Drivers suspected of dishonesty were immediately dismissed, and many were discharged without good reason. Being an omnibus conductor was not an enviable occupation as one of them pointed out:
The worst part of my business is its uncertainty. I may be discharged any day, and not know for what. I never get to a public place, whether it’s chapel or a playhouse, unless, indeed, I get a holiday, and that is once in two years. I’ve asked for a day’s holiday and been refused. I’m quite ignorant of what’s passing in the world, my time’s so taken up. We only know what’s going on from hearing people talk in the ’bus. I never care to read the paper now, though I used to like it. If I have two minutes to spare, I’d rather take a nap than anything else. We know no more politics than the back-woodsmen of America, because we haven’t time to care about it. I’ve fallen asleep on my step as the bus was going on, and almost fallen off. I have often to put up with insolence from vulgar fellows, who think it fun to chaff a cad, as they call it. There’s no help for it. Our masters won’t listen to complaints: if we are not satisfied we can go. It takes every farthing of our wages to live well enough, and keep a wife and family.29
Even so, most passengers seem to have regarded omnibus conductors less as men deserving pity than as impertinent upstarts to be prodded with umbrellas, to be distrusted whenever answering questions as to the destination of their vehicles, and in constant need of correction for their cheeky manners. In 1842 the stipendiary magistrate at Marlborough Street Police Court was moved to observe ‘in very indignant tones’ that it was necessary to protect the public ‘and females in particular’ against ‘the ruffianly conduct of omnibus conductors’.30 Charles Dickens, who compared the pleasurable variety of an omnibus journey with the tedium of one by coach, wrote of one conductor who had taken
more old ladies and gentlemen to Paddington who wanted to go to the Bank, and more old ladies and gentlemen to the Bank who wanted to go to Paddington, than any six men on the road; and, however much malevolent spirits may pretend to doubt the accuracy of the statement, they well know it to be an established fact that he has forcibly conveyed a variety of ancient persons of either sex to both places, who had not the slightest or most distant intention of going anywhere at all.31
The great boast of another conductor of Dickens’s highly coloured but apparently not entirely misleading description was that he could ‘chuck an old gen’l’m’n into the buss, shut him in, and rattle off, afore he knows where it’s a-going to’ – a feat which he frequently performed. ‘We are not aware that it has ever been precisely ascertained how many passengers our omnibus will contain,’ Dickens added. ‘The impression on the cad’s mind evidently is, that it is amply sufficient for the accommodation of any number of persons that can be enticed into it.’
‘Any room?’ cries a very hot pedestrian.
‘Plenty o’ room, sir,’ replies the conductor, gradually opening the door, and not disclosing the real state of the case until the wretched man is on the steps.
‘Where?’ inquires the entrapped individual with an attempt to back out again.
‘Either side, sir,’ rejoins the cad, shoving him in and slamming the door.
‘All right, Bill.’32
Bill, the driver, would no doubt have been as likely to complain of his long hours as most conductors were. One driver, a former builder, told Henry Mayhew:
It’s a hard work is mine; for I never have any rest but a few minutes, except every other Sunday, and then only two hours … If I was to ask leave to go to church, I know what the answer would be – ‘You can go to church as often as you like, and we can get a man who doesn’t want to go there’ … If I’m blocked [in a traffic jam] I must make up for the block by galloping; but if I’m seen to gallop and anybody tells our people, I’m called over the coals … It’s not easy to drive a bus; but I can drive and must drive to an inch; yes, sir, to half an inch.33
Omnibus drivers were considered to be for the most part a sober and respectable class of men. This was not the case, however, with cabmen and the drivers of hackney coaches. These usually came to the occupation from a variety of other employments. Some had been costermongers or greengrocers, others grooms or footmen, barmen, innkeepers, shop assistants, pawnbrokers or saddlers; several had criminal records; one, in the 1860s, was said to be a baronet. Mayhew was informed ‘on excellent authority’ that a tenth, ‘or to speak beyond the possibility of cavil, a twelfth of the whole number’, either lived with women of the town or were supported ‘on the wages of the women’s prostitution’. Certainly they knew where all the brothels were; and one cabman remembered how he used to drive Lord Barrymore ‘in his rounds of the brothels’. ‘His Lordship used always to take his own wine with him’; and, after waiting up until daylight, the cabdriver took him, ‘girls and all – fine dressed-up madams – to Billingsgate, and there left them to breakfast at some queer place or to slang with the fish-wives’.34
In the 1860s there were about 4600 cabdrivers in London in all. Of these about 2000 were their own masters and were much more respectable than the employed ‘loose fellows’ who had drifted into the life, believing it to be ‘both idle and exciting’. Their reputation for heavy drinking led to the building, at the expense of various philanthropists, of London’s cabmen’s shelters where they could provide themselves with a cheap meal and a hot non-alcoholic drink. There were at one time over sixty of these shelters, a few of which still remain.
