hansom

A Hansom cab adding character to the filming of a costume drama.

Hansom cabs were light, fast and low-slung.

A Hansom cab on display in the Mossman Collection, Luton, England.

A Hansom cab is a kind of horse-drawn carriage first designed and patented in 1834 by Joseph Hansom, an architect from Hinckley, Leicestershire, England. Originally known as the Hansom Safety Cab, its purpose was to combine speed with safety, with a low center of gravity that was essential for safe cornering. Hansom's original design was heavily altered by 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 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 1920's, when cheap automobile transport and the construction of reliable mass-transport systems led to a decline in usage. The last license for a horse-drawn cab in London was issued in 1947.

In popular culture

• 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:

• 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 usually makes up most of the facts.

See also

• Cart
• Taxicab

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)

External links

• [1] The Sherlock Holmes Museum's Hansom Cab.
• [2] Project Gutenberg's text of Fergus Hume's 'The Mystery of a Hansom Cab'.
• [3] Official abstract from L.R. King's A Monstrous Regiment of Women featuring a cab-driving scene.

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