At three o’clock on a cold, frosty February morning in 1834, his father put him on an express stagecoach bound for Rugby. Thomas had an outside seat next to the guard who looked after him during the journey.
Judge Thomas Hughes, who wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays, presided over County Courts in South Cheshire. The book is an autobiographical novel about his early life.
His father sent him to Rugby School when he was eleven. In the book, he describes his first journey to school.
At three o’clock on a February morning in 1834, his father put him on an express stagecoach bound for Rugby. Thomas had an outside seat next to the guard who looked after him during the journey. It was a bitterly cold and frosty morning. He was given a glass of hot beer and rum to keep out the cold. Yet, he was still half-frozen when the coach stopped for breakfast at a coaching inn.
“Twenty minutes here, gentlemen,” says the coachman as they pull up at half past seven at the inn door.
Have we not endured nobly this morning, and is not this a worthy reward for much endurance? We enter a low, dark, wainscoted room whose walls are hung with sporting prints. A hatstand is by the door, with a whip or two in it. They belong to commercial travellers who are still snug in bed. The room has a blazing fire, casting a warm and inviting glow. There is quaint old glass over the mantelpiece… The table is covered with the whitest of cloths and china dishes full of food. There is a pigeon pie, a ham, cold beef cut from a mammoth ox and a large loaf of bread. The stout head waiter comes, puffing under a tray of hot viands. On the tray are kidneys, roast beef, rashers of bacon, poached eggs, buttered toast, muffins, tea and coffee. The table can never hold it all. The cold meats are taken off the table and put on the sideboard. They were there for show and to give us an appetite. And now fall on gentlemen all.
“Tea or coffee sir?” says the head waiter coming round to Tom.
“Coffee, please,” says Tom, with his mouth full of muffins and kidneys. Coffee is a treat to him; tea is not.
Our coachman has breakfast with us. He eats cold beef and drinks a tankard of ale brought to him by the barmaid.
For breakfast, Tom had kidney and pigeon pie. He drank coffee, and his little skin became ‘as tight as a drum.’ After breakfast, he paid the head waiter and boarded the stagecoach to continue his journey.
Edited by The History Factory (2024)
North Staffordshire Heritage 