The popular image of Victorian England is of a society
whose members travelled by train. While
there is little doubt of the massive impact
that railways had on British society, its
landscapes and its attitudes, up to 1914 for most people most of the time the
railways were not the main means of
transport. Britain in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has
justifiably been called ‘a horse drawn society’:
Railways paraded
the power of the machine across the whole country, they eroded localism and
removed barriers to mobility and they created new jobs and new towns. Their very modernity and success in generating new traffic,
however, also generated expansion in older forms of transport, for all the
feeder services bringing freight and passengers to the railway stations were
horse-drawn. This, coupled with the
needs of road transport within the larger towns, produced a three or fourfold
increase in horse-drawn traffic on Victorian roads.
The result, in employment terms, was that there were consistently more
than twice as many road transport workers as there were railwaymen until after
1891 and that in the early twentieth century the road transport men, by now
including some handling electric trams and soon to include others on motor vehicles, remained easily the largest group of
transport workers.
In early 1830, twenty-nine coaches operated daily between
Liverpool and Manchester; by early 1831, there were four and only one remained two
years later. One of the leading coach
owners considered ‘annihilation’ as the most appropriate word to describe the
effects of railways. But this experience was untypical of other parts of the country. Where the new railways ran roughly parallel
to long-established trunk roads there was certainly
little future for stage coaching. Where roads traversed or fed
into the route of the railway a very different situation existed and
horse-drawn vehicles still played a very important part in the overall
provision of transport services.
Initially the effect of railways on towns that had
previously been important staging posts was disastrous. In 1839, Doncaster
found work for 7 four-horse coaches, 20 two-horse coaches, 9 stage wagons and
100 post horses; the total horse population was 258. In 1845, after the
town had had railway links for five years, only one four-horse coach, 3 stage
wagons and 12 post horses were still in service and the
number of horses had fallen to 60. Trade had suffered badly and the value of
property had fallen between 25 and 30 per cent.Where coaches acted as ‘feeders’
there were still opportunities for them to stay on the road and, in some cases,
increase their business. The completion of the early network by about 1840
provided many opportunities for opening up new combined coach and railway
routes for passenger traffic. In April 1839, the well-known coach magnate
George Sherman expressed the opinion that after the railway had driven most of
the coaches off the long-distance routes:
...there would be as much to
employ more horses as there ever was through the
extra ordinary quantity of omnibuses and cabs that were appearing on the
streets.
In 1839, there were 600 omnibuses in London and this increased to 1,300 by
1850. There was a parallel increase in
hansom cabs: 12 in 1823 to over 4,400 by the 1840s. Such was the importance of horse transport in
London that, during the cab strike of July 1853, the city ground to a halt:
There was not only a dearth,
but an absolute famine of locomotion, and never since the days of
Charles II, when Hackney-coaches were first invented, have the
sight-seeing and outgoing public been reduced to such an extremity of
helplessness as by the cabmen’s strike of yesterday.
The result was a significant increase in the cost of horses: in 1872 the London and South Western were paying £54
17s for the same type of animal that had only cost them £44 10s five years
earlier. The increased
demand for horses was certainly not confined to
London; there is also significant evidence from the provinces. There was also an increase in privately owned
heavy carriages: from 30,000 in 1840 the number grew to 120,000 by 1870. Over the same period the number of light
two-wheeled carriages increased six times.
By 1902, 12 out of every 1,000 people in Great Britain owned some kind
of private horse-drawn vehicles. This compared with 14 per 1000 in 1870 and 4
per 1000 in 1840, and it was not until 1926 that the number of car owners
exceeded the number of persons who had owned horse-drawn carriages in 1870.
Without carriages
and carts the railways would have been like stranded whales, giants
unable to use their strength, for these were the only means of getting people
and goods right to the doors of houses, where they wanted to be.
The number of horses and the need to do something with the bodily waste they produced created major environmental problems in towns and especially the burgeoning cities. By the 1890s, when 300,000 horses lived in London, each producing 10kg of dung a day, the stuff was piled so high that streets became impassable. The result was the creation of a new job, the crossing-sweepers who made a living clearing a path for pedestrians. Contemporaries described horse droppings coating the roads in a 'warm brown matting' that flung up dust in all directions or, on wet days, flooded the streets in a pea-soup-thick sheet that was spattered by passing vehicles across houses, shopfronts and pedestrians. As cities reached 'peak horse', streets became gridlocked and the clatter of horses and carriage wheels became so deafening that straw was laid outside homes and hospitals to muffle the noise.
The solution to all this pollution and congestion, it was hoped, was the car. Use
of the steam engine began to make the horse redundant in farm work though pit
ponies continued to be used in coal mining. The number of working horses had already declined before the war. Horse-drawn
buses disappeared in the late 1880s initially replaced by trams. Motor buses appeared in 1898 and there were
5,000 by 1904 and 50,000 ten years later.
Electric and then petrol-powered metered taxis were introduced in London from the mid-1890s. The war devastated the
taxi trade with many horses requisitioned by the military.
Although machine gun and artillery
fire reduced their value on the battlefield, horses remained an important part of the war effort.
In 1914, the British army had about 25,000 horses but this had increased by June 1917 to 591,000
horses and
213,000 mules as well as 60,000 camels and oxen. They
were mainly used for logistical support and were better than mechanised
vehicles at travelling through deep mud and over rough terrain. Horses were also
used for reconnaissance and for carrying messengers, as well as
pulling artillery, ambulances and supply wagons. On average, Britain
lost about 15 per cent of its animals each year of the war with losses at 17
per cent on the Western Front. The war had a devastating effect on the
British horse population; Britain lost over 484,000 horses, one horse for every two men. With
some breeds in danger of disappearing, after 1918 working horses were an increasingly rare part of the British
economy, their role confined largely to recreational purposes.
Thompson, F. M. L., The Rise of Respectable Society: British Society 1830-1900,
(Fontana), 1988, p. 47. See also his Victorian England: the horse-drawn society:
an inaugural lecture,
(Bedford College), 1970, and ‘Nineteenth-century horse sense’, Economic
History Review, Vol. 29, (1976), pp. 60-81.
