The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance

A notable instance of the devotion to duty of a coachman and mail-guard, and one illustrating the dangers and hardships which Post-office servants of that class had to encounter, occurred in the winter of 1831. On Tuesday the 1st February of that year, James M'George, mail-guard, and John Goodfellow, coachman, set out from Dumfries for Edinburgh at seven o'clock in the morning, and after extraordinary exertions reached Moffat,--beyond which, however, they found it impossible to proceed with the coach, owing to the accumulation of snow. They then procured saddle-horses, and with these, accompanied by a postboy, they went on, intending to continue their journey in this way. They had not proceeded beyond Erickstane Hill, a rising ground in close proximity to the well-known natural enclosure called the Deil's Beef-Tub, when it became evident that the horses could not make the journey, and these were sent back in charge of the postboy to Moffat. The guard and coachman, unwilling to give in, continued their journey on foot, having in view to reach a roadside inn at Tweedshaws, some two or three miles farther on. The exact particulars of what thereafter happened will never be known, beyond this, that the mail-bags were afterwards found tied to one of the road-posts set up in like situations to mark the line of road on occasions of snowstorms, and that the two men perished in the drift. The last act performed by them, before being quite overcome by exhaustion and fatigue, was inspired by a sense of duty, their aim being to leave the bags where they would more readily be found by others, should they themselves not live to recover them. Shortly after this the two men appear to have succumbed; for their bodies were found five days afterwards within a hundred yards of the place where they left the bags, and where at the cost of their lives they had rendered their last service to the Post-office and their country.