Many transformations have taken place since the first hackney carriage plied for hire in 1615 and the advent of the first public motor cab at Hyde Park Corner in 1906. It was several months before the first handful of these were augmented by an addition of five hundred, with the pleasing joys of the taximeter.
The next novelty for getting about was the sedan-chair.
On the return of Prince Charles (aferwards Charles I.) from the Court of Spain, he brought four back with him, and gave one to the Duke of Buckingham, “his dear Steenie,” who was hooted when he appeared in it in the streets. The chairs were very unpopular, as the people objected to see men employed as beasts of burden. However, when it was understood that letting them on hire might prove profitable, they were at once adopted.
Oddly enough, the streets of the old Moorish town of Tangier to-day resemble London of the sixteenth century. That is to say, they are so narrow, so badly paved, so weird, that no vehicle can drive through them. Therefore anyone, who can afford a beast of any kind, rides. Only the very poorest are on foot, and there the sedan-chair still survives.
Going out to dinner in evening-dress on horseback is somewhat disarranging to a woman; therefore one is carried in this fashion. Well do I remember, in 1898, four terrible-looking Jews arriving in the hall of the hotel, and bidding me enter a chair. I did, and shaking and wobbling from side to side was borne out to a dinner-party. No Mohammedan would lower himself to carry a Christian, and Jews therefore perform the office—nice, cut-throat-looking villains they appear, too. The office of chairman is looked upon as infra dig., just as it was in London in the seventeenth century. There are only three or four sedan-chairs in Tangier, and consequently, on party-nights they are in much demand, and some of the guests arrive too early and some too late, for all the women have to be borne to their destination by such means.
A patent was granted to Sir Sanders Duncombe in 1634, extending over fourteen years, for letting sedan chairs out on hire, and the preamble states that it was for the purpose of lessening the danger of the streets which were so “encumbered and pestered” with the coaches of the day. Before the end of the century these chairs were looked upon as an absolute necessity. Ladies shopped in them, called on their friends, went to parties, to theatres—in fact, they were quite the fashion, and held their own for many years to come.
In the reign of James I. the nobility alone were allowed to drive four horses, so the Duke of Buckingham, ever ready to outdo everyone else in the matter of fashion and up-to-dateness, started a coach-and-six, but such was the extravagant rivalry of the age that the Duke of Northumberland shortly afterwards drove a coach-and-eight. It is said that in the neighbourhood of London in 1638 six thousand coaches were kept.
As coaches denoted exalted rank, everyone naturally wanted to drive one. But, alas! the twentieth century has sounded their knell. Those delightful meets held in the summer months at the Magazine in Hyde Park, when the Four-in-Hand and Coaching Club muster twenty or thirty coaches each time, drive round the Park, then off to Hurlingham or Ranelagh to lunch, are coming to an end. Motors are hustling coaches off the road, and already the two famous Polo Clubs outside London are instituting automobile races and shows, because the entries for the coaches have dwindled so terribly, while for the former they have gone up by bounds in a few years. Horses are already threatened.
From the time of their introduction, private coaches were richly caparisoned. Among the State papers there is a queer old record against May Day, 1637, of three accounts: