The Victorian Era

How Did Hansom Cabs Work

Article · Cities & Entertainment · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

❦

Hansom cabs were the principal form of private hired transport in the Victorian city: a light, two-wheeled, horse-drawn vehicle in which the passengers sat in a low, covered compartment while the driver perched on a raised seat at the rear, holding the reins over the roof and speaking to his fare through a small trapdoor. The hansom cab was first designed by Joseph Aloysius Hansom in 1834, and it became one of the characteristic vehicles of the Victorian Cities, Transport, and Entertainment of the period. Cheap to hire, quick, and nimble in crowded streets, the hansom carried the middle classes to work, to the shops, to the theatre, and to the railway station.

The Design of the Hansom Cab

The hansom cab was designed and patented in 1834 by Joseph Hansom, an architect and journalist from York. Hansom’s safety cab placed the body low between two large wheels, so that passengers could step in easily and the vehicle could corner sharply without overturning. Folding doors enclosed the passengers’ legs, a curved dashboard protected them from the mud thrown up by the horse’s hooves, and the trapdoor in the roof allowed the driver to take instructions and receive his fare. Later improvements by other coachbuilders lightened the vehicle and refined its suspension, making the hansom one of the fastest carriages on the Victorian street; Disraeli famously called it the gondola of London.

The hansom carried two passengers inside, on a narrow bench seat, and luggage was stowed on a small platform behind the driver. The driver’s seat, set high over the rear axle, gave him an excellent view of the traffic, and the trapdoor — a sliding panel in the roof of the passenger compartment — allowed him to hear his fare’s instructions. Most hansoms were painted yellow, and the yellow cab of London was famous from the 1840s onwards.

The Operation of the Hansom Cab

The hansom cab was operated by a driver, who sat in the raised seat behind the passenger compartment, and it was drawn by a single horse, typically a fast and well-trained animal, driven at a smart pace through the streets of the city. Cabs were hired from cab ranks, the designated stands maintained throughout the city, or hailed in the street, and fares were regulated by law according to distance: in London, the hansom was subject to a 1d per mile fare for the first two miles and 6d per mile thereafter, with a 6d fee for each item of luggage. The driver was known as the cabby or cabman, and sometimes by older names such as jarvey or whip.

A London cab of the 1880s averaged about 25 miles a day and earned its driver perhaps thirty shillings a week, of which a substantial part went in cab rent, horse feed, and stable fees. The cabs were typically owned by small cab proprietors who let them out to the drivers. By 1900 there were about 7,600 hansom cabs in London, alongside the larger number of four-wheeled growlers and the growing number of motor cabs that would soon displace them.

The Decline of the Hansom Cab

The hansom cab declined at the very end of the Victorian period and in the Edwardian years that followed, as electric trams, motor omnibuses, and deep-level underground railways offered cheaper travel, and as the motor taxicab — first licensed in London in 1906 — displaced the horse-drawn cab from the ranks. The Franco-British Exhibition of 1908 featured a famous display of electric hansom cabs designed by Walter Bersey, and a number of motor hansom designs appeared in the Edwardian period, but the form itself was unable to compete with the four-wheeled motor cab. By the First World War the hansom had almost vanished from London’s streets.