Londoners in 1888 were astounded by the changes that had taken place since the start of the nineteenth century. As one observer noted, ‘Old London is going, going, indeed, has well-nigh gone.’ It was now an urban giant extending well into Surrey, Middlesex and Kent, and its centre had been furnished with new landmarks like Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, the Royal Courts of Justice, the National Gallery and the Houses of Parliament. Then there were the restaurants and theatres, department stores and tea shops, and hotels boasting elevators, telephones and electric light in all bedrooms. It was a sightseer’s paradise. The guidebook, London of To-Day, summed up the mood in their 1888 edition:
Since the end of the eighteenth century London has undergone a marvellous change. The monster Metropolis, which is still swelling every year – to which, indeed, many thousand houses, forming several hundred new streets, covering a distance not far short of a hundred miles, were added but a year ago – which is increasing in a way which makes it bewildering to contemplate, not its final limits, but where those limits will reach even in the near future: this monster London is really a new city.13
Of course, not everybody agreed. The writer Ouida argued in an article for Woman’s World in 1888 that:
… for a city which is in some respects the greatest capital of the world, the approaches to London are of singular and painful unsightliness … The streets are dreary, although so peopled; the sellers of fruit or flowers sit huddled in melancholy over their baskets, the costermonger bawls, the newsboy shrieks, the organ-grinders gloomily exhibit a sad-faced monkey or a still sadder little dog; a laugh is rarely heard; the crossing-sweeper at the roadside smells of whisky; a mangy cat steals timidly through the railings of those area-barriers that give to almost every London house the aspect of a menagerie combined with a madhouse … To drive through London anywhere is to feel one’s eyes literally ache with the cruel ugliness and dullness of all things around.14
Nevertheless this new, expanding city required a transport system to match. One by one, the great railway stations were opened: London Bridge (1836), Euston (1837), Paddington (1838), Waterloo (1848), King’s Cross (1852), Victoria (1860) and Charing Cross (1864). Sewers were constructed. Bridges were built over the Thames and tunnels were dug under it. People swarmed from one end of the city to another by foot, bicycle, trains and horse-drawn cabs, omnibuses and trams.15
All this travelling posed increasing danger to the pedestrian, particularly at the busiest intersections. Piccadilly Circus, which was originally a crossroads, stood at the junction of the two major new thoroughfares, Regent Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, the latter being completed in 1886. The great illuminated advertisements were yet to go up, and the statue of Anteros, the Angel of Christian Charity, would not take its place at the centre of Piccadilly Circus for another five years. What it did have was an endless flow of horses, human beings and goods surging and halting under the direction of dedicated police constables determined to prevent everything from toppling into chaos. It was said that:
… at the movement of a gloved hand, a stream of cabs, buses, carts, waggons, barrows, drays, traps, carriages – in fact, every variety of conveyance upon four wheels or two suddenly comes to a standstill, just to allow a lady to pass! The lady has as much right to passage-way as the owner of the proudest horseflesh, and it is on this principle that the policeman acts – everybody in turn.16
In an age before the combustion engine and exhaust fumes, the interchange was filled with the shouts of drivers, clattering hooves and the snorts of horses, with manure dropping from the back end. Every few minutes another omnibus passed through the vortex on its way to Hammersmith, the Strand, Liverpool Street, London Bridge, and West Kensington. This was the heyday of the buses, ‘the most convenient and the cheapest form of travelling from one London street to another’. They ran from early morning to midnight, charging fares of between 1d and 6d depending on distance and time. The first omnibuses, drawn by three horses, travelled between Paddington and Bank and had space for twenty passengers but, in effect, they were little more than a box on wheels with a few windows and a door at the back. By the 1860s the business was dominated by a French-owned outfit, the London General Omnibus Co., but from 1881 they came under increasing pressure the London Road Car Co. The Road Car buses boasted lower fares and more comfortable vehicles, and printed tickets to prevent fraud by conductors. To stand out from the crowd they flew a small Union Jack, a patriotic dig at their rivals. By 1888 the Road Cars were ferrying 22 million passengers a year compared to the London General Omnibus’ 95 million. While this competition meant passengers could travel across London for as little as a penny, it occasionally threatened to turn into a hair-raising race.
