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February 2008 • VOLUME 30 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
We cannot understand our present if we do not understand our past. While intellectually we know the horse was an integral part of our civilization and our history, never has anything published brought that home at such a completely different level of understanding than the book THE HORSE-WORLD OF LONDON. This is a must-read book for every horseman from every discipline, from western to dressage from jumping to polo . But not only for every horseman but every human being, to truly understand how much of our civilization, and the incredible debt, that we owe these horses.
Each month we will bring a new chapter of The Horse World of London, an incredible look into life and a past that is a part of all of us. In this first chapter we get to see into the life of the omnibus horse, 10,000 of which are estimated to have been in London at any one time, with two out of three dying while in service. The majority were mares, big, strong and gentle, who moved over 190,000,000 passengers in a year from place to place throughout London. This was life before real buses. The Horse World of LONDON BY W.J.GORDON 1893
CHAPTER I - THE OMNIBUS HORSE CHAPTER II - THE CAB HORSE CHAPTER III - THE CARRIER'S HORSE CHAPTER IV - THE POST-OFFICE HORSE CHAPTER V - THE VESTRY HORSE CHAPTER VI - THE BREWER'S HORSE CHAPTER VII - THE QUEEN'S HORSE CHAPTER VIII - THE CARRIAGE HORSE CHAPTER IX - THE JOBMASTER'S HORSE CHAPTER X - THE COAL HORSE CHAPTER XI - THE BLACK BRIGADE CHAPTER XII - THE CAVALRY HORSE CHAPTER XIII - THE SALE YARD CHAPTER XIV - THE DONKEY MART CHAPTER XV - THE END Chapter 1 - The Omnibus Horse THE HORSE-WORLD OF LONDON CHAPTER I THE OMNIBUS HORSE THE omnibuses are the most characteristic feature of London; and they increase, while the cabs decrease. What London would be like without them a recent strike gave us the opportunity of knowing, and there can be no doubt that from an aesthetic point of view its streets would be considerably improved. But the omnibus is for use, not for beauty; it exists for the convenience of the many. It is a money-making machine, and it looks it, with its crowd of passengers, who pay up amongst them some forty-four shillings a day for its hire, as they sit between screens of patchy advertisements, which add a shilling a day to its takings, and spoil every attempt at improving its form and decoration.
We shudder, however, at the thought of depriving a poor man of his omnibus, and for a writer on horses to even hint at such a thing is peculiarly ungrateful, inasmuch as the London General Omnibus Company are the greatest users of living horse power in London. They have, in round numbers, ten thousand horses, working a thousand omnibuses, travelling twenty million miles in a year, and carrying one hundred and ten million passengers. In other words, every omnibus travels not sixty miles an hour, but sixty miles a day, and every horse travels twelve miles a day. And as an omnibus earns a little over eightpence-halfpenny a mile, and the average fare paid by each passenger is a little under three-halfpence, it follows that each omnibus picks up six passengers every mile.
In practice, a fifth of the omnibuses are daily at rest or under repair, and allowing for these, each vehicle carries thirty-nine passengers during a journey, so that, with its accommodation for twenty-six, three passengers enter and leave for every two of its seats. The average number in an omnibus at any one time is given as fourteen, and averaging these passengers at ten stone apiece, and throwing in the driver and conductor, we get a ton of live weight, to which we can add the ton and a half which the omnibus weighs, making up two-and-a-half tons for the pair to draw, and thus we arrive at the easily-remembered formula that the London omnibus horse draws a ton and a quarter twelve miles a day. He draws this at the rate of five miles an hour; he is bought when he is five years old; he works five years; he costs 35/- to buy and half-a-sovereign a week to feed; he is sold for a £5. note; and lastly, and by no means less importantly, 'he is not a horse, but a mare.'
Most of these mares are English, some of them are Irish, only a few of them are foreign - that is, according to the dealer, if he can be trusted in his verbal guarantee of nationality. And although the omnibus is of French extraction, and the London company has a French offshoot, it is curious that there is so little avowedly foreign about either the omnibus or its horseflesh. But the omnibus has always been fostered by the unexpected, even before the public fastened onto 'Entreprise générale des omnibus,' and insisted on giving the vehicle the last word. Who would expect that Blaise Pascal, the philosopher, was the first patentee of the omnibus? It seems more incongruous than that the hansom should have been first patented by the architect of Birmingham Town Hall and of Arundel Roman Catholic chapel. Who would have expected that any new vehicle for the living would be introduced by an undertaker ?
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