The drivers’ vehicles were mostly cabriolets, a French importation, like the omnibus. By the middle of the nineteenth century, cabs had almost entirely replaced the hackney coaches which had plied for hire in the London streets since the early seventeenth century and of which there were over 1000 by the early nineteenth. The cabriolet, which had arrived in 1823, was drawn by a single horse and carried two passengers under a hood, the driver being seated outside the hood on the offside of the vehicle. In 1834 Joseph Aloysius Hansom, a joiner’s son who became an architect, introduced his ‘Patent Safety Cab’, a vehicle whose abnormally large wheels and body near the ground reduced the risk of accidents. In the developed hansom cab the driver was seated on top of the vehicle; and in later versions he was mounted behind the cab with his reins going over the roof in which there was a window through which he could communicate with his passengers. In 1865 the hansom cab was joined by the growler, a four-wheeled cab drawn by a single horse with space for a third passenger beside the driver; and men who had taken to summoning cabs by blasts on the silver whistle that hung from their watch-chains now signalled their requirements by a single blast for a hansom and a double blast for a growler.35 By 1904 there were 7499 hansom cabs in London and 3905 growlers. There were also by then several mechanically driven cabs. These, powered by electric batteries and weighing two tons – far heavier than the hansom’s eight hundredweight – were introduced in 1897 but they had a short life, being extinct before 1901. In 1904 they were replaced by petrol-engined motor cabs of which there were 8397 at the outbreak of the First World War. The taximeter, which gave the taxicab its present name, was in general use from 1907.36
Both hansoms and growlers survived into the days of the motor cab. Indeed, as late as 1927 there were still twelve hansoms in London and 100 growlers; and there was still one horse-drawn cab operating in 1947. The horse-drawn tramcar was also seen for several years after the motor omnibus had been introduced in 1897. Tramcars, with wheels running in metal tracks, had first appeared in London in 1861 when an American entrepreneur, George Francis Train, who had introduced them the year before in Birkenhead, received permission to lay tracks along Victoria Street from Westminster Abbey to Pimlico. The trams ran every five minutes, carrying forty-eight passengers, half of them outside. But as the lines stood fourteen inches above the road surface, they were strongly objected to by the owners and drivers of other vehicles and were removed before the year was over. Despite Train’s failure, three other tramways were authorized for the outskirts of London in 1869; and these lines eventually exp
anded into a large network covering most of London apart from its central area. The tramcars, which had a vertical iron ladder at each end, changed little after the brief appearance of steam trams and compressed air trams and the invention of electric traction, though most were then roofed over. Powered either by overhead lines or by live rails set in conduits between the tracks, these electric tramcars, the first of which were operated at Northfleet in Kent in 1889, were a popular means of transport until briefly superseded by the trolley-bus or ‘trackless tram’.