When the conductor rang his bell the intelligent horses settled into their collars without any word of command, and the passengers took a sporting interest in the driver’s efforts to pass the omnibus of the rival company; London General Omnibus Company versus the Road Cars with their little fluttering flags. And everywhere under the horses’ noses the nimble orderly boys scuttled about on all fours, with their little scoops and brushes, trying to keep the pavement of our imperial city comparatively clean, and in wet weather failing malodorously.17
A similar scene unfolded on the afternoon of Saturday 4 February 1888, as Augustus Maude boarded a road car at Piccadilly Circus to get home to West Kensington. He climbed to the top deck and took his place at the front looking out over the horses as they headed west towards the most fashionable quarters in London. The famous thoroughfare of Piccadilly lay before him – Wren’s brick Church of St James, Byron’s old rooms in the Albany suites, the Royal Academy at Burlington House, the Arcade, and the Egyptian Hall where Maskelyne conducted his theatrical magic shows. Gathering pace down the slight gradient, the road car settled in a few yards behind a rival London General Omnibus as Green Park opened up on the left-hand side. To the right were the aristocratic windows of the millionaire Angela Burdett-Coutts on the corner of Stratton Street, an ideal viewing platform that, according to Queen Victoria, was ‘the only place where I can go to see the traffic without stopping it’.18 Close to the junction with Half Moon Street, Maude noticed the omnibus in front slow down, as it stopped to allow three ladies get off. The driver of the Road Car pulled his horses on to the wrong side of the road to overtake, slammed into an elderly man crossing the street and ran right over his legs.
Over at No.94 Piccadilly, in a grand building marked out with a distinctive ‘In’ and ‘Out’ on its entrance and exit gates, Lord Charles Beresford was enjoying a leisurely afternoon at the Naval and Military Club. ‘Charlie B’, as he was known, was the Irish second son of the Marquess of Waterford and an MP who had only three weeks earlier resigned from his post as Junior Sea Lord of the Admiralty in protest at what he saw as Britain’s ill-preparedness for war. By contrast, he was admirably prepared for action on this occasion. On hearing the commotion outside the club, he strode to the scene of the accident, put the injured man in a cab and sent him to St George’s Hospital on Hyde Park Corner.
The injured man was James Langley, a sixty-eight-year-old widower who had been walking through Green Park and was crossing the road to get home to Shepherd Market in Mayfair. His accident featured in a long list published by a weekly newspaper, which included: a woman run over by a Road Car near Westminster Abbey; a four-year-old boy who knocked a kettle of boiling water over himself; a man who fell into a tub of boiling water at work; a boy whose hand was crushed at a printing machine; the suicide of a young watchmaker’s wife using cyanide; and a dock worker whose legs were crushed by a heavy case. Sadly, James Langley would not recover. Surgeons amputated one of his broken legs but the shock to his body was too great and he died two days later. It had been a successful life. He had been born and married in Berkshire but in his twenties had moved to London to make his way in the world. By 1881 he was a master carpenter employing five men. On his death, he left a personal estate of £650 to his eldest son, Isaac.
