Horse traction in Victorian London

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

The figures for taxes on horses for other years than those given above are available only for England and Wales as a whole; in any case, the horse duty was abolished in 1874. Thus taxation data were unavailable to W. J. Gordon, who presented estimates for 1893 (Table 7) in his enjoyable book The Horse World of London. Unfortunately the derivation of the grand total ('All horses'), as explained in the bottom row, does not instil great confidence!

The costs of horsepower

The price paid for a horse, less the price obtained when it was cast or sold dead, spread over its service life to obtain the annual equivalent, plus the similarly annuitised cost of stables and the rates on them, constituted its annual capital cost. (For firms horsing their own vehicles, the cost of the yard would be a joint cost and cannot be divided between horses and vehicles.) Current costs consisted of provender, i.e. fodder and bedding, the pay of the workers who looked after the horses, and shoeing. (On average London horses required a shoe every week, and in winter there was the additional cost of roughing the shoes to stop the horses slipping on icy surfaces.) All these costs were included in Bradfield's 1853 estimates for omnibuses presented above. For the current costs of brewery dray horses Truman Hanbury & Buxton's accounts permit calculation of their composition over the period 1837-64 (Table 8).

Fodder accounted for the major part of provender costs. A horse could live on hay and grass alone, but eating time and bulk both had to be reduced for a working horse. Many horses were fed with chaff, i.e. hay cut with straw. It saved hay, both because of the admixture of straw and because the waste from hay being dropped and trodden into the litter was avoided. Also, chaff took less time to eat, so horses settled down to rest sooner. Peas, beans or carrots also formed part of the diet, plus corn, i.e. oats or maize. Maize was regarded by some as an acceptable substitute for oats only for horses doing moderate and regular work, as it 'makes flesh and fat but not muscle'; moreover the fact that it makes horses smell strongly caused maize to be avoided in private stables.37 The first part, at least, of this statement was an opinion rather than an established fact, but much of established wisdom on the care of horses was based on trial and error; controlled experiments and measurements were almost unknown in the horse world. Certainly a vet writing in 1882 referred to 'tables of calculation founded upon experiment' from which 'it has been ascertained that the greatest advantage in the employment of horse-power is obtained when the hours of labour are increased and the pace correspondingly diminished' but, like most authors on the subject of horses, he provided no reference.38

The factors determining the quantity and variety of fodder were age, physical condition, the time of year and the quality of the food. In addition, size and the amount of work done were the major determinants. Thus, as Gordon put it, 'a corn-chandler will forage your horse at threepence an inch of height per week' and, while there was no expressed equivalent of miles per gallon, horses that worked all day were given more food than horses that were resting.39