Omnibuses and cabs

by Henry Charles Moore

“I did it out of kindness, constable. The lady has got the hiccoughs, and I wanted to give her a start.”

To be accused of having the hiccoughs seemed to annoy the woman in the corner far more than the charge of theft did, and she appealed, excitedly, to the male passenger to say whether or not she had the hiccoughs. He answered boldly that there was not the slightest ground for such an accusation.

“But she was going to have them,” the woman by the door declared, an assertion which so astonished the policeman that he felt prompt action was imperative.

“Out you come,” he said sharply, and assisted her to make her exit with alacrity.

At times the eccentricity of some passengers takes very objectionable forms. Quite recently a well-dressed little woman jumped into an omnibus in Fleet Street, pulled a man out of his seat and sat in it herself, poked her umbrella into another man’s eye, swore horribly at everybody present for about half a minute, then suddenly got up, jumped out without paying, and disappeared down a side street. The man whose eye was injured had to hurry to Charing Cross Hospital.

On another occasion a sane-looking man, sitting on top of an omnibus, suddenly started throwing pennies at the silk hats of passers-by and spitting contemptuously at female pedestrians. Before his fellow-passengers had made up their minds whether to pitch him off the omnibus or give him into custody, he walked quietly down the steps and alighted.

Many passengers leave strange things in omnibuses, but I have heard of only one man who went away without his clothes. A conductor looking round his omnibus at the end of his day’s work, kicked against a heap of clothes lying on the roof. While examining the articles by the light of his lamp he heard a noise above him, and, looking up, beheld a man, stark naked, climbing into the loft. The poor fellow had gone mad.

But of all the eccentric characters known to ’busmen, the most harmless and the most amusing is the respectable-looking little man with a black beard who runs in front of omnibuses, excitedly waving a long stick above his head. He is about forty years of age, dressed generally in black clothes, and sometimes carries a pair of gloves in his hand. He singles out an omnibus, gives a friendly shout to the coachman, darts in front of the horses, and leads the way through the streets, coming occasionally to the side of the omnibus to give passengers an opportunity to throw money to him. He delights in long runs and usually sticks to the omnibus he takes up with until it reaches the end of its journey. He has been known to run with an omnibus from Queen’s Road, Bayswater, through the city, to Burdett Road, E., and then to run back with another.

An eccentric person, well known to ’busmen in one part of London, is a gentleman who stands, almost every night, at certain corners where omnibuses stop and gives a searching look at each one as it comes up. When he started that practice, ten or fifteen years ago, the ’busmen thought that he was some omnibus official, but they soon discovered that he was not. Who or what he has been looking for all these years neither ’busmen, policemen, nor any one else, know. Sometimes conductors say to him, “Coming our way, sir?” Whereupon he answers sharply, “Take your departure.” Usually he allows about a hundred omnibuses to pass before he enters one, but sometimes he lets the last go by and then walks home.

Omnibus conductors are, on the whole, a very respectable and intelligent class of men, and this is scarcely to be wondered at, for their pay, after one year’s service, is six shillings a day. These wages cause hundreds of clerks and shopmen to resign their positions and become conductors. Many men who have been in business for themselves, but failed to earn a good living, are to be seen wearing the conductor’s badge and punch. The army, it is pleasing to be able to say, is very well represented—largely by ex-noncommissioned officers. They do not wear their medals on their waistcoats, because they know that to be the practice of old soldiers in straitened circumstances, and also, alas! of rascally impostors who have never worn the Queen’s uniform. If the conductors had uniforms, as the tram-men have, they would wear their medals.