Every year nearly 150 people were run over and killed in London, and more than 4,500 were injured.19 The overwhelming majority of deaths did not result in criminal proceedings, the modern charge of causing death by dangerous or reckless driving being unavailable until 1956. It was murder, manslaughter or nothing. In the case of James Langley the inquest jury returned a verdict of accidental death, but at the Police Court the prosecution argued that the omnibuses were racing down the hill at up to 10mph in an attempt to be the first to pick up passengers. The magistrate sent the driver of the Road Car omnibus to trial for manslaughter at the Old Bailey. On 2 March 1888, Walter Prescott, twenty-eight, was acquitted after a number of witnesses, including passenger Augustus Maude, testified that the buses were not racing and that the driver had done all he could to avoid an accident after the vehicle in front pulled up suddenly without warning. He may have been guilty of negligence, the judge remarked, but it was not gross criminal negligence.20
The competition for fares between rival drivers was so fierce that it occasionally erupted into physical violence. Frederick Sheward, forty-three, was well known among other Hansom cab drivers for constantly complaining that they had been ‘rubbing up’ against his vehicle. On Saturday 22 September he returned to the busy stand in Charing Cross Road at 10 p.m. to find his paintwork had been scratched. This time he picked on fifty-year-old James Williamson, a ‘rigger’ who looked after the cabs on the rank.
‘Look at my cab, it is disgraceful, it is always the same every night as I come back,’ Sheward ranted.
‘I have not done it, I have to look after my living,’ replied Williamson. ‘It must have been done elsewhere.’
‘You ought to be ashamed,’ continued Sheward.
The argument went back and forth for several minutes until another cab driver, Henry Matthews, decided to intervene and shouted, ‘Leave the old man alone.’
Sheward replied, ‘Mind your own business, what has that to do with you?’
Matthews then got off his own vehicle, walked up to Sheward and punched him in the face, giving him a bloody nose. This delighted Williamson, who began cheering and taunting Sheward, ‘You’ve got what you deserve you bloody monkey.’
As Matthews left in his cab, Williamson and Sheward continued to argue. Williamson was threatening to hit the other man with his walking stick. ‘I’ll knock your bloody head off.’
At this, Sheward hit Williamson in the face, knocking him to the ground near the junction with Great Newport Street. ‘Take that,’ he added, before walking off.
Williamson, who was unconscious and bleeding from a head wound, was placed into a cab and taken to Charing Cross Hospital at around 11.15 p.m. An hour later he suffered two epileptic fits. Williamson died that morning and a post-mortem revealed he had suffered a fracture at the base of his skull and brain damage from hitting his head on the ground as he fell.
Sheward was arrested at his home in south Lambeth at 6.40 a.m. on 23 September by Detective Sergeant Henry Scott.
‘I have come to see you with respect to a man who was knocked down last night,’ said Detective Scott.
‘Yes, he was messing about my horse’s head,’ replied Sheward. ‘He struck me first, and I struck him.’
Sheward was put on trial for manslaughter at the Old Bailey the following month but was acquitted after several witnesses admitted that Williamson was a ‘quarrelsome man’. Another cab driver, William Andrews, also told the court that Williamson struck out at Sheward with his walking stick before being knocked down. By contrast Sheward was said to have an ‘excellent character as an honest, sober and peaceful man’.21
While most of the busiest roads were to be found in the centre of London, crossing the street in an era before traffic lights and zebra crossings posed dangers to the pedestrian all over the city. One guidebook for tourists noted that:
Crossing, although a matter that has been lately much facilitated by the judicious erection of what may be called ‘refuges’, and by the stationing of police constables at many of the more dangerous points, still requires care and circumspection … One of the most fatal errors is to attempt the crossing in an undecided frame of mind, while hesitation or a change of plan midway is ruinous.
However, it added that, ‘to the wayfarer London is the safest promenade in the world’.22
On the evening of Saturday 28 July, Ann Rowley, a seventy-four-year-old widow, was on her way to Peckham after visiting her grandson near Charing Cross. She walked to Westminster and paid 2d to board the tram heading to New Cross. As it reached the High Street opposite Rye Lane the passengers could hear a band playing loudly outside a butcher’s shop, celebrating its first day of business. Ann Rowley stepped off the back of the tram and then went to cross the road behind it. She barely had chance to respond to the rough cry of, ‘Get out of the way’, before a Hansom cab coming the other way slammed into her at 9mph. She was flung 10 yards along the road before the wheel of the cab ran over her right leg. If the driver knew what had happened, he appeared not to care and continued driving.
