Back

Home

Back

Home

The Royal Mail Coaches
Being a short history of their mail and passenger service, embellished with interesting accounts and handsome prints.

Part 4
Stand and deliver!

Aside from pickpockets, few robbers actually exercised their job descriptions at inns. Although they did size-up stage and private coach customers who might like to “donate to the widders and orph’ns fund” a little farther down the road, mail-coach robbery was not a spur of the moment undertaking for them. The speed of mail-coaches put a single robber at an extreme disadvantage. In this case, two or more robbers would spring into action and, juggling their job responsibilities, attempt to get the drop on coachman and guard while halting the horses--and “liberate” the mail. This took a lot of practice and was best performed in a sober state of mind.

The Irish had already solved this “sticky” problem; sometimes robbing mail-coaches by setting up road blocks and attacking them in groups of up to a dozen or more -- but the English “fellowship” of fair-play highwaymen preferred the more personalized and intimate mode of robbery.

Robbery was not so much career selection; but more a matter of economic survival. Numerous highwaymen (and a few ladies) were former servants who had been “turned-off” when their masters were forced to “downsize” due to heavy taxes; while others were soldiers returning from war, who could not find employment in the increasingly industrialized England which was replacing manual labor with machines. This is not to excuse their behavior, but only to put it in perspective.

With its armed guard and coachman, the Royal Mail was a safer form of travel than regular stage or private coaches, but there were times when even this formidable duo was not enough to prevent robbery--especially when it was sight-unseen. An unobserved heist of the Royal Mail was reported in the newspapers and a broadside issued.

GENERAL POST OFFICE, Tuesday, October 27, 1812. About Seven o’Clock on the Evening of Monday the 26th instant, the LEEDS Mail Coach was robbed of the Bags of Letters for London, described at the Foot hereof, between Kettering and Higham Ferrers, and within Three Miles of Higham Ferrers, by forcing the Lock of the Mail Box.

THE BAGS STOLEN ARE:

Whoever shall apprehend the Person or Persons who committed the said Robbery, will be entitled to a Reward of TWO HUNDRED POUNDS, one Moiety to be paid on Commitment for Trial and the other Moiety on Conviction. If an Accomplice in the Robbery will surrender himself and make discovery whereby one or more of the Persons concerned therein shall be apprehended and brought to Justice, such Discoverer will be entitled to the said Reward, and be admitted an Evidence for the Crown.
By Command of the Post Master General,
F. FREELING, Secretary.

top

It was not long before the suspects were apprehended and an account appears in The Hue and Cry, and Police Gazette for November 12, 1812:

POLICE NEWS.

LAVENDER, who was sent from the Bow Street Office, to explore the circumstances of the late Mail Robbery, traced out a suspicious character, of the name of Kendall, to Wellenborough, who resides within three miles of the place where the Robbery is supposed to have been committed; who on being examined, contradicted himself as to where he was at the time. He had been seen in a cart with a man he pretends is an utter stranger to him, having merely picked him up on the road to give him a ride. Kendall, who is the keeper of a turnpike gate was absent till late on the evening of the Robbery and left his sister to act in his stead, which sister it seems, mysteriously hired a chaise the same evening for a purpose that she did not chuse to explain, but which was to go with Kendall’s unknown companion to Huntingdon, at which time and manner it is believed the purloined contents of the Mail, were conveyed there. Lavender is now making search after the property. These with other circumstances, have been thought sufficient for the magistrates of Northampton, to commit both Kendall and his sister to prison.

Perhaps Kendall resented the fact that mail-coaches didn’t have to pay a toll and felt he was being cheated out of income. And one wonders if he had been tipped off as to the contents of the mail by someone working at the Post-Office. This was always a possibility and, on more than one occasion, sorters of the Royal Mail absconded with the emptied contents of letters.

Hi-Yo Quicksilver! Awaaaaay!

Quicksilver was the only Royal Mail-coach with its own name instead of a number designation. It was the fastest mail-coach of all, and had to cover the 213 miles from London to Devonport--including all stops--in 24 hours. This was accomplished with speed and alacrity, allowing time for twenty changes of horse and less than an hour for 2 meals. It was a far cry from the advertised 3 days it took the Exeter Fly to go from Exeter to London, hedged with the proprietor’s caveat: “If God be willing”.

