All Aboard the Coach - Sepia Saturday

Sepia Saturday's May theme is  "Travel"  with the first prompt photograph a happy  group  relaxing outside their coach.  Cue for me to look a look back at how groups got around in the past - from coaches  and charabancs, to horse drawn carriages and stagecoaches.

 

 A happy group of people in Earlston, Scottish Borders, looking forward to their coach trip to Carlisle, the  city just over the border into England.  The year is 1947 - so it must have been a much welcomed event , just after the restrictions and rigours of wartime life. 

Here I am at the start of a big adventure - taking a jounrey around the  USA  on a Greyhound Bus, on the offer their offer of "99 days travel for $99".  The date  - summer 1966,  as I finished my year long stay in Cambridge, Mass.   as a trainee librarian on an exchange scheme.
 

Looking back to the age of the Charabanc 

  

I like the image  as a happy holiday photograph, (notice the little girl standing up to be photographed),   though  again I wonder how safe I would find the vehicle with so many people on board  I could imagine someone might need to get out and push, if going up hills!  

 

I knew next to nothing about this photograph. It was in the collection of my Great Aunt Jennie Danson  of Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire, and judging by the style of dress e.g. cloche hats it must have been taken in the 1920's. There was no inscription on the reverse, but the photographer/publisher was identified as Arthur Hadley, Photographer, Ramsey, Isle of Man. This could be a clue, as one of Jennie's eight brothers, Albert, worked on the Isle of Man ferry between Fleetwood, Lancashire and the Isle of Man.  And on the side of the charabanc is the famous three legged man that became the island's badge.

 

Another charabanc of the same period in the collection of my local heritage group, Auld Earlston.   To me it has an air of a vehicle cobbled together from various spare parts and  indicates an even more precarious jounrey for its passengers on crowded seats!

To go back some twenty years earlier to a horse-drawn carriage.

The date  is 1907 and  Earlston Parish Church Choir is setting   off from the Red Lion Hotel in the village  to drive to Yarrow Manse in Selkirkshire -  according to the Distances website a distance of some 29 miles over what would be a hilly, twisting  route.   

Hopefully it would be a dry day as there was no protection from the elements.     rk for part of the route and and then by waggonette to Yarrow.

 

The road today through the Yarrow valley

They must have got there  safely,  for here they are relaxing, with some hats off, outside Yarrow Manse.  

Stagecoaches - Romantic  v. Reality,

 When we look at the Images of stagecoaches on Christmas cards,   they look colourful, dashing and rather romantic, but what was the reality like for our ancestors traveling 180 years ago?

One of the many beautiful wall paintings you see on the outside of buildings in Austria. 

 

This image  of stagecoach travel has been   perpetuated by many writers including Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer.  However Charles Dickens, in "David Copperfield" published in 1850,  painted a rather different picture of the reality of a winter stagecoach journe

 

"How well I recollect the wintry ride! The frozen particles of ice brushed from the blades of grass by the wind and borne across the face; the hard clatter of the horses' hoofs beating a tune upon the ground;  the stiff-tilted soil,   the snowdrifts, lightly eddying in the chalk pit as the  breeze ruffled it;  the smoking team stopping to breathe on the hill top and shaking their bells musically,.........."

  A pub sign taken at at Greenwich,  London

 

Stagecoaches were public service vehicles designed specifically for passengers and running to a published schedule.  Eight passengers could be packed inside, with others sitting at the back of the coach and the poorest passengers atop along with the luggage.

Contemporary newspaper reports of the time present a graphic picture of the perils facing passengers and  (and pedestrian) alike.

 

"The Border Watch" - 19 November 1846: 

“A SLOW COACH. – The Edinburgh and Hawick coach, which left Princes Street, Edinburgh on Saturday afternoon at 4pm  did not reach the Bridge Inn, Galashiels, until about 10pm; thus accomplishing the distance of thirty-two miles in the astonishing period of six hours!   

 The coachman did his duty well with whip and voice, constantly urging forward his jaded steeds, and employing the box seat passenger to assist him with a spare thong.

But it was all of no avail. The animals would not move one foot faster than another. Up hill or down hill there was little perceptible difference, and several times the vehicle came to a dead halt, almost on a level.

The coach was full from Edinburgh, but a passenger having been let down on the road, another person was taken up. In spite of the loud remonstrances of the passengers, a second was buckled on behind, and a third was allowed standing room beside him. It appears there is now no restriction as to the number a stage coach may carry, and consequently three poor miserable horses were forced to drag, throughout a weary stage of fifteen miles, a heavy coach loaded with eighteen or twenty persons."

 "The Kelso Chronicle" - 16 June 1837: 

"ACCIDENT. – On Tuesday evening when the coach from Kelso had passed Ord, the reins broke, and the driver left his seat, and went along the pole to recover them. His foot slipped, and he fell between the pole and the horses to the ground. Fortunately, the wheels passed on both sides of him, and he escaped with no other injury than a slight blow to the head.The horses set off at rapid pace, and ran through Tweedmouth. The passengers kept their seats, and the horses while running furiously along the bridge, were stopped by a young man who, with great personal risk, seized the horses’ head.  Had they not been stopped, in all probability, from the speed with which they were proceeding, the coach would have been upset at the turn of Bridge Street.  The conduct of the young man deserves great praise.”

"The Kelso Chronicle" -  4 October 1844:

“WONDERFUL ESCAPE. – As the Defiance Coach was leaving the town on Friday last, a girl, about 10 years of age,  who was hastily crossing the High Street, and not perceiving the coach, ran in betwixt the fore and hind horses, by which she was struck down, when the horses and coach went over her, to the horror of the spectators, who could do nothing to save her. The wheels on the one side passed over one of her legs, bruising it most severely in two places, while the opposite wheels went over the top of her bonnet, close to the head, but without doing any injury. The poor girl’s thigh was also much bruised, apparently by one of the horses’ feet. We are glad to state that she is recovering from the effects of her injuries.”.

 

And Finally 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We were on holiday in Warsaw when this stage-coach drove into a square  - but we  never found out what it was all about!

But the iconic image of the stagecoach as a mode of travel still captures our imagination. especially at Christmas time. 

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Sepia Saturday give bloggers an opportunity 

to share their family history through photographs.

 

 

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Postscript  - I have had trouble formatting this post  - I have no idea why some of the body text has come out in red, although I had it in my  Blogger draft as black.