The Slower Road

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!

The CAA just received a wonderful donation of books from a member in Canada, and I admit that I (and several others) spent a good hour or so looking through the boxes when they arrived earlier this week.

One of the books is from a series called The Sports Library. This particular one: Riding, Driving, and Kindred Sports by T. F. Dale.

The book was published in London in 1899, and the Introduction says, “In preparing the Sports Library for the younger generation of sportsmen, the Publisher and the Editor had the following ideas in view:

“They intended that the books should be written by sportsmen of the younger generation in thorough sympathy with the needs of younger athletes and twentieth-century ideas. They hoped where necessary and practicable to deal with the cost of each sport, and also to show the public that many sports which are considered beyond the means of the ordinary man, are quite within the reach of all who are really interested. … Last, but not least, it was intended that the series should be a kind of cheap Badminton Library to the thousands of sportsmen who cannot command the price of that series.

“It is natural, perhaps, that the book on Riding, Driving, Hunting, &c., should come first. In no country is the interest in horses more widely felt than in England; it extends from the coster who drives his Russian pony to the Derby, and the City clerk on his hired hack enjoying Saturday afternoon, to the Earl of Lonsdale and the Duke of Westminster. It is anticipated that the motor cars and bicycles will so reduce the price of horses that the splendid exercise of riding will come within the reach of many who have hitherto regarded it as prohibitive.

“Mr. Dale needs no introduction to lovers of horse-flesh. Land and Water, the Field, and the Badminton Magazine have published his articles for many years, while he is well known as the author of Polo, editor of the book on Polo in the Badminton Library, “The History of the Belvoir Hunt,” &c., &c. Mr. Dale is, perhaps, the greatest authority on Polo in the United Kingdom; while in hunting and racing there are few other men who have seen so much sport at such a small expenditure of cash.

“The second volume of the Sports Library is a thoroughly up-to-date work on Football — Association and Rugby — Hockey and Lacrosse. …

“The Editor hopes to include in the third volume of this Library treatises on boxing, fencing, gymnastics, wrestling, and physical culture — each sport to be described by well-known men. Volume IV will include running, athletics, swimming, and water polo. … It is hoped that its readers, the younger generation of sportsmen, will show their appreciation of these efforts by encouraging the Publisher and Editor to produce a library of ten volumes covering every known sport.”

Mr. Dale may have been an expert on polo, but his book includes chapters on horsemanship, riding to hounds, ladies on horseback, polo (naturally), sport and health, dress and equipment, driving, tandem driving, four-in-hand driving, hog hunting, racing, and more.

Starting tomorrow, and continuing for several Saturdays, we’ll take a look at his amusing chapter on tandem driving. Stay tuned!