Driving horses; Driving of horse-drawn vehicles; Horsemanship
Before concluding, I will relate some of the difficulties we had to
encounter in foggy weather. We were obliged to be guided out of London
with torches, seven or eight Mails following one after the other, the
guard of the foremost Mail lighting the one following, and so on till
the last. We travelled at a slow pace, like a funeral procession. Many
times I have been three hours going from London to Hounslow. I remember
one very foggy night, instead of my arriving at Bagshot (a distance of
thirty miles from London, and my destination) at eleven o'clock, I did
not get there till one in the morning. I had to leave again at four the
same morning. On my way back to town, when the fog was very bad, I was
coming over Hounslow Heath when I reached the spot where the old
powder-mills used to stand. I saw several lights in the road, and heard
voices, which induced me to stop. The old Exeter Mail, which left
Bagshot thirty minutes before I did, had met with a singular accident;
it was driven by a man named Gambier; his leaders had come in contact
with a hay-cart on its way to London, which caused them to turn suddenly
round, break the pole, and blunder down a steep embankment, at the
bottom of which was a narrow deep ditch filled with water and mud. The
Mail Coach pitched on to the stump of a willow tree that over-hung the
ditch; the coachman and outside passengers were thrown over into the
meadow beyond, and the horses went into the ditch; the unfortunate
wheelers were drowned or smothered in the mud. There were two inside
passengers, who were extricated with some difficulty; but fortunately no
one was injured. I managed to take the passengers, with the guard and
mail-bags, on to London, leaving the coachman to wait for daylight
before he could make an attempt to get the Mail up the embankment. They
endeavoured to accomplish this, with cart-horses and chains. They had
nearly reached the top of the bank when something gave way, and the poor
old Mail went back into the ditch again. I shall never forget the scene;
there were about a dozen men from the powder-mills trying to render
assistance, and, with their black faces, each bearing a torch in his
hand, they presented a curious spectacle. This happened about thirty
years ago. Posts and rails were erected at the spot after the accident.
I passed the place last summer; they are still there, as well as the old
pollard willow stump.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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