‘I cried out to the cabman to stop, and ran after him, holloaing as loud as I could,’ recalled one witness, the plumber William Graham. ‘I said to him “Mate, stop! You have run over that woman”.’
The driver had turned round and replied, ‘Go to buggery’, before setting off again with a slash of the reins. Others now joined in the chase and it was only through the force of an outraged mob that the cab was brought to a halt. The driver seemed more concerned about losing his two existing fares than the condition of Ann Rowley.
‘He came back with a great crowd of people,’ remembered another witness. ‘They were all holloaing at him, and there was a great deal of confusion and excitement – he refused to turn the fare out and assist the lady into the cab, and this put the people out.’
Twenty-five-year-old George Ernest Holden was a butcher by trade. Although he was licensed to drive a cab, he had no vehicle of his own and had taken one without permission from the rank in Peckham High Street.23 Most people who saw him that day took the opinion he was ‘silly’ drunk, the kind of condition brought on by two or three glasses of beer. He still hadn’t sobered up by the time he arrived at the shop owned by Ann Rowley’s grandson, Robert Portwine, off St Martin’s Lane. As the lady was taken out of the cab, Holden kept repeating, ‘It was not my fault, missus’, and, perhaps excited to find that Mr Portwine was also a butcher, went around everybody in the premises trying to shake their hand. When he was arrested a few hours later, he was back in the Greyhound pub in Peckham.
Ann Rowley ended up at Charing Cross Hospital with a broken right leg. It was put in splints but two weeks later had to be cut off because the wound wasn’t healing and had begun to rot. She died on 25 August, nearly a month after the accident. The inquest jury returned a verdict of manslaughter against Holden, but following his trial at the Old Bailey, he was found not guilty. Perhaps the jury were swayed by his claim that Mrs Rowley had assured him that it was not his fault. His barrister also made the point that the doctor who first attended the injured lady had not been called to prove that Holden was under the influence of drink. As the Hansom had been driving at a ‘perfectly proper rate of speed’, there was no negligence proved.
Then, as now, the elderly were at particular risk from London traffic. A similar fate met Maria Rider, sixty-seven, on the night of Thursday 19 January 1888, as she tried to cross the busy Borough end of Great Dover Street at the junction with Long Lane. She had made it to the middle of the road, near a traffic island equipped with a urinal, when a van being driven by one horse struck her at around 8mph. She was taken into a nearby shop by a passing ship’s steward and then to hospital where she died on 13 February from head injuries and a subsequent bacterial infection. The driver, Edward Dye, a biscuit dealer en route from London Bridge to the Swan pub 30 yards down the road, had the grace to instantly apologise when stopped by witnesses. He also appeared ‘perfectly sober’ and was driving on the correct side of the road. Dye was acquitted of manslaughter on the evidence that the victim had suddenly stepped into his path.
Children were just as vulnerable to death on the roads. David Cavalier was only a toddler, twenty-two months old, when he was run over in Bethnal Green, east London. It was 8.30 p.m. on Sunday 8 July and he was playing on the pavement outside his home in Warner Place. Further down the road two plain-clothes policemen were patrolling. There was no traffic and all seemed quiet until a horse and cart carrying a woman and child galloped round the corner from Old Bethnal Green Road at around 10mph. Eliza Cavalier, no doubt keeping one eye on her son and one eye on the housework, noticed the boy run into the road just as she heard the clatter of the approaching vehicle. ‘I ran into the road to protect him,’ she recalled. ‘My hand just touched his clothes when I was thrown away by the horse and knocked down and the cart went over me. I was so frightened.’ While Eliza suffered only minor injuries, the wheel of the cart had passed right over her son’s head, fracturing his skull, and he died not long after being taken to the Children’s Hospital in Hackney Road. According to newspaper reports the driver of the cart, fish porter Thomas Tarplett, twenty-five, had been drinking, although he was sober when taken down to the police station. A month later he was cleared of both manslaughter of the child and causing bodily injury to the mother, after witnesses testified that he was a ‘peaceable, steady and well-behaved young man’.24
The only case that resulted in a guilty verdict was that of Elizabeth Gibbs, who was run over on Tuesday 27 December 1887, but who died on 1 January, 1888. Perhaps the driver, Alfred Winwood, was convicted because of the status of his victim – the respectable wife of John Gibbs, a wealthy estate agent who had served as a land steward on the grounds of Bayfordbury Mansion in Hertfordshire, the seat of the wealthy merchants, the Baker family. But it was clear from the evidence that Winwood had also cut the corner of Halkin Street and Grosvenor Place, and was on the wrong side of the road. He also narrowly avoided killing John Gibbs and another pedestrian. As Mr Gibbs explained:
I was just a trifle in front of my wife, and immediately I [had] left the pavement and gone perhaps two or three steps, I suddenly became aware of a two-horse van coming down upon me, so close that I had neither time to think or act … I was knocked down towards the middle of the street … the moment I touched the ground I had presence of mind to swing myself round, and by that means I escaped the wheels.
