Tour of Lost Birmingham Nᵒ.61: A Regency Stay at the Hen and Chickens Hotel (New Street)

The Hen and Chicken's on New Street, with King Edward's school to the right, c. 1808.
Coaches would enter the rear stables through the arch.
Held by Birmingham Museums.

Were you at the “Hen and Chickens,” from which I write, however, you would be very well content with your quarters [...] I am surrounded by vases of beautiful flowers, many of them the choice productions of the green house in our rude climate, which ornament and perfume the halls and landings of the staircases, and impart an air bordering on elegance, to the general neatness and comfort of the establishment. The inn at which we are, is said to be the best in this great work-shop of iron and steel [...].*

Newspaper Clippings: The Balloon Coach

~From Aris's Birmingham Gazette, 7 May 1787~
BIRMINGHAM and LONDON BALLOON COACH
The advert depicts the cost of coach travel at the time, which would have been completely out of the reach of the poor. It makes me wonder how the poorest, who did move about from country to town, and from town to town, transported themselves and their families. Note, also, how the proprietors protect themselves from the possibility of highway robbery by stating that they are not accountable for valuable goods.

Paper Remnants: The First Birmingham Stage-Coach

Print of a poster from May 1731 advertising the first regular stage-coach from Birmingham to London. The journey took two and a half days; but notice the get-out clause 'if God permit', allowing for anything from bad roads (which were common), poor weather (this is England) and any other eventuality that may be thrown at the journey. A regular stage-coach means that Birmingham's traders and manufacturers have a cheaper and easier way to reach the capital in order to make and maintain business connections. Take a journey on the London to Birmingham stage coach here.

London to Birmingham, by Coach

The London to Birmingham Stage Coach by John Cordrey, 1801. The coach,
full of passengers, includes a wedding party & is eight miles from London.   

Edit: The motifs painted on the side of the coach depicts two balloons (on the two side panels) either side of a Swan with Two Necks (painted on the central door). The Swan with Two Necks was a public house on Lad Lane in London, so the motifs shows that the coach was likely the Birmingham Balloon Post Coach, as noted in newspapers as stopping at the Swan with Two Necks. Detail provided with thanks by Tom Nicholls. 

As the London to Birmingham stage coach passes by, one friendly passenger raises his hat; another drinks heartily and seems ready to alight rather prematurely. The pace of Cordrey's coach seems very slow and easy, which could not be further from the truth. Our passengers would have been jolted all over the place as they sped over the bumpy roads, and considering that the speed of the coaches was of great importance, the comfort of passengers was often overlooked. For many wealthier travellers, the stage coach was an inferior mode of transport, the genteel Hotel on Birmingham’s Temple Row was proud to state that it did not have the ‘annoyance of stage coaches’ (visit the Hotel). Most of the other main inns in Birmingham had stage coaches running to and from them though, in 1830 you could catch one of several coaches from the Albion, Castle, Fountain, Hen & Chickens, Nelson or Swan everyday.*    

The first regular weekly stage coach between London and Birmingham was initiated by Nicholas Rothwell in 1731 (see poster) and made the journey in two and a half days (down from coaches taking four days in 1659 and three days in 1702).* By 1742 faster coaches, named 'flying coaches', were making the journey in only two days, and different proprietors ran different routes; the Lichfield and Birmingham route began on 12^th April (see cutting below) and a competitor, Robert Coles, began his Birmingham and Warwick coach less than a month later, running in the summer season, when the roads were safer.* In 1747 a journey on the Birmingham and Warwick stage coach to London cost 1l 5s, but the traveller was 'answerable for jewels, rings, watches, money, or plate, unless paid for after the rate of three-pence for every twenty shillings value' revealing the possibility of attacks from highwaymen.* In May 1742 an infamous highwayman called Mansell Sansbury who worked the roads near Banbury was finally arrested with an accomplice after stealing from a London to Birmingham stage coach and later being found passed-out drunk in a field. Highwayman was only Sansbury's 'part-time job', as most of the time he worked as a grocer in Banbury.

By 1783 thirty coaches were leaving for London from Birmingham each week, and were run by inn keepers as well as indepenent companies. One London to Birmingham route went via Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon and this was the route that William Hutton travelled in 1784, and subsequently wrote about a year later (though the book relates more to his stay in London than the journey which is a shame). On the route from London, you would travel all night, take breakfast and change horses in Oxford, and then dine in the evening at Stratford before moving on to Birmingham.* Later, in the 1820s, when this journey would only take one day, the stay in Stratford was limited to only a few minutes.* The journey became much quicker, and safer, into the beginning of the nineteenth century, due to some improvements to the roads. Between the 1820s and 1840s was the peak of coach travel; more coaches were leaving and arriving in towns like Birmingham than ever before, and, after the coming of the railways, ever would again.

