Early Carriages and Roads

by Sir Walter Gilbey

HEAVY TAXATION OF COACHES.

The heavy taxes laid upon the stage coaches were a fruitful source of complaint among proprietors. In 1835 a coach conveying eighteen passengers paid 3½d. per mile run to the revenue. To show the decline of coaching, it may be said that in 1835 the total revenue from the stage coaches amounted to £498,497 and in 1854 it had fallen to £73,903. The taxes were estimated to be one-fifth of the receipts, and this being the case it is not remarkable that, in the earlier days of the railroad, the people in country districts remote from railways should have suffered more inconvenience than they had ever known. It no longer paid to run a coach in such districts; and persons in the humbler walks of life found themselves set down at the station, ten, fifteen or twenty miles from home, with no means of getting there other than their own legs. Such districts saw a revival of old postal methods in the shape of boys mounted on ponies.

The unequal competition between coach and train was continued for many years, ruinous taxation of the former notwithstanding. While the coaches were paying 20 per cent. of their earnings to the revenue, the railways paid 5 per cent., and carried passengers more rapidly and more cheaply. The coaches held their place with great tenacity, aided no doubt by the innate British tendency to cling to old institutions.

The Quarterly Review of 1837 mentions as a curious and striking instance of enterprise and the advantages of free competition that a day coach then performed the journey between London and Manchester in time which exceeded by only one hour that occupied by the combined agency of coaches and the Liverpool and Birmingham railway. The Act for transmitting the mails by railway was passed in 1838, eight years after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, and then it may be said coach proprietors recognised that their industry was doomed; but they maintained fares at the old scales until the coach was nearly extinguished.

EARLY CABS.

We must now retrace our steps and endeavour to trace the progress made in vehicles other than stage and mail coaches. In 1740 the first patent was granted for a two-wheeled carriage; it is briefly described as a “double shaft and pole carriage with two wheels drawn by two horses harnessed abreast.” Another “coach with two wheels” was patented in 1786. Mr. Thrupp states that 27,300 two-wheeled vehicles paid duty in the year 1814, a fact which shows how rapidly they grew in favour. It is therefore somewhat curious that the first two-wheeled hackney cab in London should not have appeared in London until 1823, when Mr. David Davis built twelve of these vehicles.

“The body was a little like a hansom cab but smaller; it had a head, of which the hinder half was stiff and solid, and the fore part made to fold. This arrangement was probably an imitation of the gentleman’s cabriolet, the hood of which was rarely put down altogether, as the groom had to hold on by it. Outside the head on one side was a seat for the driver of the cab, and the whole was hung upon stiff shafts. These cabs were, I think, painted yellow, and stood for hire in a yard in Portland Street close to Oxford Circus.”

Cabs of this kind stood for hire in the streets, a few years later, if we may accept the authority of Charles Dickens. Readers of the Pickwick Papers which was published (in monthly parts) in 1837 and 1838, will remember how Mr. Pickwick, when he set out upon his travels took a cab from “the coach stand at St. Martins-le-Grand”; and took notes of the driver’s account of his horse as he drove to Charing Cross. On another page we find Mr. and Mrs. Raddle and Mrs. Cluppins “squeezed into a hackney cabriolet, the driver sitting in his own particular little dickey at the side.” This vehicle was perhaps the light two-wheeled cab with a fixed panel top, built to carry only two persons inside, which was introduced about 1830. The driver sat on a little seat over the off-side wheel.

This vehicle was succeeded by Mr. Boulnois’ patent cab, of which an illustration is given. It opened at the back, and the driver’s seat was on the roof; the passengers sat facing one another. This cab was light and convenient, but appears to have fallen into disuse because the fore part was within too easy reach of the horse’s heels to make it quite acceptable to nervous passengers, Harvey’s “Quarto Bus” to carry four was the next popular conveyance, but it was superseded about 1836 by the “brougham cab” for two. This cab was rather smaller than the vehicle to which Lord Brougham’s name was given in 1839. From this conveyance was developed the “clarence cab,” which remains with us still as the familiar “four-wheeler.” It should be mentioned that the first four-wheeled cabs appeared in London about 1835; these however, carried only two passengers inside. The modern hansom belongs to a later period. In 1802 there were 1,100 hackney carriages in London, and in 1855 the number was 2,706.