The COACHING TRADITION
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By
FRANCIS JONES
IT was in the news, recently, that a coachoperating concern had decided to name each of its vehicles after one of the more famous coaches of a century or more ago. To my possibly peculiar way of thinking, this announcement is not only about the most interesting that I have read for some time, but the most hopeful.
It indicates that coach owners are beginning to take stock of tradition and are, therefore, in a fair way to create a tradition of their own. Modern coaching has no deep tradition. It is too young, and, perhaps, even too indefinite for that. The coach , proper, which operates between, say, London and Manchester, has not yet distinguished itself sufficiently from the vehicle that takes beanfeasters to the sea, or from the slightly glorified bus.
All are classified under the general heading of public-service vehicles, and the finer distinctions have not emerged. There is inclined to be an impersonal attitude between drivers, conductors and passengers. Whilst making for efficiency this lacks a human touch which ought to better business.
Because there is nothing about coaching that is peculiar and typical, and because there is no wealth of old tradition, there is also an absence of romance. But all these things will come.
The coach of the pre-railway epoch had a tradition, and a tremendous one. It was enshrined in numberless stories of great drives and great drivers; of wonderful horses, of feats of horsemanship.
Those stories were told and retold in every inn along every road ; they produced a literature and even inspired an art. Of all that, ranch still remains; thd collection of coaching pictures is
The coach owners of to-day have a good chance of creating a tradition that is all their own
among the minor hobbies, and books are still being written about the coaching days. The old heroes are still remembered, and so are the old villains.
When coaching was at its height, this tradition, no doubt, operated powerfully in coaching interests. It not only made the driver a dignitary and even R celebrity, but it produced a sort of patriotism of the road, a loyalty that stood the coach owners in good stead. It was not enough to save them when "the calamity of railways" (as John London Macadam called it) descended upon the land, but it, no doubt, prolonged the coach's lease of life and eased its passing not a little. It was a valuable asset and it ought to be recovered by the coaching folk of the new generation. That is not merely possible; it is, indeed, almost inevitable. A modern coaching tradition must, in the nature of things, be bunt up in time, and the process can be quickened by a judicious step here and a wise move there.
The revival of the names of some of the classic coaches is exeellent ; on the other hand, any attempt to run a modern 'coach service in an atmosphere of sham antiquity would be doomed to failure. There must be no use of that ghastly phrase, "ye Olde," and, whatever our tradition is, it must be of our own century and not of the eighteenth.
Romance has come back to the roads. It may yet —will yet—return to the coach. There will be a glamour about coaching that is, at present,, still to seek—and with it, no doubt, some further profit to coach operators.
Inspiring an added public interest by the ,revival of the names of classic horsed coaches