Turnpike roads, being then things “new-fangled” and unusual, were of course disapproved of by all that very numerous class who distrust any change. Doubtful of their own ability to hold their own in any order of things newer than that in which they have been brought up, _any_ change must to them be for the worse. The waggoners to a man were numbered in this class, and, apart from the tolls to be paid on the new roads, objected to them as new. An entertaining contributor to the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ in 1752 consulted “the most solemn waggoner” he could find between London and Bath. This was one “Jack Whipcord,” who, like every one else, preferred to go round by “a miserable waggon-track called ‘Ramsbury Narrow Way.’ Jack’s answer was, that roads had but one object--namely, waggon-driving; that he required but five feet width in a lane (which he resolved never to quit), and all the rest might go to the devil. That the gentry ought to stay at home and be damned, and not run gossipping up and down the country. No turnpikes, no improvements of roads for him. The Scripture for him was Jeremiah vi. 16.[E] Thus,” says the writer, “finding Jack an ill-natured brute and a profane country wag, I left him, dissatisfied.”
[E] “Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.”
We are not to suppose, from this imaginary “Jack Whipcord,” that waggoners were generally of a dour and unpleasant nature. Indeed, the consensus of opinion to be collected from old-world literature shows that, as a class, they were pleasant and light-hearted. M. Samuel de Sorbière, a distinguished Frenchman who visited England in 1663 and has left a very entertaining account of his travels, paints a charming little cameo portrait of the waggoner who was in charge of the six-horse stage-waggon by which he travelled from Dover to Gravesend. The horses were yoked one before the other, and beside them walked the waggoner, “clothed in black and appointed in all things like another Saint George. He had a brave mounteero on his head, and was a merry fellow, who fancied he made a figure and seemed mightily pleased with himself.” “Joey,” too, the waggoner already glimpsed in _Roderick Random_, was sprightly and light-hearted; and we have the evidence of that old English ballad, the “Jolly Waggoner,” that men of this trade were conventionally regarded as devil-me-care fellows, own brothers in disposition to sailors, always represented as jolly, even in the old days when rations were scanty and bad and rope’s endings plentiful. This jollity is insisted upon, even by the old wayside signs of the country inns. Now and again you may find the sign of the “Jolly Anglers,” while on the Portsmouth Road the “Jolly Drovers” is to be seen, and on the Exeter Road the “Jolly Farmer,” a creature vanished from this country and utterly unknown these forty years and more; but only the waggoners and the sailors are usually known by that adjective. Rarely, indeed, is the sailor described in any other way. In a few instances he may be “Valiant,” but ninety times in every hundred he is “Jolly.”