The Slower Road

Last Saturday, we started with a “reading” of the chapter on tandem driving in the first volume of  The Sports Library (by Mr. T. F. Dale), published in 1899. You can read part of the book’s introduction (and the introduction to our look back at this nineteenth-century book) here.

Today, we have the second part:

… But it may be gathered that during the three years I drove up and down the frontier, I learned something of tandem-driving from a practical point of view.

For example, I learned that breast harness is not nearly so good as collars on rough roads, and that horses that will draw well in a collar will hang back and sometimes take to jibbing altogether in breast harness. In very rough and stiff ground where I wanted all the draft power I could get, I used to unhook the leader’s traces from the usual place and put them on to rings put for that purpose at the end of the shafts. This gave a more direct pull on the load, and certainly made more effectual use of the horse power.

As a rule, however, I drove with the ordinary long traces. This works well enough with a fairly good or willing horse, but with an awkward leader they add greatly to the difficulties of driving, for if the leader hangs back obstinately the wheeler may get its leg over the traces. Of course, when driving fresh-caught Indian country-breds of various sorts, an awkward leader was not uncommon, and many very good travelers were a bit nasty at starting, especially until they got used to it. I may say truly that I have had my leader in every possible and impossible position in relation to the cart. I have had him riding on the step, of course, but that is a commonplace of tandem-driving. I have had him with his head under the shafts behind the wheeler’s tail. I have had him on his back under the cart. I have had him rolled up into a kind of tangle so that he had to be cut out of his harness. But I always got to my journey’s end.

Yet much of my trouble might have been saved me if I had begun as I ended, by driving with bars. To my mind these have simplified tandem-driving immensely, have reduced the danger, if there ever was any, and added greatly to the pleasure. With long traces a certain space was always required to turn in, but with bars a tandem can easily be turned in its own length, and the leader is much more easily put to or detached. …

We’ll continue with Mr. Dale’s tandem-driving tales next Saturday!

In case you’re wondering about our Mr. T. F. Dale, here’s a photo of him:

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from Riding, Driving, and Kindred Sports, Volume 1 in The Sports Library (1899)

Today we begin with the first part of Mr. Dale’s chapter on tandem driving, published in 1899:

The tandem is the poor man’s team, and is somewhat neglected by many who might obtain a great deal of amusement from it. But driving tandem is not only an amusement, for it is an excellent and economical method of traversing bad roads for long distances. On this point I may claim to speak with some certainty, having driven a tandem for something like eighteen hundred to two thousand miles in a year, for three consecutive years, over some of the worst roads on our Indian frontier. In fact, for the whole of the cold weather and a considerable portion of the hot season too, I was always driving. It is needless to say that this was excellent practice. In fact it is in my opinion impossible to learn to drive well until you have had some experience of driving journeys.

In the old days, the coaching books tell us, those who had a taste for coaching, qualified in the art by driving the stage-coaches, and no doubt this was an incomparable school for coachmen. Roads of all sorts, horses of all kinds and seldom of the best, with loads of varying weight, and time to keep, taught them to be thorough coachmen, judges of pace, strong with a weak team, and gentle with a strong one, so as to get the most work with the least expenditure of the horses’ strength.

When in 1881 I was appointed to the frontier, I found that part of my duties would consist in driving from one end of the frontier to the other, from Bannu to Rajanpore. My immediate predecessor had done the journey on a camel, but I have no taste for camel riding. The ordinary riding-camel is dull work, and the trotting-camels from Bhowalpur are expensive, and carry little or nothing besides the rider. The journey might be ridden on horseback, but there was the question of baggage. Why not drive tandem? “Oh,” said everybody, “that is impossible. The roads are so bad, no cart would stand them, and you would not get twenty miles.”

I am afraid I am not very good at taking advice, and experience has told me that not one man in a hundred knows anything about a road over which he may have traveled often enough. So I took my own course, bought four ponies, and had a bamboo cart built for me. I had the seat placed rather high and on it a box, literally a box—which I found most useful, for it carried my books and pipes—from which to drive. The net underneath carried the baggage, and the whole was drawn by two ponies tandem fashion. The road was rough and in places very heavy, but it was nowhere impracticable, and I drove over the whole of it for three years without a serious accident. The low center of gravity of a bamboo cart makes the danger of upsetting small…

We’ll continue with Mr. Dale’s tandem-driving tales next Saturday!