Crossword-Solution: JAGGERS 7 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 16

The idea was inspired by my brother's general admiration of the London messenger service and his particular belief in one William Thomas Jaggers, a fourteen-year-old lad whom Richard had frequently employed to carry notes and run errands.

One day, during a casual luncheon conversation at the Savoy with his friend Somers Somerset, Richard said that he believed that if Jaggers were asked to carry a message to New York that he could not only do it but would express no surprise at the commission.

The boy slipped quietly away from London, but a few days later the bet became public and the newspapers were filled with speculation as to whether Jaggers could beat the mails.

The newspapers not only printed long accounts of Jaggers's triumphal progress from New York to Chicago and back again, but used the success of his undertaking as a text for many editorials against the dilatory methods of our foreign-mail service.

Jaggers left London on March 11, 1899, and was back again on the 29th, having travelled nearly eighty-four hundred miles in eighteen days.