Omnibuses and cabs

by Henry Charles Moore

A few months after the Restoration hackney-coaches were forbidden, by a proclamation dated October 18, 1660, to ply for hire in the streets. But that this edict was evaded we have the authority of the delightful Samuel Pepys. Writing under the date of November 7 he states:—

“Notwithstanding that this was the first day of the king’s proclamation against hackney coaches coming into the streets to stand to be hired, yet I got one to carry me home.”

In 1661 they numbered four hundred. They were small, narrow vehicles, drawn by two horses, on one of which sat the driver, wearing spurs and carrying a short whip. It was found, however, that they were very destructive to the paving-stones, and a tax of £5 a year was therefore placed on all hackney-coaches, the money thus obtained being expended on the repairing and cleansing of the roads.

During the Plague infected persons were frequently conveyed to the Pest-houses in hackney-coaches. Defoe mentions this in his “Journal of the Plague Year.” In the “Orders conceived and published by the Lord Mayor and Alderman of the City of London, concerning the infection of the plague, 1665,” appears the following order:—“That care be taken of hackney-coachmen, that they may not (as some of them have been observed to do), after carrying of infected persons to the Pest-house, and other places, be admitted to common use, till their coaches be well aired, and have stood unemployed by the space of five or six days after such service.”

HACKNEY-COACH. ABOUT 1680.

After the Great Fire, when the streets were widened, more commodious vehicles came into use, the majority being disused family coaches which had been sold cheaply by the nobility and gentry. Their coats of arms were not removed from the panels, and such coaches as bore the heraldic devices of the most aristocratic houses invariably received the greatest patronage. In 1694 some masked women hired a coach decorated with a well-known coat of arms, and went for a drive in Hyde Park. It is recorded that their behaviour was disgraceful, and that they deliberately insulted some very distinguished people who were riding in their private coaches. What they said or did will never be known, but from that day hackney-coaches were prohibited from entering Hyde Park. In the same year a tax of £4 per annum was placed on hackney-coaches, and the cost of a licence became £50. The licence held good for twenty-one years. The same Act of Parliament ordained that the number of hackney-coaches should not exceed seven hundred.

In the early part of the following year William Congreve, the poet, was appointed a Commissioner for Licensing Hackney-Coaches, at the moderate salary of £100 a year, and retained the position until October, 1707. Possibly the Hackney-Coach Licence Office was not loved by Congreve, and when he left it each day he banished all thought of it until the morrow. The idea of writing anything about it, in all probability never occurred to him. “Who would be interested in hearing anything concerning that dull, wearisome office?” he might have asked had any one made the suggestion, and possibly very few people of that day would have troubled to read anything on the subject. But to us an account of his duties, with some description of the hackney-coach proprietors and drivers with whom he came into contact daily, would be of more than ordinary interest.

Early in the eighteenth century several thieves, not sufficiently daring to attack stage-coaches, cut through the backs of hackney-coaches, snatched off the passengers’ wigs and decamped with them.

In 1711 Parliament once more altered the regulations concerning hackney-coaches. The annual tax of £4 was changed to a weekly one of five shillings, and the number of licences was increased to eight hundred. The fares which the hackney-coachmen were authorised to charge were fixed at a shilling for one mile and a half, eighteenpence for two miles, and sixpence for every additional mile or portion of a mile.