If one can imagine this kind of thing continuing hour after hour, while one’s bones ached with the cramp, and one was stupefied with the noise and smell, one gains some idea of the delights of waggon travelling.
The increase in driving led to great improvement in the roads. Even the “bagmen” of the country, whom we call commercial travellers, renounced their bags and adopted the gig, which was soon introduced into Hyde Park in a glorified form.
Toll-gates were instituted on every main road between towns to tax passers-by for the upkeep of the roads, and these increased tremendously in the early nineteenth century. So much so, that they led in 1843 to that strange series of riots, known as the “Rebecca Riots,” because the rioters took the scriptural words, “And they blessed Rebekah and said, ... let thy seed possess the gate of them which hate them,” as their motto. Men, dressed as women, attacked the gates.
These barriers were originally formed with a cross of two bars, armed at the end with pikes, turning on a pin, and fixed to prevent the passage of horses, hence their name. On many of the old highways throughout England a projecting house still shows where a turnpike gate stood, and over the door are the marks of the board on which the scale of charges was written. The twenty-seven London toll-bars were abolished in 1864, but it was not until 1889 that they disappeared in the country districts of England. What a blessing to motorists that they are gone.
Little more than half a century ago railroads drove the coaches off the highways. Only within the last decade or so the conditions of London street traffic have been entirely revolutionised. But what we take to be new is in a large measure old. The steam omnibus, which is quite the latest thing of to-day (1908), is really a direct descendant of the steam coaches introduced in the time of George IV. Many efforts were made to utilise steam motors between the years 1821 and 1833. The “Enterprise,” which ran from Paddington to the City in the latter year, was remarkably like the last type just placed on the streets. Most of these were private ventures, but in spite of a Select Committee being appointed, and their verdict being, on the whole, favourable, it has practically taken the entire nineteenth century to educate people up to this mode of transit.
Ten years after the Commission sat, other public steam carriages were attempted. One of them made the journey to Windsor, and was inspected by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who were highly pleased with it. The motor had attained a speed of eighteen to twenty miles an hour. But it was still before its day.
The horse-drawn omnibus is older than most people think. Soon it will have reached the eightieth anniversary of its advent. The first real London omnibus was run from the “Yorkshire Stingo” (near the present Great Central Hotel), Paddington, to the Bank in 1829, and was found so convenient that in two years ninety vehicles of the kind were in public service. At first the driver used to collect fares; but as competition increased, the drivers raced on their routes (as they do at the present day), and the conductors—or “cads,” as they were then called—practically fought to secure passengers, especially if the passenger was an unprotected female of the Early Victorian days. The “knife board” of the eighties, and the narrow, horizontal footrests which made the top of the ’bus an impossible altitude for women to attain, has become as extinct as the dodo, since garden seats and staircases to the top have popularised the vehicle for both sexes.
If I may be allowed a digression, may I say that, in 1900 and 1904, when I was in up-to-date New York, omnibuses of the oldest possible type, with seats behind the driver almost as difficult to climb as a chimney-stack from the street, were still running from Maddison Square up Fifth Avenue past Central Park. I well remember admiring the Dewey Arch at the top of Broadway, erected after the Admiral’s victories in the Philippines, and then being persuaded to see the charms of Central Park from the top of a ’bus—“if you have the pluck to climb up,” said my friend.
Pluck! Fancy anyone using such a word to an Englishwoman. Why, of course I had.
We waited. The ’bus came. There, at one of the busiest points of that busy city’s streets, the vehicle drew up. There was no stairway, no ladder even as to a coach. I simply had to clamber from axle to wheel, from wheel to small step below the driver, and—dragged and hauled by that kindly person—land somehow into a seat beside him,—then to step over that into a row of seats placed still higher behind the driver’s back. I had split my sleeve and made a pair of white kid gloves filthy in the process, but I was there! No wonder American women do not aspire to the tops of omnibuses, and no wonder that the bustling crowd stopped to look at a mad Englishwoman in her best frock attempting athletic feats. Even the fat Irish policeman, white bâton in hand, looked on and marvelled. Up-to-date as the Americans boast to be, it was curious to find such an obsolete old vehicle still doing duty in the heart of their metropolis. Many of the roads in important towns in America are to-day little better than those of London a century and a half ago.