, but the time was cut down to fourteen hours a few years 

 later. 



