A history of… taxis (Part 1)
Early cabs caused a "great disturbance" to Charles I…
I recently spent some time in Helsinki,1 and something that stood out compared to a city such as, say, London or New York, was quite how few taxis there were. Partly this is because it is relatively small and easily walkable, and partly because of an excellent public transport system. Oh, and partly because some of the getting around you will want to do is by boat and so is not suited for a private-hire vehicle. As traditional taxis are increasingly under threat from ride-hail apps and even robot cars I thought it would be interesting to take a look back and explore their history a little.
Taxis, in essence, are a means of getting oneself around a city, or beyond, fairly quickly – something that has been a pretty tiresome business for much of human history. Streets are usually narrow, dirty, and congested, and for most people for the last few thousand years the only affordable means of transport has been their own legs. For those who have the money though there has also most always been a means of getting from A to B with considerably less personal effort. One has been able to, if you will excuse the pun, get someone else to do the heavy lifting. For thousands of years before the invention of the motorised taxi cabs the great and the good have been carried from place to place by others. In ancient Rome, for example, the wealthy were transported around lecticae, covered litters carried by slaves.
As you can imagine, these were fairly large and bulky affairs, and were carried along streets teeming with pedestrians. As the rich were unwilling to wait in the crowds they soon obtained the reputation of being somewhat careless in their attitudes to other street-users. The poet Juvenal (55–128 CE) describes this perfectly:
When duty demands it, crowds fall back to allow
The wealthy to pass, who sail past the coast
In a mighty Liburnian ship, while on the way
They read or write or even take a nap,
For the litter and its shut windows bring on sleep.
Yet he still arrives first; while we are blocked
In our hurry by a wave before us, while the great crowd
Crushes our backs from behind us; an elbow or a stick
Hits you, a beam or a wine-jar smacks you on the head;
My leg is covered in crud, from every side
It wasn’t just the pedestrians who were abused by this form of transport, the luckless slaves really bore the brunt of it, as Juvenal continues:
The Liburnian litter-slaves are told they’re late, they must pay for their master’s
Slumbers. Sticks are broken on one slave, the whip and the strap scorch others;
Also in ancient Rome and closer to our modern concept of a taxi were the cisiarii (public carriage drivers) offered horse-drawn rides for a fee. These could be used for local journeys, but also between towns and cities at considerable speeds for the time as Cicero recounts:
Decem horis nocturnis sex et quinquaginta milia passuum cisiis pervolavit…
In ten night-time hours he flew by cisia for fifty-six miles…2
Litters for carrying people, similar to those in Rome, could be found all across the world. In India there was the palanquin or palki, Japan the kago or norimono, and in China the 轎 (jiao). This form of transport really took off, however, in 17th-century Europe under the name by which it is best known today, the sedan3 chair. Such chairs first became popular as forms of transport for the wealthy in France under various names – chaise à porteurs, chaise portée, etcetera – but these were transports owned by the people who used them. Their usage was catalysed in London in 1634 when Charles I granted Sir Saunders Duncombe a royal patent to supply numbered, licenced sedans for hire – to all intents and purposes an early, regulated, door-to-door, taxi service. Suddenly you didn’t have to be rich enough to own one (and the attendant servants to carry it) you could rent one for a single trip.
These chairs were basically wooden boxes that a person could sit upright in, usually clad with leather and sporting attractive brass fittings. A pole would run down each side through iron brackets and the sedan chair-carriers, the two ‘chairmen’4 would support the poles at waist height using leather straps strung over their shoulders. Empty these sedans would weigh between 45–60 kilograms (100–130 pounds) and even more if they were fancy. With the occupant inside the total weight would be more like 105–145 kilograms (230–320 pounds). This meant that the people carrying them had to be incredibly fit and strong,5 taking them along uneven roads and up hills all the while fighting their way through jostling crowds.
Sedan chairs soon spread to other cities and the characteristics of their services were often very similar to modern-day taxis. Edinburgh organized sedans into a regulated urban service in the early 1700s, issuing licences and numbered badges, ensuring that fares were publicly posted, and even enforcing rules about lights at night.6
Around the same time the true progenitor of the taxi cab, the hackney coach came into being. Coaches for hire had been around for sometime, but run by individual operators in a haphazard manner. Things changed in the mid-1620s one Captain Bail(e)y (said to be a retired sea captain, but things are somewhat unclear) bought four coaches, staffed them men in smart livery, and established what one can think of as the first ever taxi-stand, at Maypole in the Strand, as this account in a letter from 1634 explains:
I cannot omit to mention any new thing that comes up amongst us, though never so trivial: here is one Captain Baily, he hath been a sea-captain, but now lives on the land, about this city, where he tries experiments. He hath erected, according to his ability, some four hackney-coaches, put his men in livery, and appointed them to stand at the Maypole in the Strand, giving them instructions at what rates to carry men into several parts of the town, where all day they may be had. Other hackney-men seeing this way, they flocked to the same place, and perform their journeys at the same rate; so that sometimes there are twenty of them together, which disperse up and down, that they and others are to be had everywhere, as watermen are to be had by the waterside. Everybody is much pleased with it; for, whereas, before, coaches could not be had but at greater rates, now a man may have one much cheaper.
