Mons. Misson has the following passage concerning the hackney coachman; it is interesting as an illustration of contemporary manners:—
“If a coachman has a dispute about his fare with a gentleman that has hired him, and the gentleman offers to fight him to decide the quarrel, the coachman consents with all his heart. The gentleman pulls off his sword, lays it in some shop with his cane, gloves and cravat, and boxes in the manner I have described. If the coachman is soundly drubbed, which happens almost always, that goes for payment, but if he is the beator the beatee must pay the money about which they quarrelled. I once saw the late Duke of Grafton at fisticuffs in the open street, the widest part of the Strand, with such a fellow whom he lamm’d most horribly.”
The same author says that the London squares are enclosed with railings to keep the coaches from crossing them.
CAB DRIVING A LUCRATIVE OCCUPATION.
It has been remarked on a previous page that the hackney coachman drove a thriving business; how profitable it was we may learn from two petitions which were evoked by Queen Anne’s Act of 1710, which increased the number of licenses to 800 on payment of 5s. a week, such licenses to hold good for thirty-two years. Seven hundred coaches were more than profitable employment could be found for, if we might believe the inevitable petition put in against this Act; but nevertheless the new 800 licensees joined in petitioning that their licenses “may again be made assets” as under the Act of 1694. “In consideration of which, notwithstanding the rent of 5s. per week, we most humbly offer to raise £16,000 as a fine of £20 on each license for the use of His Majesty King George.”
That there was money to be made in the business is shown even more clearly by a petition submitted by James, Lord Mordington and others about this time. The petitioners offer to “farm the 800 hackney coaches which are now thought necessary” at £6 per license for 21 years; they were also prepared to pay £2,000 a year during that period, on which the King might raise a sum of £20,000; to pay £500 a year to the orphans of the City of London; and also to raise and equip a regiment of foot at a cost of £3,000!
The Act of 1710, it should be observed, altogether removed the prohibition against plying on Sunday. It licensed 200 hackney chairs and fixed the chair tariff at two-thirds of that in force for the coach (1s. for one and a half miles, and 1s. 6d. for two miles). An injunction to the Commissioners to fix at the Royal Exchange a table of distances must have been appreciated by the users of hackney coaches in London. It also repeated the injunction to use horses of fourteen hands at least; which repetition seems to have been very necessary, as Misson remarks that the regulation at the time of his visit was “but ill obeyed.”
It was about this time that a curious system of wig stealing was adopted by the London thieves. We read in the Weekly Journal of March 30, 1713, that:—
“The thieves have got such a villainous way now of robbing gentlemen, that they cut holes through the backs of hackney carriages, and take away their wigs or the fine headdresses of gentlewomen.”