LAST week, we noted that Jane Austen, in 1799, had handed in a letter to the Star and Garter in the High Street. At that time, the post office was located within the inn itself, but only because the then postmistress was Jane Marcer, who also ran the hotel. A central collecting point for local mail existed long before that and we know that post roads and post towns, as they were called, had been maintained for the safe passage around the country of royal correspondence and official letters since the 16th century.

Because Andover was on one of the five great roads of England - the London to Plymouth route – it would have been among the post towns with its own postmaster from as far back as 1579, although it was not until 1635 that King Charles I allowed the public to make use of the mail service, and not until 1660 that Charles II created the GPO. Each postmaster was entrusted with passing on the mail to the next post town on the route; and to this effect he was expected to supply sufficient horses and to have them available as soon as the day’s post arrived.

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Over the next 100 years, the road system expanded so that all the market towns of England were inter-connected, with a post office in each. A General Post Office at Lombard Street in the capital, enabled letters to be sorted and then to be sent off again to every corner of the country. This was the job of the post boys, riding on horseback, literally going from ‘post to post’. At each posting point, the mail was handed to the next one in the chain, who would also hand over any letters going the other way. So, the Andover post boy, having collected letters arriving in the town from London, would ride to Salisbury, change horses at the local posting house (a term generally used for any inn that supplied fresh horses) and then take any mail going eastwards to London back to Andover. The posting house may have been in the same location as the post office but not necessarily. It was a continuous relay system for each rider, all working their own patch but also a hazardous one in winter, together with the possible danger of highwaymen.

Roads were nothing like what they are today and consisted of layers of stones, usually patched and repaired by local labour or the unemployed who were set to work by the relevant parish. During the 18th century, the system of turnpike roads evolved so that the rough and rutted tracks were taken over by a local Turnpike Trust that improved the road and then charged a toll for anyone using it. Each trust was financed by a committee of local trustees and each project required a petition to parliament in order for it to be sanctioned. Once completed, the new road was punctuated with manned toll houses at strategic junctions in order to collect the due tolls. Parliament set the maximum tolls to be charged, which were 1/- for a coach with four horses; 6d for a coach with two or three horses; 3d for one horse and waggon; and 1d for a ridden horse. There were several exceptions: pedestrians did not pay, nor did the royal family, volunteer troops going to muster and those going either to a Sunday service or to a funeral. One payment of toll allowed the traveller to go freely through all other toll gates that were part of the same trust for 24 hours. In Andover, the first turnpike road to run through the town was from Basingstoke to Lopcombe Corner (1755) from east to west, and then in 1766, the Hursley-Newbury road was turnpiked, a north to west route. Further linking stretches were constructed in 1774: one from from Bridge Street through Charlton, to Tangley and another from the Spittle (today’s Millennium Man junction) to Mullenspond, just east of Thruxton.

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All these improvements eased and increased the passage of coach traffic. Realising the potential, the first official mail coach ran between London and Bristol in 1784, an experiment suggested by John Palmer, a Bath ex-theatre manager, whose friend, William Pitt the Younger, was about to become prime minister. The new mail coach, guarded by a lookout with pistols and blunderbuss, was so successful that the practice spread quickly and a year or two later, a mail coach was calling at Andover six times a week, taking full advantage of the turnpike roads, while not having to pay any tolls. A post horn was employed to warn other road-users that the fast-travelling mail coach was approaching and was the signal to any resident toll-house keeper to get the gates open smartly.

The two earliest directories that exist with entries for Andover, the Hampshire Directory of 1784 and the Universal British Directory of 1792-98, show how things changed between the publication of each: the earlier one under the heading Post Days merely states that the mail comes into the town on Sunday, Wednesday and Fridays at about 6pm and sets off for London on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday about 3pm.

A number of carriages and waggons had regular routes to Exeter, Salisbury and Bath through Andover, from London. Frequency varied, according to the coach but some were every day, the stopping points being fixed for each at the various coaching inns in the town. None of these specifically handled the mail but they could do so. Eight years later (perhaps up to 12, according to when the information for Andover was gathered, as this directory took several years to compile), a mail coach arrived and left every day. It brought the incoming mail from London to the Star and Garter at 5am and returned from the West Country to take outgoing mail to London at 9.30pm –  not the self-same coach as they travelled at no more than eight miles per hour. The mail coach was faster than the commercial equivalents, which had to stop at its passengers’ convenience and to pay road tolls. Mail coaches could take passengers but this was restricted.

For the mail coach, as well as for the other coaches, each stopping point along the journey meant a change of horses at a posting house and this would have required a sufficient number of animals to be fed, watered, stabled and generally kept in good condition, in readiness to be harnessed, and sent on the next leg of any given journey north, south, east or west. No wonder the larger inns had substantial yards and outbuildings to the rear; in addition, coaching traffic provided employment for the resident stable-lads and ostlers, as well as business for the local corn and hay merchants, the saddlers, the farriers and the coach builders.

Today, despite the inevitable, urban encroachments of later periods, we can still see the remains of the stabling blocks in the yards of the Star and Garter, the White Hart, the George and the Black Swan. The latter inn has long gone but the south side of Black Swan Yard still largely comprises former stables. An archway between 19 and 21 Bridge Street leads to the remains of a long-redundant stable building, probably belonging to either the Bush or the Katherine Wheel, both inns that serviced coaches.

It all ended when the railways started. But this took some 20 years to complete from the beginning when the Liverpool-Manchester line carried mail in 1830. Andover’s first station was 12 miles away at Micheldever, opened in 1840, from where mail was sent and collected, still by horse-power. But as the railways proliferated all over the country, the old mail and commercial coaches faded into oblivion.

If you are interested in local history, why not join Andover History and Archaeology Society? Details can be found at andoverlocalhistoryarchaeology.uk