Free The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London by Judith Flanders

short-stages appeared, they continued to wait at inns and taverns, in great part because of the availability of stabling for the horses and, to a lesser degree, for the convenience of the drivers and conductors; by the time buses arrived, it simply seemed to be the order of things that public transport stops were near hostelries. 35
    While no one knew any longer how they had managed without this splendid system of transportation, they found plenty to complain about nonetheless. The bus conductor, in top hat and with a flower in his buttonhole, stood one-footed on a tiny step beside the door at the rear, raised about a third of the way up the bus so that he could see whether seats were vacant on top, and could tell new passengers which side to climb up. He also leant over, when crinolines were in fashion, to hold down the women’s hoops as they squeezed through the narrow doorway. Otherwise he swayed in place, holding on to a leather strap hanging by his shoulder and taking fares from departing passengers, his eyes always darting to find the next, as passengers hailed the buses anywhere along their routes.
    Initially, there were no tickets and thus no check on the takings, apart from the word of the cad and the driver; they both therefore had a great incentive to stop for as many passengers as possible while admitting to the bare minimum at the end of the day. Wits claimed that perfectly innocent pedestrians were virtually kidnapped by the cads: they could, said a character in Sketches by Boz , ‘chuck an old gen’lm’n into the buss, shut him in, and rattle off, afore he knows where it’s a-going to’. For the same reason, no cads ever admitted to being full up: ‘Plenty o’ room, sir,’ they cried jovially, shouting ‘All right,’ and thumping on the roof to signal the driver to move off so the passenger couldn’t jump down when he saw that he would more or less have to sit on someone’s lap. Or, as Sophia Beale, a doctor’s young daughter from Kensington, wrote in 1850, ‘he...shouts“Kilburne, Kilburne, come along mam, sixpence all the way” then he stops and runs back and pulls the lady along and stuffs her in and slams the door and begins to shout again “Kilburne, sixpence all the way”.’ That is, he did so until it rained, and then he charged passengers extra, from which he creamed off the surplus. A snowfall made matters even worse: an extra horse was needed for each bus, and that, together with the increased feed and hay prices in bad weather, sent fares up to 9d.
    The drivers also competed for fares. An ‘old gentleman elevates his cane in the air, and runs with all his might towards our omnibus; we watch his progress with great interest’, Dickens had a passenger report in Sketches by Boz ; ‘the door is opened to receive him, he suddenly disappears – he has been spirited away by the opposition.’ This was comedy, but court records indicate that many drivers raced along the streets to get ahead of the other buses and increase their chance of finding passengers: reckless driving was a regular charge. In 1844, two drivers were sentenced to a month’s hard labourafter a policeman testified to seeing them galloping down Regent Street; when they reached Pall Mall, one forced the other on to the pavement, where, nothing daunted, he continued at speed ‘for some time’. However, once a system of tickets was instituted, the complaints were the reverse: that the drivers dawdled along, while the cads became wilfully blind, ‘indifferent to shouts, threats, and entreaties of those who hail them from the road’, since they made no profit from the increased work.

    At places like Holborn Hill, before the Viaduct was built across the steep Fleet Valley, bus companies stabled extra horses to harness on to each bus before it began the ascent. Mud, ice, rain and snow all made accidents more likely.
    Even when drivers behaved responsibly, the streets of London, the weather and technology all made