Description
'Our duty is not like the common business... the eyes of all the Kingdom is on us and the Correspondence of the Country is at stake. In these words Thomas Hasker, the man who was chiefly responsible for the revolutionary development of the splendid mail-coaches of eighteenth and nineteenth- century England, described the vital importance of the service which was to become so renowned a feature of our roads, and its accomplishment's popular legend. The service was the brainchild of John
Palmer, a theatre proprietor who realized that mail-coaches, properly organized and run to a strict time schedule, would be much more efficient than the illiterate and often dishonest postboys on whom the country had previously had to depend for the delivery of its mails. When Palmer fell from favour it became Hasker's task to make this gigantic scheme work, and to it he henceforth devoted his life, one of un- ceasing vigilance and toil. His services ran from one end of the country to the other, the coaches lumbering through the night at full speed in the worst weather, all traffic compelled to give way to them, the coach- men and guard huddled on their perches against the cold, striving to complete the next stage of the journey on time. If they failed, Hasker would ask the reason why. His men were handpicked for reliability and proud of it, for the safety of the mails was their responsibility in an age when willfully interrupting them was punishable by death.
Here can be read letters from Hasker to the contractors who ran the coaches, to the guards and to postmasters on the mail routes; letters which, often very amusing, throw much light on unfamiliar sides of late eighteenth-century life.
ISBN: 9780678057414