He got up and found his wife lying in the road, her left arm crushed by the wheel.
When Winwood was flagged down by a postman who had witnessed the accident and told that he had run a woman over, he replied, ‘What the bloody hell has that got to do with me?’ and drove off. It appeared as if he had been drinking. Winwood was also late attending the inquest, and was arrested on a warrant issued by the coroner. He was forty-three, and employed by Messrs Batey’s Mineral Water and Ginger Beer Co. as a delivery driver for the Fulham district. At trial, his defence involved accusing John Gibbs and his wife of ‘contributory negligence’ by not taking more care crossing the road. His punishment for the crime of manslaughter was six months' hard labour, which in 1888 might still have involved ‘picking oakum’, a walk on the treadmill, lifting cannon balls, or sewing. It might have been a longer sentence had the jury not recommended him to the mercy of the court. After his release he returned home to his wife Sarah at a small house in Shoreditch they shared with a family of four, giving his occupation in the 1891 census as ‘traveller’.
As for John Gibbs, widowed so soon into the new year, he placed a death notice in The Times in tribute to his ‘dearly-loved wife’ and spent the rest of his life living with two of his daughters, first at Ebury Street in Belgravia and then in Hampstead. He died in 1905 at the age of eighty-five.25
One final case of interest did not involve horse-drawn transport but the bicycle. By the 1880s the awkward penny farthing had been refined to something similar to the modern bike, with lower seats and a chain connecting the pedals to the wheel. This new ‘safety bicycle’ would grow in popularity during the rest of the century, and there were cheers in the House of Commons in July 1888 when it was announced that bicycles and tricycles would be allowed on all roads in Hyde Park and St James’ Park. The design would be further improved with the pneumatic rubber tyre, invented by John Boyd Dunlop and patented in 1888. But, as with any method of transport, there would be reports of fatal accidents. One night in February that year a hotel landlord, forty-two-year-old John Watney Green, was knocked over by a cyclist in Kenley, Surrey, and died the next day – although the doctor suggested death was actually due to exhaustion and delirium tremens.26
Looking back from the twenty-first century it seems incredible that there was no real ambulance service in 1888. Dedicated horse-drawn carriages had been provided by the Metropolitan Board of Works for carrying fever and smallpox cases to hospital for twenty years, and it was possible to summon them by telegram for a small fee. The medical magazine The Lancet had recommended a centralised service in 1865 but the state of the nineteenth-century communication system (telegram, word of mouth and only a few primitive telephones) meant that it was quicker and easier to commandeer a carriage at the scene. The matter was left to local organisations like the Middlesex Hospital Board, who had a ‘chair and horse’ to transfer the injured from 1877, and the London Hospital who had one from 1881. The St John Ambulance provided carriages during the 1887 Jubilee celebrations, although early paramedics were often branded ‘body snatchers’. London would have to wait for the development of the motor engine before the first centralised ambulance service began in 1907.27