The King's Post: Being a volume of historical facts relating to the posts, mail coaches, coach roads, and railway mail services of and connected with the ancient city of Bristol from 1580 to the present timeTombs, Robert Charles
History
The King's Post: Being a volume of historical facts relating to the posts, mail coaches, coach roads, and railway mail services of and connected with the ancient city of Bristol from 1580 to the present time
Tombs, Robert Charles
Postal service -- England -- Bristol
As a "Caution to Mail Coachmen," the following notice was issued on June
20, 1829:--"On Friday, Thomas Moor, the driver of the London mail from
Bristol to Calne and back, appeared before the Magistrates at
Brislington to answer an information laid against him by Mr. Bull, the
Inspector of Mail Coaches, by order of the G.P.O. for giving up the
reins to an outside passenger, and permitting him to drive the mail, on
May 29 last, from Keynsham to Bath, against the remonstrances of the
guard. The magistrates convicted Moor in the mitigated penalty of £5 and
11s. costs. Mr. Bull presented the Bath Hospital with the amount of the
fine."
On September 8th, 1837, a coachman named Burnett was killed at
Speenhamland, on the Bath Road. He was driving one of the New Company's
London and Bristol stages, and alighted at the "Hare and Hounds," very
foolishly leaving the horses unattended, with reins on their backs. He
had been a coachman for 20 years, but experience had not been sufficient
to prevent him thus breaking one of the first rules of the profession.
He had no sooner entered the Inn than the rival Old Company's coach came
down the road. Whether the other coachman gave the horses a touch with
his whip as he passed, or if they started of their own accord, is not
known, but they did start, and Burnett, rushing out to stop them, was
thrown down and trampled on, so that he died.
There departed this life at Bristol, in November, 1904, a somewhat
notable individual in the person of Richard Griffiths, who was born at
Westminster, in the year 1811, and entered the service of the Post
Office as a Mail Guard on the 17th November, 1834. At the commencement
of his service he was employed as Guard to the London and Norwich, _via_
Newmarket Mail Coach, upon which duty he remained until the coach ceased
running on the 5th January, 1846, when he was transferred to the London
and Dover Railway, and acted as Mail Train Guard thereon. When a
Travelling Post Office was established in 1860 on the Dover line of
railway, and the necessity for a Guard to the Mail bags thus removed,
Griffiths was ordered to the South Wales Railway, where he remained as
Mail Train Guard until superannuated on the 25th August, 1870. He lived
at Eastville, in Bristol, under the care at last of Mrs. Barrett, a
kind old dame, who made him very comfortable, and on his demise, after
being on pension for 34 years, he bequeathed his old battered Mail Coach
horn to her (_see illustration_). It is probable that the horn was used
on the last Norwich Coach out of London. The maker's name on it is "J.A.
Turner, 19 Poultry."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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