World Wide Words -- 25 Jun11

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 742          Saturday 25 June 2011
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Author/editor: Michael Quinion      US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org               ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Article: Your carriage awaits, Mr Holmes.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOLIDAY BREAK  I am taking a break until 9 July. Until then, I'm 
reprinting each week revised versions of some pieces that first 
appeared in my book Gallimaufry.


2. Article: Your carriage awaits, Mr Holmes
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So many investigations began with a carriage pulling up outside 
221b Baker Street:

    As he spoke there was the sharp sound of horses' hoofs 
    and grating wheels against the curb, followed by a sharp 
    pull at the bell. Holmes whistled. "A pair, by the 
    sound," said he. "Yes," he continued, glancing out of the 
    window. "A nice little brougham and a pair of beauties. A 
    hundred and fifty guineas apiece. There's money in this 
    case, Watson, if there is nothing else." 
    [A Scandal In Bohemia, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 
    first published in the Strand Magazine in July 1891.]

It definitely had to be a man of means driving that brougham - it 
was a private conveyance for the socially advantaged, not only for 
"dukes and marquises, and people of that sort", as Household Words 
(in the person of Charles Dickens) noted in 1851, but also for 
members of the prosperous middle classes; if you called in a 
society doctor for a home consultation, it was a fair bet that he 
would arrive in a brougham. It was a one- or two-horse closed four-
wheeled carriage, compact and manoeuvrable, the horse-era 
equivalent of a town car. Its name commemorates a former Lord 
Chancellor, the Scotsman Henry Brougham, later the first Baron 
Brougham and Vaux, brilliant and genial man, famous in his time but 
forgotten now, except in Cannes, where he spent every winter and 
was largely responsible for developing it into a resort.

Whenever Holmes and Watson needed to rush off to some exotic 
location, such as Norwood or Leatherhead, their first action was 
frequently the same as modern men in a hurry - they called a cab. 
These were horse-driven, of course: motorized ones didn't appear in 
any numbers in London until 1905. "Cab" was a contraction of 
cabriolet, a light two-wheeled vehicle drawn by one horse that had 
been around since the middle of the seventeenth century in France, 
but which had first appeared for hire in London in 1823 (and which 
were being called "cabs" by 1827 at the latest). The name shares an 
origin with the ballet leap "cabriole"; both derive from French 
"cabrioler", to leap in the air like a goat, which was taken from 
Latin "caper", a goat, which is also the origin of our verb to leap 
about in a lively or playful way. The French called the carriage a 
"cabriole" because of its curious bouncy motion. Conan Doyle never 
uses the full term in the Sherlock Holmes stories, since by the 
time he was writing, near the end of the nineteenth century, 
"cabriolet" was rare. Its abbreviation had been generalized to 
refer to a number of vehicles, both two- and four-wheeled, that had 
in common that they were available for hire on the street.

The classic one, which is familiar to anyone who has ever seen a 
period film or television programme, was the hansom. This had been 
invented by the architect Joseph Hansom, who also founded The 
Builder magazine and designed Birmingham Town Hall and numerous 
churches, some in partnership with Edward Pugin. He patented his 
safety cab on 23 December 1834, with the intention of making a 
existing two-wheeled vehicle safer by preventing it tipping over 
after an accident. His vehicles were built on a square framework on 
two wheels each 7ft6ins in diameter. The hansom cabs in the 
Sherlock Holmes stories didn't actually incorporate many of 
Hansom's ideas but they kept his name. The cabman sat high up at 
the back - in the open air, as all drivers did at the period - and 
talked to his passengers through a small hatch in the roof. The 
passengers weren't altogether protected from the weather, either:

    You observe that you have some splashes on the left 
    sleeve and shoulder of your coat. Had you sat in the 
    centre of a hansom you would probably have had no 
    splashes, and if you had they would certainly have been 
    symmetrical. Therefore it is clear that you sat at the 
    side. Therefore it is equally clear that you had a 
    companion.
    [The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, in the 
    Strand Magazine, Dec. 1911.]

