⇩ Cobb & Co coach at Scarborough, NSW
(Photo: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney) ⇧
See also the preceding post The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co – Part I
By the 1880s Cobb & Co’s coach lines had become so successful in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland that most of its competitors had been either relegated to the ranks of commercial obscurity, gone out of business altogether or been swallowed up by the ubiquitous, dominant transport market leader (or all three!)
Overreach and eventual decline
Cobb & Co’s foray in new areas of enterprise led it, and specifically company boss James Rutherford, into more and more diverse fields – everything from gold and copper mines to horse-breeding to newspapers. The inevitable downside of over-diversification was diminishing success…moreover the failures were often the result of bad and even disastrous investments (a Lithgow iron ore mine, a 1880s railway construction project connecting Glen Innes and Tenterfield)💮and in this the blame lay squarely with Rutherford. Rutherford as GM had some glaring shortcomings – he was often impetuous in business when he should have been measured, and made important (and increasingly unwise) decisions without consulting his partners [Kathy Riley), Australian Geographic, 18-Oct-2011, www.australian geographic.com.au].
⇩ A fully loaded six-horse Cobb & Co coach
(Photo: www.visityuleba.com.au) ⇧
Other factors contributing to Cobb & Co’s downfall
In addition to the instability of taking on too much concurrently, the company was a victim of misfortune and circumstance. The 1890s was a decade that brought drought and a depression to the colonies. The drought hit Cobb & Co like a sledgehammer – the cost of feed for their thousands of horses sky-rocketed! During just the four years from 1898-1902, the cost was £70,000, which was nearly half of Cobb & Co’s total revenue. Compounding this was further devastation arising from the drought – losses of livestock, plummeting of the values of company’s properties [ibid.].
⇧ Vic Museums (Photo credit: https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/1256058)
Eclipsed by the advance of rail transport
The introduction of commercial railways in the inland regions of Australia from the 1870s was a forewarning that the demise of coach transport was on the horizon. Cobb & Co in Victoria and NSW survived the new competition from the railroad for a time – in part because the coach line adopted the strategy of providing a complimentary service to it (joining the dots between the rail routes)✪. It also pushed its operations further westwards into NSW to service new localities and communities beyond the rail terminus [‘Coaching days in NSW’, (Cobb & Co in NSW), http://www.orange.nsw.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Cobb-Co-Resource.pdf].
Ultimately though Cobb & Co was simply delaying the inevitable in the two southern colonies…Victoria ceased its company operations in 1890. The NSW operations’ decline led to its Bathurst and Bourke factories closing down not long after…all later coach-making was done through the Charleville Coach Plant in Queensland. By 1897 all the NSW lines ceased except those in the Bourke area [ibid.]. In 1902 Cobb & Co experienced a net loss of over £18,000 and owed considerably more than that to bankers and creditors [Riley, op.cit.]. Liquidation of the company soon followed. The following year the company was reformed but this wasn’t able to revive its flagging fortunes.
⇧ Cobb & Co Charleville coachworks (Qld) (Photo: www.qhatlas.com.au/)
Queensland, the last outpost for Cobb & Co coaches
Only “vast and untrammelled” Queensland held out against the railways’ dominance, maintaining “a solid demand for coaching” beyond Federation and into the new century, with routes in the colony peaking at more than 7000km in 1900. Queensland Cobb & Co lines lingered on, gradually losing business to the railways, their routes shrivelling up bit by bit. The advent of motor vehicles, while still at a rudimentary stage, foreshadowed that horse coaches were dinosaurs as a long-term prospect. Cobb & Co itself dabbled in automobiles and in store-keeping, but these ventures brought it no success [ibid.].
Air mail anyone?
The embryonic development of commercial air travel was another sign of the imminent end of the road for Cobb & Co. In 1922 QANTAS (Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services) launched its inaugural air mail and passenger flying service (based in central west Queensland). Cobb & Co made its final trip in 1924 on the Yuleba to Surat (Qld) route. Thus the curtain was drawn for good on what had been Australia’s first ever privately-owned public transport system [ibid; Simpson, loc.cit.].
Endnote: A television series rip-off
In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a fictionalised TV take on the Cobb & Co story…made in Australia by ITV Britain♚. A fairly unexceptional piece of television adventure and light on historical accuracy, Whiplash was marketed in Australia and the US as “an Australianised Western”, it starred the serviceable American TV actor Peter Graves as the fictional “Chris(sic) Cobb”. Some of the episodes were written by the future creator of Star Trek Gene Roddenberry [‘Whiplash’, Classic Australian Television, www.classicaustraliantv.com].
⇧ ‘Whiplash’: Peter Graves in a scene (Photo: www.nostalgiacentral.com)
⇩ Artransa Studios, French’s Forest (Photo: www.abctvgorehill.com.au)
PostScript: The Cobb & Co Museum
Fittingly, given that Queensland was the state that maintained the Cobb & Co tradition the longest, it has a museum dedicated to the memory of the Cobb & Co pioneers. Located in country Toowoomba, the museum houses historic Cobb & Co coaches as part of an extended collection of horse-drawn vehicles – the ‘National Carriage Collection’.(Source: www.queensland.com)
⥰⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽⥰
💮 which left Cobb and Co a very sizeable £130,000 in debt
♚ filmed on location at Scone, NSW, and at Artransa Park Studios in French’s Forest, (northern Sydney) which then contained a suitably bushy backdrop
✪ this contrasted markedly with the fate of coach transport in England – where the introduction of railways, occurring from the 1830s, killed off the coaches in quick time [‘Cobb and Co coach’, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, (Margaret Simpson, Curator, Transport), 12-Jun-2013, http://maas.museum]
💠 💠 💠
Freeman Cobb ⇑ (Photo: www.geni.com)
The Concord coaches were fitted with leather braces and straps in place of the inflexible iron ones used on other horse-drawn vehicles which had a tendency to snap too easily (leather also provided greatly superior suspension for the carriage). Concord coaches were made to last the rugged journey and so contributed to a reputation for reliability that the Cobb service was able to establish [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.].
Many of the drivers, some of which Cobb and (later) Rutherford recruited from the US, were colourful characters in addition to being accomplished horse handlers…blokes such as Dick Houston, Jim Conroy, ‘Silent’ Bob Bates, H Barnes, and not least “Cabbage Tree” Ned Devine. Devine, with his team of distinctive light grey horses, was by all accounts a particularly exceptional driver (earning himself a very good wage of £17 a week)…when the first English cricket team toured Australia (HH Stephenson’s, 1862), Devine was their driver on the Victorian leg of the tour [K. A. Austin, ‘Devine, Edward (Ned) (1833–1908)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/devine-edward-ned-3405/text5169, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 31 May 2019]. 
(Photo source: State Library of Victoria)