The Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn Road: The Great Fenland HighwayHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
England -- Description and travel; Fens, The (England) -- Description and travel
FEW and fragmentary are the recollections of the old coachmen of
the Cambridge Road. A coloured etching exists, the work of Dighton,
purporting to show the driver of the "Telegraph" in 1809; but whether
this represents that Richard Vaughan of the same coach, praised in
the book on coaching by Lord William Pitt-Lennox as "scientific
in horseflesh, unequalled in driving," is doubtful, for the hero
of Dighton's picture seems to belong to an earlier generation.
Among drivers of the "Telegraph" were "Old Quaker Will" and George
Elliott, just mentioned by Thomas Cross; himself not much given to
enlarging upon other coachmen and their professional skill. Poor Tommy
necessarily moved in their circle; but although with them, he was not
of them, and nursed a pride both of his family and of his own superior
education that grew more arrogant as his misfortunes increased. As for
Tommy himself, we have already heard much of him and his _Autobiography
of a Stage Coachman_. The "Lynn Union," however, the coach he drove
down part of the road one day and up the next, was by no means one of
the crack "double" coaches, but started from either end only three
times a week, and although upset every now and again, was a jogtrot
affair that averaged but seven miles an hour, including stops. That
the "Lynn Union" commonly carried a consignment of shrimps one way
and the returned empty baskets another was long one of Cross's minor
martyrdoms. He drove along the road, his head full of poetry and noble
thoughts, and yearning for cultured talk, while the shrimp-baskets
diffused a penetrating odour around, highly offensive to those cultured
folk for whose society his soul longed. People with a nice sense of
smell avoided the "Lynn Union" while the shrimp-carrying continued.
Contemporary with Cross was Jo Walton, of the "Safety," and later of
the "Star." He was perhaps one of the finest coachmen who ever drove on
the Cambridge Road, and it was possibly the knowledge of this skill,
and the daring to which it led, that brought so many mishaps to the
"Star" while he wielded the reins. He has been described as "a man
who swore like a trooper and went regularly to church," with a temper
like an emperor and a grip like steel. This fine picturesque character
was the very antithesis of the peaceful and dreamy Cross, and thought
nothing of double-thonging a nodding waggoner who blocked the road with
his sleepy team. Twice at least he upset the "Star" between Royston
and Buntingford when attempting to pass another coach. He, at last,
was cut short by the railway, and his final journeys were between
Broxbourne and Cambridge. "Here," he would say bitterly, as the train
came steaming into Broxbourne Station, "here comes old Hell-in-Harness!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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