THE KING’S HIGHWAY

Greymouth Evening Star, 14 September 1934, Page 10

THE KING’S HIGHWAY

ROMANCE OF TRANSPORT. In 1834 Robert Peel was found at a ’bull in Romo and told that he had been appointed Prime Minister. He posted back to England as fast as horses could carry him. The journey occupied thirteen days, or just as long as the Romans hid taken eighteen hundred years before (writes Gerald Dillon, in the “Sydney Morping Herald”). Civilisation is primarily a matter of good roads, the history of road making and of transport generally is also bound up with the evolution of the wheel. Once man had conquered the technique-of wheel-making, nothing much could be done with vehicles until there were better and longer roads to run them on. And let us remember that it is only 95 years ago (1539) since the following .conversation took place between young Queen Victoria and old Lord Melbourne in regard to a popular vogue in transport which was then being superseded. The Queen records in her journal: —

Talyked of sedan chairs and being earned in one, which Lord M. said “is a very pleasant sensation.” He added: “My mother used always have her chair, and it was the usual mode of conveyance. But the town is grown too large for it now. . . . “The town,” by the way, was London. London—9s years ago—had grown “too large” for sedan chairs! The oldest paved road that can be traced was made about . 3700 B.C. by Cheops, the King who bjiilt the Great Pyramid. Three thousand years later, Carthage, the city founded by the Phoenicians, in Northern Africa, laid down the first proper system of good stone road. - . But the real history of road making begins with the Romans. Tho Roman Empire may be said to have been built on roads along which news could be posted swiftly or troops moved. There was one road that stretched from Scotland to beyond Jerusalem—about 4000 miles! On such roads important Roman officials could travel in their light carriages 100 miles a day. Indeed the Emperor Tiberius is said to have raced 200 miles in a day to see his brother, who was dying at Lyons! A record which the Prime Minister-elect of England (Feel) could not surpass only one hundred years ago!

ROADS LEFT DERELICT. The roads the Roman made, which are still amongst the finest evidences of Roman culture in Britain to be seen to this day. were made to last lor hundreds of years. When the Roihans left Britain in 440 A.D. they left, of necessity, their roads behind them. And tlie people in Britain did not do very much about them. They used. them, but ( hey had not concrete for repairing them. So the roads got worse and worse until, in the Middle Ages, they, were almost unusable. As a matter of fact (he people of England in the Middle Ages could not believe that the Roman roads in England could ever have been made by men like themselves. Indeed a legend grew up about the roads, which said: “Those,; ways were the work of a king descended from Brutus, and called ivfuimutius, who lived long before the birth of Christ. This Mulmutius, be-

ing a great sorcerer, performed that by the assistance of his art, and of devils, which it was impossible for meh to do. For that in a few days England was finished with highways of a beautiful and admirable structure, from one end to the other. ... to the amazement of all that beheld them. . However, it must b,e remembered that the Roman roads lasted as good roads in Britain for a considerable time.. When Harold beat his rebel brother and the Norsemen at Stamford Bridge in 10'66, and then learned that William of Normandy had landed an army in Kent, he marched his tired army all those two hundred miles, from York to London, in four days. This could never haye been done over bad roads. And those roads had then been there for 600 years! The Saxons did make an effort to maintain the roads, but as people had a habit then, if they wanted stone to "build a house with, of taking the material from the nearest Roman read —it can be realised that the roads persisted rather in spite of the people than because of them. While the Monastic influence was strong in England, this tendency was checked. The repair of roads and bridges was regarded as a pious duty, but when Henry VIII. closed the monasteries, there was no one left who would trouble to look after them. The wisest thing that Parliament could think of at that time was to pass a law allowing anyone who reached a bad piece of road to go round it—whether it meant trespass oh private land or not. Alary made every farmer provide labour for the roads for so many days each year; but by this time the ”oads had become so bad that, except for .short distances, hardly anything on wheels went t over them at all. Trees felled for -’shipbuilding often took several years to reach the coast. Stage waggons for the transport of goods which were supposed to run to a time-table always had the words: “If God permits. . .” printed on their schedules.

TURNPIKE ACT. The next advance was made by the first Turnpike Act in 1663. The Turnpike* Act ushered in an idea still maintained in principle on our Harbour Bridge to-day—that those who used the road, or bridge, should pay for it. In spite of this, the reacts remained bad. In the seventeenth century the people of London were, for practical purposes, farther from Reading than we are at this day in Sydney from London! Afid tire journey was far more dangerous! In those days a than setting out on a coach journey hade bis friends a real “good-bye!” hardly expecting to see them again. The state of the roads might leave a coach hopelessly “ditched." Highwaymen were real and earnest. With them it was a case of your money or your life”—and sometimes, quite possibly, both. But things gradually improved. In 1673 the 200-mile journey from London to lork took eight days, with 40 horses in relays. In 1761 they did it in three days, in summer. In 1774 in two days. In 1776 in 36 hours. In 1796 in 31 hours. Then 291 hours. 25 hours, and—just as the railways came, in 20 hours, an incredible speed for ’ those days—lo miles per hour! Indeed, the early trains reached the astonishing sped of 14 miles per hour!

Then Telford and McAdam, at the

beginning of the 19th century, ushered in a new era of road-making. We would still be using McAdam roads were it not for the invention of the motor car. Iron tyres improved a McAdam road by grinding fine powder off the stones, which the rain mixed to a paste strong enough to cement the surface together. But the rubber tyres of motor cars tend to suck up the loose stones, and in dry weather the speed of the car blows the useful dust away, weakening the surface. HIS MAJESTY'S MAILS. If you are travelling to Europe today via the Sqez Canal, you will notice that all shipping in the canal has to give way to the passage of His Majesty’s mail boats. This, indeed, perpetuates the tradition derived from the mail Coaches. There were no mail coaches in England until 1784, before that the mail was carried by post boys (often old men), whose speed was little more than three mileS per hour. With the advent of mail coaches things were “speeded up.” All traffic had to give way to the mail coaches, and all toll gates had to be ready opened to let them go through. Still, even the mail coaches were sometimes subjected to the depredations of footpads and highwaymen. And when a man named Palmer proposed to establish a proper service of mail coaches, built for speed, and running to a time-table, officialdom smiled because the speed proposed was eight miles per hour! However, Pitt listened, to Palmer and Palmer got the first mail contract. And in the first 25 years of the Palmer contract mails were carried for 70,000,000 miles—without a. single serious robbery!

In conclusion, one can hardly refrain from pointing out an interesting analogy between the railway and the earliest form of wheel transport. The standard gauge throughout the world is 4ft Sain —and that is precisely the same width as that between the ruts on tho prehistoric ridgeways. Thon carts had to have their wheels: the width of the ruts to get along at all; so, when the first colliery railways Were built, the first waggons to use them were of this gauge, and so the rails wore laid to fit them. Stevenson built his first locomotive for a colliery, and when he built others later he used the same gauge. So the Flying) Scotsman to-day loars over the same width of rails as separated the ruts along which our barbarian ancestors lumbered in their waggons—thousands of years ago. But we must not forget tliat they invented the wheel which, through its perfection, and various embellishments, makes a road like the Prince’s Highway a necessity to modern man.