Manchester, less than half the way to Glasgow, was in later years very abundantly supplied with coaches from London; but London and Manchester were not in direct communication by coach until 1754; and had London been left to establish a line of coaches to Manchester, the date would no doubt have been much later. Indeed, it is to be noted that, almost without exception, the earlier coaches between London and the provinces were established by provincials seeking to reach London. The metropolis was always magnificently indifferent; but when the provincial manufacturing towns began to arise, the manufacturers, seeking business with that greatest of markets, and finding nothing for it but to ride horseback to and from London, speedily set up coach services. Thus it was that the first coach ever to run between Manchester and London was established by an association of Manchester men. This was the “Flying Coach” of 1754, which was announced with the statement that “However incredible it may appear, this coach will actually (barring accidents) arrive in London in four days and a half after leaving Manchester.”
Really and truly! as the children say. Here we smile; but those eighteenth-century projectors manifestly took things very seriously, as they had every reason to do; and doubtless considered the establishment of this flier a wonderful achievement.
Six years later, in 1760, Messrs. Handforth, Howe, Glanville & Richardson’s coach is found performing the journey in three days “or thereabouts”; and in 1770 the “London Flying Machine,” by Samuel Tennant, began to wing its way every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in summer, in two days, from the “Royal Oak,” Market Street. It set out in summer at the shocking hour of one o’clock in the morning, but conceded 4 a.m. in the winter months; when, however, it required another whole day for the journey.
The earlier coaches seem to have been discontinued, for Tennant’s “Flying Machine” was in 1770 the only one between London and Manchester; but for the less moneyed and more leisured classes whose time was of small value, and expedition was therefore of little moment, there were Matthew Pickford’s stage-waggons (“Flying Waggons” he called them), which, generally at a penny a mile, conveyed passengers and goods between London and Manchester in four and a half days. They went from the “Swan,” Market Street Lane, on Wednesdays and Saturdays; but had several rivals: notably Bass’s waggons, on Fridays, from the “Fountain”; Cooper’s, from the “Star,” Deansgate, on Wednesdays and Saturdays; Hulse’s, from the “Windmill,” on the same days; Washington’s, from the “Pack Horse,” Mill Street Lane, Tuesdays; and Wood’s, from the “Coach and Horses,” Deansgate, Wednesdays and Saturdays.