Trams have been called the ‘gondolas of the people’,37 a description that echoes Disraeli’s celebration of the hansom cab as the ‘Gondola of London’; and before the end of the nineteenth century they were to be seen in large towns all over the country, from Plymouth to Leeds-where the first electric tram was seen at Roundhay as early as 1891 – much reducing the time it took people to travel to work and enabling them to get to football grounds and shops and their children to get to school. After the Tramways Act of 1870 had allowed local authorities to buy private tramways by compulsory purchase after twenty-one years of operation, sixty-one local authorities took advantage of this legislation, though there were still eighty-nine undertakings managed by private enterprise.38
When electric trams first appeared in London the congestion in the streets had been slightly alleviated by the building of the underground. Proposals for this revolutionary scheme were put forward by Charles Pearson, the enterprising surveyor to the City of London, to a Royal Commission which had been appointed in 1845 to consider the problems of traffic which were threatening to become insuperable. The streets in the centre of the city were daily choked not only by tens of thousands of pedestrians, by 20,000 equestrians, by herds of innumerable animals bumping into each other on their way to market, by omnibuses, hansoms and growlers, but also by thousands of other carriages, vans and carts, gigs, tilburies, phaetons, landaus, broughams, dogcarts and donkey-carts.
Pearson, therefore, proposed that, since there was no longer room for people to move about comfortably at street level, they should be transported beneath it. Objections to such a quixotic idea were immediate and numerous: the houses above the lines would collapse into the tunnels; digging holes in the ground for such a purpose must surely be contrary to the laws of God; the Duke of Wellington warned that one day a French army would suddenly arrive in London by train without anyone even knowing that it had landed on the English shore.
Pearson persisted, however, and, having persuaded several rich men that underground railways would not only ease traffic congestion and enable working people to live in healthier districts outside central London but that they would also be highly profitable, his scheme was eventually accepted. But it was not until May 1862 that the first section of the Metropolitan Line was opened for an inaugural journey upon which W. E. Gladstone, at that time Chancellor of the Exchequer, seated in top-hat and morning coat beside his wife, was one of the passengers. The next year the line was opened to the public and on its first day it carried 30,000 passengers in open trucks behind a steam engine from Paddington to Farringdon Street in the City. So successful was the line, in fact, that by the end of 1864 no fewer than 259 projects for underground railways in and around London had been presented.
At first the lines were dug by what was known as the ‘cut and cover’ method, that was to say by following the lines of existing roads to avoid paying for property, digging a deep trench, supporting the earth at the sides with brick walls, laying the tracks, roofing over them, then restoring the road surface. The District and Circle lines were both built by this method. Later tunnels were built with the help of cast-iron circular shields, originally patented by Marc Brunel. These were used in the construction of the City and South London railway (later part of the Northern Line), the world’s first electric tube railway which was opened in 1890 from Stockwell to King William Street. It was a deep tube, with platforms forty feet below ground from which passengers were taken back to the surface by hydraulic lifts. The apprehension which such a mode of transport initially aroused was soon overcome by its speed and comfort, and by the cheapness of its 2d flat rate fare. In its first two weeks this electric railway carried 165,000 passengers, and its success led to a wave of other railway promotions until there were over 100 miles of underground lines in the London area.39
While thousands of people were going to work by underground railways in late Victorian London, thousands, too, all over the country, were going by bicycle. Compared with other means of cheap transport the bicycle had come late upon the scene. In 1839 a Scottish blacksmith named Macmillan had invented a primitive kind of bicycle driven by cranks rather than pedals; but, little better than a hobbyhorse, it had never become popular, and it was not until the 1860s – when two Frenchmen, Pierre and Ernest Michaux, built a more sophisticated machine which became known as a vélocipède – that a bicycle became accepted as a feasible means of transport. The Coventry Sewing Machine Company made 400 of the Michaux bicycles for export to France, but the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War obliged the company to sell them in England where, it was soon found, a keen market for bicycles existed and where, up till then, most machines were clumsy contraptions like the one Tom Mullins bought for 2s 6d which ‘had a wooden frame and handlebars, but no chains or pedals, you simply pushed it along with your feet’. Other machines were made by village blacksmiths and, while fast enough going downhill, were so heavy that they demanded a great deal of energy when the road took an upward turn.
