The Exeter Road

is not proposed to follow either of the two routes taken by the ‘Telegraph’ coach or the ‘Quicksilver’ Devonport mai

. This way went in 1826, according to Cary, those eminently safe and reliable coaches, the ‘Regulator,’ in twenty-four hours; the ‘Royal Mail,’ in twenty-two hours; and the ‘Sovereign,’ which, as no time is specified, would seem to have journeyed down the road in a haphazard fas

COACHI

by the stage coach advertised in the Mercurius Politicus of 1658 to start from the ‘George Inn,’ Aldersgate Without, ‘every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. To Sal

under the best conditions, and was the swiftest public conveyance down this road at that time, be

A

ater date—from the ’20’s until the close of the coaching era—were the proprietors of an intermediate kind of vehicle between the waggon at one extreme and the mail coaches at the other. This was the ‘Fly Van,’ of which, unlike their more ancient conveyances which set out only three times a week, one started every week-day from either end. This accommodated a class of travellers who did not disdain to travel among the bales and bundles, or to fit themselves in between the knobbly corners of heavy goods, but who would neither walk nor consent to the journey from the Far West occupying the best part of a fortnight. So they paid a trifle more and travelled the distance between Exeter and London in two days, in times when the ‘Telegraph,’ according to Sir William Knighton, conveyed the aristocratic passenger that distance in seventeen hours. He writes, in his diary, under date of 23rd September 1832, that he started at five o’clock in the morning of that day from Exeter in the ‘Tele

aph.’ But it was left to the ‘Waggon Coach’ to present the greatest disparity of prices and places. This was a vehicle which, under various names, was seen for a considerable period on most of the roads, and can, with a little ingenuity, be looked upon as the precursor of the three classes on railways. The

ecks,’ in Lad Lane,{12} and the ‘New London Inn,’ Exeter, both in those days inns of good solid feeding, with drinking to match. It w

n with Two

ed two

beef at the Bul

s of the road, ‘bothering the beef’ with his huge appetite, and tippling the genero

Pilot,’ ‘Traveller,’ and ‘Quicksilver,’ by Crewkerne and Yeovil; and the ‘Defiance,’ ‘Celerity,’ and ‘Subscription,’ by Amesbury and Ilminster; to