An interesting anecdote concerning the Devonport Mail shows how well even the horses knew their routes. On one occasion, the Quicksilver was left unattended outside an inn seven miles from Plymouth, while the coachman and guard enjoyed their drinks. The horses soon tired of waiting and decided to set off for the next stop on their own. Off they went, rumbling along the appointed route, up to speed--and to the extreme distress of Mrs. Cox, a fishwife from Devonport, who was the only passenger on the roof. She quietly, but frantically, tried to attract the attention of some passers-by--but to no avail. Wisely, she did not scream, for fear of frightening the horses, who trotted on negotiating all the hazards including on-coming traffic and a narrow bridge. Even the toll gate could not stop the horses, as it had been left open for the mail-coach by the gatekeeper at Crabtree. After an exhilarating trot the coach came to a halt, dead on time, outside the King’s Arms at Plymouth. The inside passengers, unaware of the absence of both coachman and guard, were amazed when they alighted from the Quicksilver and found that the horses had proceeded to the inn on their own.

top

The Royal road to more enjoyable writing.

Toward the end of the great mail-coach era, Anthony Trollope served as a travelling inspector in the employ of the Post-Office. At this time, his Barchester Chronicles were being issued in weekly installments, and during a stay at the Saracen’s Head in Chelmsford, he encountered a party of women who were discussing his stories over coffee. While talking about Mrs. Proudie, the bishop’s wife, Trollope heard one of them say, “Confound that woman! I for one wish she were dead!” He then arose, greeted the ladies, thanked them for their comments, and promised that Mrs. Proudie would die in the next installment. Trollope kept his word--to the pleasure and relief of many readers.

Post Mortem

The mail-coaches plied their established routes for years, speedily delivering mail and passengers to all points of the British Isles. Their solid contribution to business and society spanned more than 6 decades before they ingloriously came to the end of the road. With the advent of the railroads, steam packets, and an improved canal system, the long-heralded aristocrats of the road disappeared--along with their familiar trumpeted signals.

No one has penned a better description of their haunting demise than Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers:

"When my uncle reached the end of Leith Walk, he had to cross a pretty large piece of waste ground which separated him from a short street which he had to turn down, to go direct to his lodging. Now, in this piece of waste ground, there was, at that time, an enclosure belonging to some wheelwright who contracted with the Post-office for the purchase of old worn-out mail coaches; and my uncle, being very fond of coaches, old, young, or middle-aged, all at once took it into his head to step out of his road for no other purpose than to peep between the palings at these mails - about a dozen of which, he remembered to have seen, crowded together in a very forlorn and dismantled state, inside. My uncle was a very enthusiastic, emphatic sort of person, gentlemen; so, finding that he could not obtain a good peep between the palings, he got over them, and sitting himself quietly down on an old axletree, began to contemplate the mail coaches with a deal of gravity.

There might be a dozen of them, or there might be more - my uncle was never quite certain on this point, and being a man of very scrupulous veracity about numbers, didn't like to say - but there they stood, all huddled together in the most desolate condition imaginable. The doors had been torn from their hinges and removed; the linings had been stripped off: only a shred hanging here and there by a rusty nail; the lamps were gone, the poles had long since vanished, the iron-work was rusty, the paint was worn away; the wind whistled through the chinks in the bare wood work; and the rain, which had collected on the roofs, fell, drop by drop, into the insides with a hollow and melancholy sound. They were the decaying skeletons of departed mails, and in that lonely place, at that time of night, they looked chill and dismal.

My uncle rested his head upon his hands, and thought of the busy bustling people who had rattled about, years before, in the old coaches, and were now as silent and changed; he thought of the numbers of people to whom one of those crazy mouldering vehicles had borne, night after night, for many years, and through all weathers, the anxiously expected intelligence, the eagerly looked-for remittance, the promised assurance of health and safety, the sudden announcement of sickness and death. The merchant, the lover, the wife, the widow, the mother, the schoolboy, the very child who tottered to the door at the postman's knock - how had they all looked forward to the arrival of the old coach. And where were they all now!”

~Robert Whitworth

top