Seeing the other day a set of very interesting old prints in the Granville Hotel, Waterford, of car travelling in the South of Ireland in the year 1856, I was reminded that Charles Bianconi, the owner of these coaches, started his first car from Clonmel to Cahir in 1815, and fifty years later was making an annual income of £35,000 from them.
Bianconi was an Italian, engaged in the picture frame and gilding trade in Clonmel and Waterford in 1802, and it was during his frequent travels between the two towns, carrying four stone weight of pictures on his back, that he saw the necessity of cheap travelling.
The set of pictures I saw began with the start of Bianconi's stage coach, Faugh-a-Ballagh, from Cummins's Hotel (now the Granville Hotel), Waterford, and finished with its arrival at Hearn's Hotel, Clonmel. In the courtyard at Hearn's Hotel there is still to be seen a clock with the wording:
Commercial Day
Car
Office 1832.
Bianconi started with the small "jaunting" car, increasing to the big lumbering four-wheeler coach. The light-going coaches were known as "Faugh-a-Ballagh" (clear the way), the next size the Massy-Dawsons, and the heaviest the Finn McCouls. The drivers of these coaches wore great Irish frieze ulsters, to defy the weather, and picturesque top hats, and were said to be all famous "characters."
Travelling by these coaches was only 2d. per mile, which was not as expensive as we now imagine. Bianconi's coaches superseded travelling by boat between Carrick-on-Suir and Waterford, but the railway, called in those days the "headless coaches," which started in 1853, was the doom of coaching, although the second class railway fare was as expensive as the coach.
The Irish Times, March 19th, 1939.