“Where, oh where, is the good old Doctor?
Where, oh where, is the good old Doctor?
He went up in the Three Wheel Chariot,
Safe into the Promised Land!”
A six-wheeled carriage was also proposed by Sir Sidney Smith. Here, as in Bridges Adams’s various equirotal carriages (never successful and particularly ugly, so far as the pictures of them are concerned), the wheels were all of equal size. Great things were promised of it, but that was all. The question, however, of safety carriages was being very widely considered. Accidents must have been all too frequent. Runaway horses and high gigs between them were constantly bringing the more reckless drivers to an untimely end. In 1825 a good proposal was made for a safety gig, which was to have a contrivance fixed to the shafts so that they should remain in a horizontal position, whether the horse were between them or not. Experiments were also made with some such contrivance as Sir Francis Delavel had first tried with his eighteenth-century phaeton. And then came a time when almost every coachbuilder had some “pet dodge” with which the dangers of travelling were supposed to be reduced to a minimum.
In Ireland, where at a very early date a rough, flat-boarded waggon on two solid wheels had been used for passenger-traffic—in which case the passengers sat on the boards back to back with their legs dangling over the sides—a peculiar vehicle called a noddy was now popular. A writer in Blackwood’s Magazine for 1826 speaks of this carriage.
“A chaise and pair, miserable in show and substance as both really were, was a species of luxurious conveyance to which the ambition of the middle class of travellers in Ireland before 1800 never ventured to aspire. Such as were content with a less dignified mode of travelling on wheels, the city of Dublin accommodated with a vehicle unparalleled, I believe, in any part of the world, and singular in name as well as construction. It was called a Noddy, drawn by one horse, and carrying two, or if not of overgrown dimensions, three passengers. The body of this ‘leathern convenience,’ which bore some resemblance to an old-fashioned phaeton, ‘beetled o’er its base’ in front, the better to protect the inmates; and being slung from cross-bars by strong braces instead of springs, nodded formidably at every movement of the horse, hence deriving the appropriate appellation of Noddy. In case of rain blowing in, a curtain of the same material afforded its friendly shelter, wrapping the passengers in total darkness, though, as far as the prospect was concerned, the inconvenience was little; the only visible object when it was withdrawn being the broad back and shoulders of the brawny driver, who rested his legs upon the shaft, and his sitting part on a sort of stool a very little way removed from the knees of the person seated within. Simple, awkward, and uneasy as this contrivance was, it was not disdained even by senators at an earlier period than that of which I write; and a nobleman, some thirty years older than myself, too, of high rank and large estate, assured me that it was his usual conveyance to and from college accompanied by a trusty servant or private tutor.”
The ordinary jaunting car and the larger bian—the invention of Bianconi, a rich tradesman in Dublin, though for many years an itinerant dealer—hardly differed in points of construction from English carriages, though the passengers sat back to back on a seat that ran parallel to the shafts.
In Wales the market cart was even more primitive than the noddy of Ireland. This was a low, two-wheeled, springless box of an affair, in which you sat as best you could on the boards. There was no covering at all. A rail at the back, extending some way along the sides, helped to prevent you from falling out behind, if the horse gave a sudden lurch forward.