I remember being very surprised to find — in a history lesson — that the rapid expansion of the railways in the nineteenth century was accompanied by a huge increase in the number of horse–drawn vehicles. It seemed counterintuitive, but of course the horses were needed to transfer people and goods from the railway stations to a wide number of local destinations. (At St Pancras station, horses were stabled on several levels: ‘multi-stabled’, as it might be described.)
Horses were of course eventually ‘superseded’ by buses, cars, lorries, (and traction engines on farms before tractors were developed). However, when I was growing up in the 1940s and 50s, horse–drawn coal lorries were still a common sight. The ‘lorries’ were flat trucks without sides: the sacks of coal lined up in rows, and kept in position by their own weight. This was domestic coal, and was unceremoniously delivered straight from the sack into the house cellars through the ‘coal hole’ — a circular manhole cover. This was backbreaking work for the coal men, and raised a considerable amount of coal dust, but no one thought about health and safety then… (This, however, was nothing compared to the work of the coal–heavers of the nineteenth century. Coal from the north–east delivered by boat to the Thames had to manually unloaded, and the constitution of the men engaged in this work was soon broken beyond hope of recovery.)
Another common horse–drawn vehicle was that of the rag and bone man. Probably these were the last horses put to commercial street work, and they were still around — in London at least — in the 1970s. The last I saw was in Belsize Square in 1978; though I should really say, the last I heard, because these men had an extraordinary — almost uncanny — ‘cry’, capable of penetrating to the back rooms of the most solidly built houses. The sight and sound of these ‘barrel scraping’ street traders had probably not change for 150 years. How useful they would now be as recycling merchants!
The only other horse–drawn vehicle that I saw — and that just once in London in the early 1950s — was a milk float. I had never seen such a thing in Sussex or Kent, though I do not know how common they were in other parts of the country. I was much intrigued by the sight, and even as a child it struck me as belonging to a much earlier era. So it did; and if we are considering the broader aspects of social and political history, then dates are comparatively arbitrary. In such terms, there was no ending of the nineteenth century and no beginning of the twentieth. There can of course be no symbiotic relationship between the past and the present, and yet it may be said that the present consists substantially of the past — that is to say, the past recast.
This toy obviously represents a very early form of horse–drawn coal cart, and would not have formed part of the coal man's son's toys! (assuming he had any).
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It is interesting how many metaphors and figures of speech remain from the eras of horse and steam power. This, for example, from an Australian report: ‘APS job cuts - Navy tries to steam roll ahead.’ In addition, we talk of people ‘letting off steam’, or of projects ‘running out of steam’. Moreover, a little though illustrates that these forms of speech are not so easily replaced. Try ‘letting off gas’, ‘running out of petrol’, or ‘heavy–lorrying’ legislation through. None of these work at all — even though the others have become clichéd. And consider this: ‘Most electric locomotives weigh between 100 and 200 short tons (90 and 180 metric tons) and provide about 6000 to 7000 horsepower (4500 to 5200 kilowatts).’ Horsepower in a nuclear age!
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