Identifier: stagecoachmailin01harp (find matches)
Title: Stage-coach and mail in days of yore : a picturesque history of the coaching age
Year: 1903 (1900s)
Authors: Harper, Charles G. (Charles George), 1863-1943
Subjects: Horses Coaching (Transportation) -- History
Publisher: London : Chapman & Hall, limited
Contributing Library: Tufts University
Digitizing Sponsor: Tufts University and the National Science Foundation

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sensitive persons led tothe establishment of a superior class of coach,carrying insides only; and accordingly, we find theoriginal improvement of seats on the roof bringingfar-reaching consequences in its train. Whiledemocratising coaches, it at the same timenecessitated another class, and thus directlybrought about a numerical increase. The ex-clusive were thus enabled to keep their exclusive-ness by going in such conveyances as thatannounced in the advertising columns of thehigh-class papers :— For Portsmouth. A New Carriage on Springs, called THE LAND FRIGATE, gets out from the Bell Savage, Ludgate Hill, to theBjd Lyon at Portsmouth, every Tuesday andSaturday, at 6 a.m. Fare, i 5^. each Passenger. Ladiesand Gentlemen are requested to Observe that theFrigate is elegantly sashed all round, and in order topreserve the gentility and respectability of the vehicle,no outside passengers are carried. The period now under consideration was inother ways a very great and progressive one. In
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THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 1800—1824 185 this space of twenty-five years were included thetwo most significant advances in the whole historyof the road—the introduction about 1805 ofsprings under the driving-box, and the shorteningof the stages. AVithout either of them, theacceleration that resulted in the Golden Age ofcoaching, beginning in 1825, AAould have beenimpossible. The placing of springs under the driving-l)oxwas due to the suggestion of John Warde, earliestof the coaching amateurs, who had been taughtthe art of driving a stage-coach by Jack Bailey,a famed coachman on the old Prince of Wales,between London and Birmingham. He had foundthe jolting received directly from the axle anintolerable infliction on a long drive, and urgedcoach-proprietors to provide springs. Said Mr.AVilkins of the Balloon—a character inNimrods Life of a Sportsman— they do say theyare going to put the boxes of all stage-coaches onsprings, but Heaven knows when that will be—not in my time, 1 fear

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