148 THE COACHING AGE. 



the carrying agency to it, or that agency formed 

 part of the inducement held out to them to with'- 

 draw their coaches from the road, and not, as was 

 saidi, £10,000 for throwing their interest into the 

 railway. 



The next person in my list may, I think, be Eobert 

 Gray. He went to the Bolt-in-Tun Coach Office, in 

 Fleet Street, in the year 1807, having previously 

 carried on the business of a coach-proprietor at the 

 Belle Sauvage, on Ludgate Hill. He "said he was. 

 extensively engaged in business as a stage-coach pro- 

 prietor, chiefly on the western and southern roads,, 

 having nothing at all upon the northern. 



He was concerned in two mails, the Portsmouth,, 

 and the Hastings, a pair-horse coach which he worked 

 in conjunction with Home, whose business was about 

 four times as large as his own, as he knew from the 

 respective sums they paid annually for duties. 



That the Bolt-in-Tun is a very old coaching-inn, or 

 rather an inn from which conveyances of some de- 

 scription started upwards of a hundred years since, is 

 clear from an account given of it in the book on 

 ' Signboards ' before referred to, which runs thus : 



Hereford IVCachine, 

 In a day and a half twice, continues flying from the Swan, and 

 Falcon, Hereford, Monday and Thursday mornings, and from the 

 Bolt-in-Tun, Fleet Street, London, Monday and Thursday evenings. 

 Fare, 19s.; outside, one half. — Hereford Journal, January 12, 1775. 



