Stage-coach and Mail in Days of Yore, Volume 2 (of 2)

CHAPTER I

THE LATER MAILS

The Bristol Mail opened the mail-coach era by going at eight miles an hour, but that was an altogether exceptional speed, and the average mail-coach journeys were not performed at a rate of more than seven miles an hour until long after the nineteenth century had dawned. In 1812, when Colonel Hawker travelled to Glasgow, it took the mail 57 hours’ con...