A four-wheeled cab based on the brougham was named the clarence, 
after the then Duke of Clarence, later William IV, but acquired the 
slang name of growler, from the noise its steel-rimmed wheels made 
on the road. Holmes, as befits a man who could identify 140 
varieties of tobacco ash, was familiar with the type and applied 
his deductive skills:

    I satisfied myself that it was a cab and not a private 
    carriage by the narrow gauge of the wheels. The ordinary 
    London growler is considerably less wide than a 
    gentleman's brougham.
    [A Study in Scarlet, 1888, Conan Doyle's first 
    Sherlock Holmes story. Perhaps surprisingly in view of 
    his later popularity, he had great trouble placing it 
    with a publisher.]

A slightly larger version had four wheels and so was boringly known 
as a four-wheeler; it features in another story, in which the 
wonderfully named Mr Hosmer Angel disappears:

    Hosmer came for us in a hansom, but as there were two 
    of us he put us both into it and stepped himself into a 
    four-wheeler, which happened to be the only other cab in 
    the street.
    [A Case of Identity, in the Strand Magazine, Aug. 
    1891.]

Types and makes of horse-drawn carriages were then as varied as 
makes of car are today. Among others Conan Doyle has his heroes 
travel in are the gig:

    I had descended from my gig and was standing in front 
    of him, when I saw his eyes fix themselves over my 
    shoulder, and stare past me with an expression of the 
    most dreadful horror.
    [The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902.]

A gig was a light two-wheeled one-horse open carriage, in word-
history terms a flighty girl, since that was a much older sense, 
itself borrowed from a more literal sense of something that 
whirled, such as one of those old children's tops that were spun by 
whipping them with a string. The trap was a variant of the gig, 
whose distinguishing feature was that it was on springs to ease the 
ride, not always successfully to judge from the creation in the 
1830s of rattle-trap for a vehicle that gave a rough ride.

Another two-wheeler was the dog-cart, with open seats placed back 
to back across the body of the vehicle, given that name because at 
one time it incorporated a box under the seat for sportsmen's dogs. 
The wagonette was a larger cart with four wheels and a seat or 
bench at each side facing inwards:

    The train pulled up at a small wayside station and we 
    all descended. Outside, beyond the low, white fence, a 
    wagonette with a pair of cobs was waiting.
    [The Hound of the Baskervilles. A "cob" was a short-
    legged, stout variety of horse, probably from the old 
    word meaning stout, rounded, or sturdy that's also the 
    source of "cobnut", another name for a hazelnut.]

Conan Doyle was unusual among writers of his time in mentioning so 
many types of vehicle. But there were lots of others. This 
description of Derby Day at Epsom shows how varied conveyances were 
at the time:

    All ranks and conditions of men and women are jumbled 
    together on the Course; even as all ranks and kinds of 
    vehicles are visible on the road, from the regimental 
    drag of the 90th Hussars to the spring-cart of the small 
    East-End tradesman, who drives down his wife and "missus" 
    for a day's outing; from the open landau, - with four 
    spanking greys, and postilions in blue jackets, 
    buckskins, and white silk hints, - to the free and 
    independent costermonger, with his pal in the "shallow," 
    tranquilly piloting  his "little 'oss," or, perchance, 
    his donkey, through the seething throng.
    [London Up to Date, by George Augustus Sala, 1895.]

The drag (in full, park drag) was a private version of the road 
coach or stagecoach, pulled by four matched horses and with seating 
on top; a spring-cart was a fast little passenger vehicle with two 
wheels supported on springs, hence the name; a shallow was the cart 
from which a costermonger sold his produce, with a flat space for 
goods behind the driver's seat, which had room for a passenger. The 
landau, a very posh conveyance as you may gather, appears in just 
one Sherlock Holmes story:

    Away they went, and I was just wondering whether I 
    should not do well to follow them when up the lane came a 
    neat little landau, the coachman with his coat only half-
    buttoned, and his tie under his ear, while all the tags 
    of his harness were sticking out of the buckles. It 
    hadn't pulled up before she shot out of the hall door and 
    into it. I only caught a glimpse of her at the moment, 
    but she was a lovely woman, with a face that a man might 
    die for.
    [A Scandal in Bohemia, 1891. The woman is, of course, 
    Irene Adler.]

The landau could be pulled by four horses (a four-in-hand, from the 
four sets of reins held by the driver), though two was more common. 
It was low-slung, with four seats facing each other in pairs, 
usually open but with folding tops front and rear that could be 
raised and closed together in bad weather. The landau was an 
excellent vehicle for being seen in, which is why it features in so 
many pictures of royalty or lord mayors in ceremonial processions 
even today. It's named after Landau in Germany, where it was 
invented in the eighteenth century. 

