Old Coaching Days: Some Incidents in the Life of Moses James Nobbs, the last of the Mail Coach GuardsNobbs, Moses James
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Old Coaching Days: Some Incidents in the Life of Moses James Nobbs, the last of the Mail Coach Guards
Nobbs, Moses James
Nobbs, Moses James, 1817-; Postal service -- Great Britain -- Employees
I don’t know that I notice very much change in the manners and habits of
people from what they were in my younger days. As regards my Post Office
work, however, the change has been most wonderful, and at Christmas time
the Mails despatched by me from Paddington to places on the Great Western
Line have grown to be a hundredfold of the quantity we used to carry by
coach.
M. J. NOBBS
OTHER COACHING INCIDENTS.
COACHES IN SNOW-STORMS.
THE great snow-storm of Christmas, 1836, was long remembered as one of
the most severe on record, and Mr. Nobbs’ coach was only one of many that
had to be abandoned owing to the depth of the snow-drifts. All over
England, and in Scotland as well, most of the roads were rendered
impassable. Some coaches, after proceeding for miles on their journey,
were forced to return; thus the Brighton Mail from London had to put back
after getting as far as Crawley, and the Dover Mail got no further than
Gravesend. Other coaches were upset, and some were completely lost,
having been abandoned, and afterwards buried in the snow-wreaths. Near
Chatham the snow lay to a depth of 30 or 40 feet, and on some of the
roads in the Midlands, after cuttings had been made, the snow was banked
to the height of 50 feet. A full account of this and other memorable
snowstorms will be found in Mr. Wilson Hyde’s most interesting book, “The
Royal Mail.”
History repeats itself, and more than fifty years after that 1836 storm
we again find Mail Coaches blocked by the snow on the Brighton road. The
severe snow-storm of the 9th and 10th of March last taxed the resources
of the Post Office in the South and West of England to the utmost. For
several days Plymouth was virtually without any service of Mails, and one
after another came an apparently endless series of telegrams to
headquarters in London, bearing dismal tidings of trains buried in
mammoth drifts, cuttings blocked with snow, and portentous
“accumulations” of parcel receptacles at places quite unprepared to bear
so large a share of the Post Office burden. The trials and triumphs of
that stirring time have, however, already found a capable chronicler—as
readers of the _St. Martin’s-le-Grand_ Magazine will shortly discover.
All we would refer to here is the fact that the up and down Brighton
Parcel Coaches were both blocked by snow at Handcross Hill, about four
miles from Crawley—one at the top of the hill and the other at the
bottom. The resources of civilisation in 1891, however, afforded a means
of overcoming the difficulty which was not open to our fathers and
grand-fathers in 1836. An experienced officer (Mr. W. Roberts) went down
from London by train and superintended the digging out of the coaches.
This done, he had both vehicles taken to Crawley, where the parcel
baskets were transferred to the railway. In 1836 those parcels would
probably not have reached their destination under a week or ten days.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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