Horse traction in Victorian London

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2005 by Turvey, Ralph

The reason why the tram horses were worked out sooner than omnibus horses was 'the greater effort required to start a tramway car . . . together with the greater frequency of the stoppages'.16 Furthermore 'so much greater is his effort that it costs a shilling a week more to feed him'.17 Service life was a business decision:

Experience, or rather a combination of circumstances, has led coach proprietors to the same result; but they have reasoned a step further, and found it more profitable to double the quantity of labour here assigned for the day's work of a horse, and to wear the horse out in three or four years. The difference between the interest that will return the excess of capital expended in the [more frequent replacement] purchase of fresh horses, and the annual expense of keeping a greater number of them [to do the same total amount of work] is too great to allow the proprietor of three or 400 coach horses to hesitate about 130 of them in a year being sacrificed. It is a melancholy reflection to recollect, that there is at all times in this country several thousand of horses wearing down under excess of labour.18

Steam competition

Before the introduction of steam locomotion, thousands of waggons, mostly drawn by six or eight horses, entered or left London each week.19 The total number of horses in the country as a whole used in coaching was over 150,000-about one horse per mile of route. Coachmen, guards, storekeepers, ostlers, clerks at booking offices, porters, assistants, etc., were upwards of 30,000. The number of stage and mail coaches was not over 4,000, some 700 of them being mails. William Chaplin was the largest owner, occupying five yards and having 1,300 horses at work in coaches. B. W. Home and Edward Sherman were the two next largest proprietors, with about 700 each.20 However, as early as the year ending January 1845 'short' stage coaches had been abandoned and the railways had driven all the long ones from the road except about fifty, but there were at least 1,400 omnibuses.21 Charles Collins, a coach proprietor on the London and Blackheath road, had been increasing the number of his coaches until 1834, when the introduction of steam vessels diminished their number, which by 1837 had fallen by half:

they run in the summer season, a time when we calculate on making our profit. The steam vessels certainly took away nearly all our profit. . . since that time the railway has so much diminished the number of passengers by our coaches, that it is impossible for all those that are now working to be kept on.22

Before these changes, coach and waggon traffic in and out of London, passing through the turnpikes which surrounded it, must have been very considerable, but then the character of such traffic changed. According to the chairman of the Metropolitan Road Commissioners, who looked at the matter in terms of turnpike revenue, in 1856:

Half the horses in London never see a turnpike gate. Take the brewers in the London traffic, and other tradesmen; there are hardly any, I believe, go out of London; a very limited number of brewers' carts go out of London; the same as to coals and as to the job horses. The principal horses that come through the tolls are for what is called the long traffic. I believe [it] may be divided into pretty nearly four heads in London. The first and largest is the omnibuses; then there are the vans from the railroads, and other commercial traffic, which now form a very large item, say £12,000 a year; next the agricultural. I suppose what with hay, straw, market gardenings, and other things which come to London, they pay £12,000 a year. Then perhaps the smallest division is what is called pleasure traffic: gentlemen's carriages, riding on horseback, and other things, which is very little towards the east end of town.23