Sedan chairs still continued to flourish, as they were cheaper, could go up streets too narrow for a carriage, and were often faster as they could weave their way through the traffic. Nonetheless the number of hackney carriages soon exploded, though not everyone was thrilled by this development – particularly the Thames watermen (with congested streets a boat on the river was often the fastest way to get around). The waterman and poet John Taylor (1578–1653) – who we’ve met before – in his pamphlet ‘The World Runs on Wheels’7 railed against:
…the caterpillar swarm of hirelings. They have undone my poor trade whereof I am a member: and though I look for no reformation yet I expect the benefit of an old proverb, ‘Give the losers leave to speak.’… This infernal swarm of trade-spellers have so overrun the land that we can get no living upon the water; for I dare truly affirm that in every day in any term, especially if the Court be at Whitehall, they do rob us of our livings and carry 500 fares8 daily from us.
It wasn’t just the watermen who were annoyed by “the caterpillar swarm of hirelings”; Charles I got a bit pissed off about how they were clogging up the streets and on January 19th, 1635 a proclamation was made “to restrain the multitude and promiscuous use of coaches about London and Westminster.”
…hackney-coaches were not only a great disturbance to his Majesty, his dearest consort the Queen, the nobility and others of place and degree in their passage through the streets; but the streets themselves were so pestered and the pavements so broken up, that the common passage is thereby hindered and made dangerous; and the prices of hay, provender, etc., thereby made exceeding dear. Wherefore we expressly command and forbid that no hackney-coaches or hired carriages be used or suffered in London, Westminster, or the suburbs thereof, except they be to travel at least three miles out of the same. And also that no person shall go in a coach to the said streets except the owner of the coach shall constantly keep up four able horses for our service when required.9
This proclamation was soon either withdrawn or simply ignored. The demand for them was too great, and the business for those operating them too good for it to cease. In July 1637 Charles I stopped trying to ban them and empowered his Master of the Horse, James, Duke of Hamilton, to license 50 hackney-coachmen for London and Westminster and the suburbs (and “other convenient places”). The coaches had to adhere to specific rules:
They had to have four wheels and be available for hire
They had to be pulled by only two horses
They had to have six seats (four inside for the passengers and two outside, one for the driver and one for a servant).
It is believed that each licence holder was allowed up to 12 horses, so in theory there could have been 300 coaches in total, but as the horses would have been worked in shifts and rested the likely number would have been somewhat lower.
Further regulation was introduced under Cromwell in 1654, limiting the official number to 300 carriages (though likely many more than this were operating). Charles II, restored to the throne in 1660, shared his father’s dislike of the vehicles, and promptly banned them in a proclamation issued on October 18th the same year. This, err, didn’t work as we know from a somewhat smug diary entry from Samuel Pepys a few weeks later:
Notwithstanding that this was the first day of the king’s proclamation against hackney coaches coming into the streets to stand to be hired, yet I got one to carry me home.
Pepys had a somewhat riskier journey a few years later in 1665, when London was in the midst of the great plague:
At last [the driver] stood still, and came down hardly able to stand; and told me that he was suddenly struck very sick and almost blind. So I ’light and went into another coach, with a sad heart for the poor man and trouble for myself, lest he should have been struck with the plague.
Hackney carriages were often used to transport plague victims, both living and dead, at an obviously huge risk to the drivers, though care was taken not to infect future passengers, as Daniel Defoe records in his Journal of the Plague Year:
In the “Orders conceived and published by the Lord Mayor and Alderman of the City of London, concerning the infection of the plague, 1665,” appears the following order: “That care be taken of hackney-coachmen, that they may not (as some of them have been observed to do), after carrying of infected persons to the Pest-house, and other places, be admitted to common use, till their coaches be well aired, and have stood unemployed by the space of five or six days after such service.”
The hackney carriages numbers continued to increase in the decades that followed, but they were not without their problems. They were, as we have seen, fairly large vehicles, and as such were not exactly nimble and could get easily stuck in jams. Furthermore, with a capacity of four passengers, and two horses pulling them, they were pretty expensive to hire. When measured in terms of average wages at the time compared to those of today a fairly straightforward trip in London in 1654 would cost around £100 ($135), and hiring a carriage for a day would set you back over £1,000.
It was in France that the next evolution of taxis occurred at the start of the 18th century. A much smaller, lighter, vehicle was created that carried only two passengers and was pulled by a single horse. Rather than a fixed wooden structure the occupants were covered by a leather hood that could be pulled over them on a frame to provide shelter. The name of this marvel was the cabriolet and yes, that is where we get the word ‘cab’ from!
In my next piece I’ll describe how these cabriolets evolved into the cabs of today including the 18th-century equivalent of phone snatching!
Lovely city, do visit it if you get a chance!
56 Roman miles is around 83 kilometres, not a bad speed.
The word sedan probably comes from a southern Italian dialect derivative of Italian sede ‘seat’, from Latin sēdēs/sedēre ‘to sit’, not, as is often claimed, the place in France named Sedan.
No, this usage has nothing to do with ‘chairman’ in the sense of an office holder, which is first seen in 1624 as a portmanteau of ‘chair’ and the gender of the person occupying it.
It is all too easy to forget that manual workers of this time had bodies that most gym-goers of today would kill for.
An Edinburgh council meeting minute from 1749 recorded that chairmen “carrying or resting their chairs… under cloud of night… not having a light fixed upon one of the forepoles” would incur a penalty.
He also wrote, more poetically, “Carroaches, coaches, jades, and flanders mares Doe rob us of our shares, our wares, our fares. Against the ground we stand and knock our heels, “Whilest all our profit runs away on wheeles”
It is generally thought that he was being a bit hyperbolic about losing quite that many fares.
“...for our service when required” essentially meant that the carriages could be requisitioned for military use should the need arise.