Horse traction in Victorian London

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

Taking the example of bus and tram horses, quantities and costs are shown in Table 9. Maize, first purchased by the LGOC in 1862, had largely replaced oats by 1876, though their relative shares varied through time in response to changes in their relative prices. Maize was also substituted for beans when they rose in price (though not for the horses in infirmaries).40 Sawdust or peat was sometimes used instead of straw as bedding. Such price-induced substitutions made total provender cost fluctuate less than the prices of its components, though substitution was less marked in the case of brewers' splendid horses, which always had to have the best (Table 9).

Figure 2 shows the generally downward trend in provender cost from the 186Os onward; note the difference between provender costs for brewery (Truman Hanbury & Buxton) and bus (North Metropolitan) horses. Fluctuations around this trend reflected harvest variations, such as the extraordinarily poor hay harvests in 1892 and 1893.

Horse prices

Horse prices are difficult to obtain and to analyse because horses are so heterogeneous. Most of the factors determining the price that a particular horse will fetch are neither quantifiable nor even very clearly defined; experts were better at recognising quality than at describing it. Certainly, buyers who knew their business needed to spend quite a bit of time inspecting possible purchases. As a purchaser for the army put it, 'Purchasing horses is laborious work, and by the time that twenty-five or thirty have been examined, passed, and registered, the officers employed will have exhausted much power, both of eye and brain.'41

Size and age, which are quantifiable, were obviously important for any general class of horse. The effect of age is indicated by the average prices paid by Whitbread & Co. over the years 1881-1900, as calculated from a large sample of the purchases recorded in their horse book. These were £75 for four-year-olds (few in number), £79 for five-year-olds, £76 for six-year-olds and £70 for seven-year-olds.42 Lower prices were paid for mares.

Nearly all the available records of individual horse purchases, however, are limited to the prices paid, without any description of the animals. The use of mean prices thus entails the hope that nearly all the purchases were of the same type of horse, and it is difficult to know how far such was the case. Thus in 1855, while the Engineer's Department of the North Eastern Railway bought six horses at a uniform price of £50 8s, nineteen horses were bought for the Traffic Department at prices ranging from £25 to £80, an average price of £38 16s.43 In such cases the use of median prices may serve to cut out horses that were different, such as the odd horse bought for a gig to draw a foreman from one stable to another.

The prices paid by commercial purchasers varied a good deal. Figures 3 and 4 display information although they exclude the facts that Barclay Perkins paid fifty guineas for its dray horses in 1837 and 1838, similar to what Courage & Co. paid in the mid-1850s,44 and the book value of Truman Hanbury & Buxton's horses lay around £35 in the years 1837-43, falling to an average of £23 in the years 1849-52.45 Since the number of horses owned was not falling, this decline probably reflects a reduction in the prices that the firm paid for its horses, although its precise timing could be ascertained only if the depreciation method used were known.