In 1870 James Stanley, a young foreman at the Coventry company, built the first ‘penny farthing’, a high bicycle with a front wheel much larger than the rear; but this was also difficult to ride and it was not until the low-framed Rover ‘safety bicycle’ with wheels of equal size was introduced in 1880, followed in 1888 by the invention of a pneumatic tyre by a Belfast veterinary surgeon, John Boyd Dunlop, and by the improvement of the free wheel in the early 1890s, that bicycling became a pleasure. It was eagerly adopted by all classes, particularly by the lower middle classes, and by women who found it both a healthy exercise and a liberating experience which they could share on equal terms with men.
There are bicycling clubs in every part of England [wrote T. H. S. Escort in 1897]. A favourite rendezvous in the neighbourhood of London is Bushey Park, and there, when the weather is fine, as many as a thousand bicyclists congregate. During the summer, too, in the heart of the city, when the business traffic of the day is done and the streets are clear, an active scene may often be witnessed by gas-light. Under the shadow of the Bank and the Exchange, the asphalt thoroughfare is covered with a host of bicycle riders, performing a series of intricate evolutions on their iron steeds.40
All over the country bicycles were now to be seen. In Cambridge the daughter of the Plumian Professor of Astronomy was ‘just about at the right age to enjoy it’ when the ‘bicycling craze came in’. ‘At first even “safety bicycles” were too dangerous and improper for ladies to ride,’ she recalled. ‘They had to have tricycles. My mother had (I believe) the first female tricycle in Cambridge; and I had a little one, and we used to go out for family rides, all together.’ Her father led the way on his bicycle; her brother stood miserably on the bar behind their mother, ‘holding on for all he was worth’. Before the advent of the pneumatic tyre she found it hard to keep up with the others, ‘pounding away on hard tyres, a glorious but not a pleasurable pastime’. ‘Then one day at lunch,’ she continued, ‘my father said he had just seen a new kind of tyre, filled with air, and he thought it might be a success. And soon after that everyone had bicycles … and [they] became the smart thing in society … We were then permitted to wear baggy knickerbockers, horridly improper, but rather grand … I only once saw a woman (not, of course, a lady) in real bloomers.’41
The small motor-car was also soon to be recognized as a pleasurable and cheap form of private transport, cheaper at least than a private carriage. Before the death of Queen Victoria there were numerous small cars on the
roads. They were quite reliable – in the words of a correspondent whose letter was published in The Autocar in 1901 – and were capable of reaching respectable speeds ‘with very few involuntary stops’.42 The Queen herself had an Electric Victoria whose driver sat on a platform above the rear wheels looking over the heads of the two passengers. It cost £570, could cover up to forty miles on one charge, and was driven at a speed of about twelve miles an hour. This was quite fast enough for the Queen; and would have been illegal before the repeal in 1896 of a law which prohibited vehicles being driven on public roads at more than four miles an hour and which required them to’ be preceded by a man carrying a red flag. To celebrate the repeal of this law, and the raising of the speed limit to twelve miles an hour, a group of motorists burned their red flags and drove off to Brighton in what was to be the first of a series of regular events, later to be known as Veteran Car Runs, in which motor cars made between 1895 and 1905 are driven from Hyde Park Corner to Madeira Drive, Brighton.
Although considered quite fast enough by most pedestrians, a speed of twelve miles an hour – raised in 1903 to twenty miles an hour on roads deemed suitable – was thought not nearly fast enough by most motorists, many of whom regularly exceeded it. Among these was Edward VII who in 1898, while Prince of Wales and staying at Highcliffe Castle in Hampshire, had been driven at forty miles an hour in a Daimler by a fellow-guest. When he had his own cars, among them a sixty-five-horse-power Mercedes, the King liked to be driven much faster than that. Unaffected by the traffic laws of his realm, he often congratulated himself upon having raced along the Brighton road in 1906 at sixty miles an hour. Other motorists had to grow accustomed to being overtaken by a large car, without number plates but with the Royal Arms on the door panels, in which a bearded figure sat on the blue Morocco back seat, smoking a large cigar, as he urged his chauffeur on with impatient gestures and gruff commands to ever greater speeds.43
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