The railway arrived to compete with stage coach travel from the late 1830s and slowly ate into the trade of coaches, the travel was faster, more comfortable, and it was even declared that it had medical benefits:

'With respect to the comparative advantages, in point of healthful exercise, between riding on the railroad and on the ordinary roads, there can be but one opinion, the oscillatory motion of the Railway carriage being much more salutary than the swinging, jolting motion of the stage coach. Dr. Johnson, a medical man of long experience [...] says, "The former equalises the circulation, promotes digestion, tranquilises the nerves, and often causes sound sleep during the succeeding night; the exercise of this kind of travelling being unaccompanied by that lassitude aching, and fatigue which, in weakly constitutions, is the invariable accompaniment of the ordinary coach travelling, and which so frequently in such constitutions produces sleepless nights"'.*

The 'Tally-Ho' London - Birmingham Stage Coach Passing Whittington
College, Highgate. 1836 by James Pollard

Take a stage coach to London past by visiting this great post on Regency London here. On the English Historical Fiction Authors blog. 

NOTES
* References on request
The Cock and the Redd Lyon in Digbeth, The Talbot and The Dogg in Spiceal St, The Dolphin in Corn Cheaping, The Horseshoe in St. Martins Lane, The Swan in High Street , The Garland and the Starr in High Town, The White Hart , Fleur- de- Lis in Moor St, The Angel and Hen and Chickens in High St.

Tour of Lost Birmingham Nᵒ.2: Georgian Post Office (New Street)




The Post Office (right) and other shops on New Street in 1824.
By Samuel Lines Senior

It is easy to forget in this information age, when you can communicate with the other side of the planet within seconds, that the only way to be in contact with those outside of the town in the Georgian era was either to go and visit them or through the post office. The post office was very much the hub of communication in the Georgian town; it was where information was transmitted, not only through letters, but the post office was where you could find news of distant wars and current events, when newspapers were a luxury to many. The buildings life and history was discussed in a column of the Birmingham Daily Post in the 1860s; it was a nostalgic look back, and also, an attempt to comprehend the rapid change that was happening at the time. This post narrates the memories from those articles as well as other sources to understand what was being recorded in the drawing above by those who could actually remember.

For many wealthier visitors to the town, the post office would be their point of arrival, if they had taken the mail coach at least, alighting in the yard behind and walking out into New Street. In front of them would be the Theatre Royal and Portugal House, behind them appearing from behind the trees would be the Baroque tower of St. Philip’s, three of the finest buildings of the town, and this would be their first impression. The post office building itself had either been built or appropriated in about 1784 and was a simple unassuming Georgian house covered with rough stucco and whitewashed. The door to the office was on the right, with a small window for posting letters out of hours that was lit at night by an oil lamp and space for only about six people inside.* In the drawing the step outside has become worn from its service to many feet. To the right was a small outbuilding with a window where the notices would be placed, it was here where news of the Battle of Waterloo was posted.* The house of the postmaster, John Gottwaltz, was entered by a separate door surrounded by elegant Classical porch.

If you turned right out of the coach yard, passing the post office on your right, you would follow the wall of the Gottwaltz garden for a bit, with trees bowing over the top, and then find premises hiring out post horses and hackney coaches. Post horses were not just for the fast delivery of mail, but could be hired for carriages; often someone with their own carriage would start out with their own horses, but for long journeys the horses would need to be rested and then returned home, and the traveller could hire the post horses to the next town, and so on till their destination was reached. Hackney coaches were rented four wheeled vehicles, with or without a coachman, but were thought of socially as an inferior mode of transport to the mail coaches which delivered the post. The mail coach was usually how someone with means but who could not afford their own carriage would arrive in a town from afar.

The first mail coach to deliver and collect from Birmingham was in 1812 (though mail coaches began in 1784), it would have delivered to the local inns and clattered up Georgian New Street through the post office gates. The coaches all looked the same; large red wheels with maroon on the lower body and the doors and a black upper body. Each door was painted with the royal arms as well as the words Royal Mail, and on the side of the drivers carriage the letters GR were intertwined for George Regina. The panels on either side of the doors were painted with stars of the principal orders of the knighthood; the garter, bath, thistle and St. Patrick, and painted on the rear was the coaches individual number.* Each coach carried a driver and an armed guard both wearing smart red uniforms but with different coloured collars so that they could be distinguished from each other. The guard was responsible for locking the mail in a box at the rear of the coach. Sometimes the guard would hand over his watch to the postmaster to be checked and repaired to maintain the good time keeping of the coaches.

~A Georgian mail coach (produced circa 1870); the heads from this scrap have been lost.~

In about 1820 a brand new street, Bennett’s Hill, cut down onto New Street straight past the post office, which was at that time extensively altered. Bennett’s Hill sat where the yard and its gates had sat, and no more mail coaches disembarked at the post office; mail and visitors instead arriving at one of the towns several inns and hotels. This post office was run by John Gottwaltz’s unmarried daughter, Georgina Margaret, who had taken over when her father died in 1817, and who moved with the post office as it transferred over the street to the converted Portugal House in 1842. The old building was taken down shortly afterwards.

NOTES
*From Kirsten Olsen, All Things Austen (Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing, 2008).
Images courtesy of Birmingham Library and Archive Services.
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