The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: London to York — John Shaqi
The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: London to YorkHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: London to York
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
A1 Road (England and Scotland); England -- Social life and customs; Great Britain -- Description and travel
The average takings of the coach would certainly never, at the best of
it, come to more than £50 a journey, leaving a balance of £15 10s.
profit. Now, taking a year of three hundred and thirteen days, and
coaches “up” and “down,” this gives a profit of £9,702—not, be it borne
in mind, going to one man. The “end men” had the greatest share, as they
had also the heaviest expenses, and the “middle-ground men” got little
beyond the mileage on which they horsed the coaches; but with twenty-five
stages or so, and twenty-five participants in the profits, it will be
seen that the individual earnings on one coach could not be classed very
high.
VI
IT was a costly as well as a lengthy business to travel from London to
Edinburgh. Not so lengthy, of course, by mail as by stage-coach, but
much more expensive. If you wished to take it comfortably during the
forty-two hours and a-half or so of travelling, you went inside,
especially if it happened to be in winter; but an inside place cost
eleven guineas and a-half, which was thought a much larger sum in 1830
than it would be nowadays. Accordingly, the stalwart and the not
particularly well-to-do, who at the same time wanted to travel quickly,
went outside, whereby they saved no less than four guineas.
But let not the reader think that these respective sums of eleven and
a-half and seven and a-half guineas comprised the whole of the
traveller’s expenses in the old days. There were numerous people to tip,
such as porters, waiters, and last, but certainly not the least of them,
the coachmen and guards, who at the end of their respective journeys,
when they left their seats to a new guard or a new Jehu, “kicked” the
passengers, as the expressive phrase went, for their respective two
shillings or so. To be kicked at intervals in this figurative manner,
all the way between London and Edinburgh, was not physically painful, but
it came expensive; and what with the necessary meals and refreshments
during those forty-two hours or so, it could scarce have cost an “inside”
less than fifteen guineas, or an “outside” less than eleven.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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