When cars took over from the coach and horses

Littleham’s Reg Hill has just turned 100. In a series of articles he gives his memories of life in the village. David Beasley reports.

• DREAM job – Reg worked as a chauffeur for industrialist Mr Willie. Reg drove from the age of 18 to 80. He never took a driving test – but never had a driving conviction!

• REG’S pride and joy – his motorcycle with ladies on board. However, one day he recalls losing his future wife off the back seat on a trip to Exeter speedway!

• TIME for relaxation. Littleham Village bagatelle club was run at the Tythe Cottage. They played in the local bagatelle league – Reg is in the back row on the left.

GETTING around 100 years ago was a relatively simple matter because, for most, there was but a single option – walk.

When Littleham's 100-year-old Reg Hill was a boy, many of Great Britain's train lines hadn't been laid, the “engines” that powered coaches were of the four-legged variety and cars and bicycles were a burgeoning technology – out of reach to all but the most affluent.

"I didn't leave Littleham very often,” he recalls. “Everything we needed was in the village. At that time we had to walk everywhere. Once a year, we went to Exeter by horse-drawn coach to the pantomime, but this was a very special treat."

On the rare occasions Reg did venture into Exmouth, it was for a special reason and, if you were a horse lover like Reg, the place to go was Exmouth's Central Coachhouse and Stables, now Exmouth's indoor market.

"I used to spend hours there," says Reg. "I used to watch them look after the horses and repair the coaches. I used to look at the stable boys with envy, thinking ‘I would like to have done that’."

On his rare trips by coach, Reg used to jump out of the carriage on steep inclines, like Knowle Hill, to alleviate the strain on the horses.

"The horses used to get very tired. But the driver had to be quick and put wooden blocks under the wheels – or else the coach would roll back and cause a serious accident."

By 1920, horse-drawn coaches were starting to become obsolete, as more people demanded quicker, cheaper forms of travel – a horse-drawn coach took an hour-and-a-half to get to Exeter from Littleham.

The increased usage of the internal combustion engine forced old coachhouses to close and, in Exmouth's case, it was reinvented as Millers Garage. Among other things serviced there were the open-topped single-decker motorised-coaches that replaced them, called charabancs.

After Reg left school at 13, he worked for several year's on Munday's Farm, before landing a gardening job at Knappe Cross House, now part of Brixington.

During this time, he developed an interest in motor vehicles and he had ambitions to be a chauffeur.

However, after several years of polishing cars, checking tyres and batteries the nearest a disappointed Reg got to driving a car was sneaking a drive around the grounds to deliver either the Daimler, Buick or Bentley to the front door of the house.

"Polishing the cars was back breaking," he said. "If you didn't get it right, you had to start all over again."

However, Reg's luck changed and he soon landed a job as a driver for a well-to-do family, the Willies, who lived in an impressive house on Cyprus Road in Exmouth. But there was a snag.

"The problem was I couldn't drive. Driving around a country estate is one thing but, when there are horses and cars in the way, it was a bit different."

So a rather-worried Reg began to fear that his plum job wouldn't quite work out as expected unless he could convince his employers he could actually drive.

"One of the other chauffeurs, I think Rimmer was his name, offered to help me practise on Exmouth beach.

“Near where the coastguard hut is now used to be an old Great War tank just dumped in the middle of the beach.

"I drove in a figure of eight around the tank in an old Hillman and, after a few hours, I felt I got the hang of it and I was qualified enough to be a chauffeur."

However, Reg wasn't quite of the woods yet and, after driving members of the Willie family through Exton, he remembers a rather oldish lady banging on the partition window with her brolly, chastising Reg for being on the wrong side of the road.

"She shouted at me and basically said if I did it again I would be sacked. It was quite odd that someone who hadn't driven before knew what side of the road I should be on, seeing as there were no road markings and the lane was so narrow."

In fact, driving at all then was a perilous business. Cars, even in the 1920s, could travel up to 70 mph, even though Reg was advised against it. "The car used to shake badly and bits used to start falling off," he said.

Although you could drive for hours and not see another car, traffic wasn't the problem; there were a few rather vague roads signs, no traffic lights, no road markings and a lack of any kind of Highway Code.

"Driving at night in the rain was no joke. The windscreen wipers didn't work well so you had to drive with a window open with your right hand wiping the windscreen on the outside as you drove.

"I used to get soaked. The lights were pathetic. Paraffin lamps really didn't light up the road, so you had to drive very slowly. Driving through fog was almost impossible and dangerous."

Thankfully, this caution led to Reg, despite never having passed a driving test, having an impeccable driving record of no crashes in 50 years of driving.
One thing about being a chauffeur was that it was lonely. A drive to Aldershot or Wales used to take most of the day and, because of the soundproof partition in the car, the passengers never spoke to Reg.

"The only time they would speak to me would be when one of them opened a small door in the partition to bark orders at me."

However, to make up for it the Willies ensured that on long trips, Reg was thoroughly looked after.

"They used to keep several bottles of Bass ale in the car just for me. Unlike today, where you can't drink and drive, they used to encourage me to drink the beer, and I accepted eagerly and carried on driving."

Despite Reg's perfect record in cars, the same cannot be said of motorbikes, as he recalls when he and his future wife used to travel through Topsham on the way to Exeter Showground and the speedway:

"She just fell off the back of the bike. I really didn't notice until I got to Exeter and she was pretty cross. She must have been sitting in the road for some time. This sounds a terrible thing to say but we were eager to get the speedway to see some of the spectacular crashes and just didn't notice."