A related vehicle makes a fleeting appearance in another tale:

    Within a quarter of an hour we saw the big open yellow 
    barouche coming down the long avenue, with two splendid, 
    high-stepping gray carriage horses in the shafts.
    [The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place, first published 
    in the Strand Magazine in April, 1927.]

The barouche was just as posh as the landau but it had just the one 
folding top, at the rear, with the two backward-facing seats behind 
the driver open to the elements. The name comes from the German 
dialect word "Barutsche" that derives via Italian from Latin 
"birotus", two-wheeled. Along the etymological route from Latin two 
extra wheels were added, which reminds us not to rely on a word's 
history for its meaning. The barouche was a development of the 
"calash" of the previous century, whose name comes from the Polish 
"kolasa", meaning a wheeled-carriage. It was definitely a vehicle 
to aspire to, as was made clear a century earlier:

    His mother wished to interest him in political 
    concerns, to get him into parliament, or to see him 
    connected with some of the great men of the day. Mrs John 
    Dashwood wished it likewise; but in the mean while, till 
    one of these superior blessings could be attained, it 
    would have quieted her ambition to see him driving a 
    barouche.
    [Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen, 1811.]

The phaeton was a light, open, four-wheeled vehicle, a dashing and 
speedy type, the sports car of Victorian days, dangerous in the 
wrong hands. Appropriately, it was named after the Greek Phaethon, 
son of Helios the sun-god, who got into such difficulties while 
driving his father's chariot of the sun. The stanhope and the 
tilbury (named after its inventor, not the place in Essex) were 
fashionable versions. It is absent from the Sherlock Holmes stories 
but appears in a contemporary detective story:

    By this time his elegant mail phaeton, with its 
    magnificent horses and Indian servant on the seat behind 
    was as well-known as Her Majesty's state equipage, and 
    attracted almost as much attention.
    [The Duchess of Wiltshire's Diamonds by Guy Boothby, 
    1897, anthologised in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes by 
    Sir Hugh Green, 1970. Boothby was an Australian writer, 
    who published more than 50 books after settling in 
    England in 1894, most of which have been forgotten. The 
    mail-phaeton was a two-seater version drawn by a pair of 
    horses, so named because it used springs designed for use 
    on fast mail coaches.]

One of the odder names for a conveyance was "fly". This was a light 
vehicle, a one-horse covered carriage. It had been introduced at 
Brighton in 1816 and had at first been drawn by men, presumably 
being something like a rickshaw. Later, a horse was used instead, 
when the name came to refer to a small vehicle for hire. The Oxford 
English Dictionary conjectures that its name was short for "fly-by-
night". As a linguistic curiosity, the verb "fly" also existed, 
meaning to travel by a fly; unlike the more common sense, its past 
tense was regular: "Tuesday, Poole flied us all the way to Sir T 
Acland's Somersetshire seat of Holnicot."

    The spectators reluctantly trooped out, the jurymen 
    stood up and stretched themselves, and the two 
    constables, under the guidance of the sergeant, carried 
    the wretched Draper in a fainting condition to a closed 
    fly that was waiting outside.
    [The Man With The Nailed Shoes, by R Austin Freeman. 
    1909. Another almost forgotten writer, his stories 
    featured the medico-legal forensic investigator Dr John 
    Thorndyke, a more plausible and sober rival of Sherlock 
    Holmes.]

Conan Doyle might also have mentioned the victoria (named after Her 
Gracious Majesty), a four-wheeled pleasure carriage for two with a 
folding top and a raised seat in front for the driver; the sociable 
(short for sociable-coach), a larger vehicle for pleasure trips, a 
cross between a barouche and a victoria; the governess-cart, a 
light two-wheeled vehicle with seats face to face at the sides (not 
by any means always used by governesses); and the brake or shooting 
brake, a country vehicle for a driver, gamekeeper and up to six 
sportsmen, with their dogs, guns and game borne along the sides in 
slatted racks.

Some terms for horse-drawn carriages have since been borrowed by 
the makers of motor cars. In Britain, "shooting brake" is an old-
fashioned term for an estate car or station wagon, with cargo space 
at the rear. A cabriolet can now be a type of car with a roof that 
folds down. A coupé was originally a short four-wheeled closed 
carriage with an inside seat for two, so called because it was a 
cut-down vehicle.


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