When the London and South-Western Railway was opened to Richmond, in 1843, the first station-master was a former coachman and coach-proprietor, and a very notable one: no less a man, indeed, than Thomas Cooper, who had in his time run a service of coaches between London, Bath and Bristol, and had been landlord of that very fine old inn, the “Castle,” at Marlborough, now and for many years past a part of Marlborough College. Cooper’s varied enterprises on the Bath Road at last led him direct into the Bankruptcy Court. When he emerged from the official whitewashing process, Chaplin had acquired his line of coaches, and to that highly successful man he became a local manager. It was Chaplin who obtained him the position of station-master, as doubtless he had, in his influential position of director and chairman of the L. & S.W.R., already found many posts on that line for coachmen, guards, and others. Jo Walton, the famous whip of the “Star of Cambridge,” became a messenger at Foster’s Bank in that town, after the railway had run him off. At an earlier date Dick Vaughan, of the Cambridge “Telegraph,” had been killed by being thrown out of a gig; but of him we know little. Of Thomas Cross, who was intimately connected with Cambridge, we know a good deal. He drove the Lynn “Union” for many years. Born in 1791, he died in 1877, in his eighty-sixth year. His occupancy of the box-seat lasted from 1821 to 1847, when his coaching career was brought to a close by the opening of the length of railway between Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn, His was a remarkable history. His father, John Cross, from being a highly prosperous coach-proprietor, with large estates and considerable social standing in the district between Petersfield and Portsmouth, was gradually brought low by misfortune and reckless speculations. John Cross, with the wealth and status of a country squire, had given his son Thomas an excellent education, and had destined him for the Navy; but serious attacks of epilepsy, and the results of an accident caused from falling in one of these fits on a number of wine-bottles, cut his career in the Service short. He was a midshipman when these distressing circumstances entirely altered his future. He then started farming, but misfortune dogged his steps. As owners of horses, himself and his father fared no better, for the terrible disease of glanders broke out and quickly carried off 120 animals. Eventually ruin faced the family, and Thomas Cross at last was reduced to seeking employment as a whip in the very yard once owned by his father. At the age of thirty, then, married and with a family of his own to support, we perceive him pretty thoroughly graduated in the school of life, and already familiar with the worst blows that adversity could give. In the beginning of his coaching career he drove the “Union” between London and Cambridge, but at different periods had the middle and the lower ground.