Hansom cab

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"Hansom" redirects here. For the surname, see Hansom (surname).
A Hansom cab adding character to the filming of a costume drama.
A Hansom cab adding character to the filming of a costume drama.
Hansom cabs were light, fast and low-slung.
Hansom cabs were light, fast and low-slung.
The Sherlock Holmes Museum's Hansom Cab with Vasily Livanov.
The Sherlock Holmes Museum's Hansom Cab with Vasily Livanov.
A Hansom cab on display in the Mossman Collection, Luton, England.
A Hansom cab on display in the Mossman Collection, Luton, England.

A Hansom cab is a kind of horse-drawn carriage designed and patented in 1834 by Joseph Hansom, an architect from York. The vehicle was developed and tested by Hansom in Hinckley, Leicestershire, England. Originally known as the Hansom Safety Cab, its purpose was to combine speed with safety, with a low centre of gravity that was essential for safe cornering. Hansom's original design was heavily altered by John Chapman to improve its practicability, but retained his name.

Cab is a shortening of cabriolet, reflecting the design of the carriage. It replaced the hackney carriage as a vehicle for hire; with the introduction of clockwork mechanical taximeters to measure fares, the name became taxicab. Hansom cabs enjoyed immense popularity as they were fast, light enough to be pulled by a single horse (making the journey cheaper than travelling in a larger four-wheel coach) and were agile enough to steer around horse-drawn vehicles in the notorious traffic jams of nineteenth-century London. They were always seen as rather 'racy' and were not used by respectable ladies on their own.

The cab, a type of fly, sat two passengers (three if squeezed in) and a driver who sat on a sprung seat behind the vehicle. The passengers were able to give their instructions to the driver through a trap door near the rear of the roof. They could also pay the driver through this hatch and he would then operate a lever to release the doors so they could alight. The passengers were protected from the elements by the cab itself, as well as by folding wooden doors which enclosed their feet and legs, protecting their clothes from splashing mud. Later versions also had an up-and-over glass window above the doors to complete the enclosure of the passengers. Additionally, a curved fender mounted forward of the doors protected passengers from the stones thrown up by the flying hooves of the horse.

There were up to 3000 Hansom Cabs in use at the height of their popularity and they quickly spread to other cities in the United Kingdom, as well as continental European cities, particularly Paris, Berlin, and St Petersburg. The cab was introduced to the United States during the late 19th century, and was most commonly used in New York City. Contemporary illustrations even show hansom cabs on the streets of Sydney, Cairo, and Hong Kong.

The cab enjoyed popularity in the United Kingdom until the 1920s, when cheap cars and the expansion of reliable mass-transport systems led to a decline in usage. The last licence for a horse-drawn cab in London was issued in 1947.

Ironically, the only surviving example of a working hansom cab in the world—owned and operated by the Sherlock Holmes Museum in London—is not permitted to enter any of the Royal Parks because it is considered a commercial vehicle. Both The Royal Parks Agency and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Mr. James Purnell, have refused to grant permission for the hansom cab to be driven along any of the Park Roads.

This is despite the fact that thousands of taxis have unrestricted freedom to enter the Royal Parks on a daily basis, and Her Majesty the Queen is a renowned horse-lover.

[edit] In popular culture

  • Many versions of the Jack the Ripper story feature Hansom cabs, not merely to reflect the period of the real-life events, but because in many interpretations it is thought the Ripper himself employed a cab (possibly a larger, more enclosed coach) and even an accomplice cabbie to carry out his appalling murders.
  • In The Magician's Nephew, part of the children's fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, Jadis, the evil Queen, hijacks a hansom cab and rides it like a chariot during her brief visit to London. More importantly though, the cabbie gets transported to Narnia and later becomes King Frank, as does the horse pulling the hansom cab, Strawberry, later becoming the winged-horse Fledge.
  • Also in Laurie R. King's series of Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes books, cabs feature as a declining means of transport. Particularly in the second book of the series, A Monstrous Regiment of Women set in 1920, one of the crucial opening scenes of the narrative features Russell following Holmes across the less-reputed streets of London when the latter took up the role of a hansom cab driver for one night:
The alarming dip of the cab caused the horse to snort and veer sharply, and a startled, moustachioed face appeared behind the cracked glass of the side window, scowling at me. Holmes redirected his tongue's wrath from the prostitute to the horse and, in the best tradition of London cabbies, cursed the animal soundly, imaginatively, and without a single manifest obscenity. He also more usefully snapped the horse's head back with one clean jerk on the reins, returning its attention to the job at hand, while continuing to pull me up and shooting a parting volley of affectionate and remarkably familiar remarks at the fading Annalisa. Holmes did so like to immerse himself fully in his roles, I reflected as I wedged myself into the one-person seat already occupied by the man and his garments.
"Good evening, Holmes," I greeted him politely.
"Good morning, Russell," he corrected me, and shook the horse back into a trot.
And immediately, at a pace of surprising swiftness, the hansom drove off through the rain into a maze of villas. One villa was so like another, each with its front garden, and there was so little to distinguish the deserted lamp-lit streets and crescents through which the flying hansom took its way, that Brackenbury soon lost all idea of direction.
  • In 1886, Fergus Hume published his novel The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, set in Gold Rush-era Melbourne, Australia. It opens: "On the twenty-seventh day of July, at the hour of twenty minutes to two o'clock in the morning, a hansom cab drove up to the police station in Grey Street, St. Kilda, and the driver made the startling statement that his cab contained the body of a man who he had reason to believe had been murdered." The story was filmed in Australia in 1911, under the same title.
  • In the Seinfeld episode "The Rye," Cosmo Kramer drives his friend's hansom cab around New York City for the duration of the episode. He attempts to act like a tour guide while driving the cab, but makes up most of the facts.
  • In the movie "My Man Godfrey" (1936) starring Carole Lombard and William Powell, there is a scene in which the maid tells Alexander (Carole Lombard's character's father) "There's a hansom cab driver at the door. He wants $50 and his horse." Carole Lombard's character, after a night of partying and drinking, rode it up the steps of their 5th Avenue mansion and parked it in the library.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • Carriage Terminology: An Historical Dictionary by Donald H. Berkebile, Don H. Berkebile (1979) ISBN 0-87474-166-1
  • A Dictionary of Horse Drawn Vehicles by D.J.M. Smith (1988)
  • Looking at Carriages by Sallie Walrond (1992)

[edit] External links