Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (19 page)

The route proved such a hit that by the 1930s, this was one of the busiest stations in the capital, and the single-deckers were replaced by two-tier trams - which meant the tunnel roof had to be raised. After the Second World War the popularity of trams went into decline, as the bus became the new boss on London’s streets. The Kingsway Tunnel station finally closed in July 1952, after a week of nostalgic farewell celebrations across the capital. Photos from the time show Londoners queuing round the block to secure their seat on the last trams to criss-cross the capital. I can’t quite imagine us throwing a similar kind of party for the bendy bus.

After the trams were retired and the tunnel closed, it was used as a storage garage for decommissioned buses that were held in reserve for the Coronation and as a flood control centre. It even starred in a film, when it played the role of a train tunnel in
Bhowani Junction
opposite the lovely Ava Gardner. I am not sure the director George Cukor really did the Kingsway Tunnel justice, and the Kingsway’s agent couldn’t have been great because the film work dried up. I guess there just aren’t that many good roles for tram and train tunnels. Now it is a storage depot for great lengths of pipe, paving slabs and cobbles: a rather gloomy municipal B&Q slowly decaying beneath the streets of Holborn.

I don’t think the trams at Holborn took the Oyster card - Londoners’ current passport for public transport - but there are other elements of the modern-day system which would have struck a chord with travellers transported forward in time from an earlier age. In the early part of the nineteenth century, for example, there were different travel zones within the city. The drivers of the original horse-drawn Hackney carriages, the ancestors of today’s black-cab drivers, had a monopoly on picking up and dropping off customers in the central area of the capital. Alarmed by the threat to their livelihoods posed by the new horse-drawn omnibuses, which offered Londoners a cheaper, if less comfortable, way of getting from A to B, the Hackney carriage drivers lobbied successfully to keep the omnibuses from making stops to pick up and drop off in central London. So a kind of central zone operated in the city for a few years. But you can’t stop progress and the buses represented a bit of a transport revolution. The cabbies couldn’t stop buses challenging their supremacy, but they did retain their monopoly on picking up fares from the kerbside, which they still jealously guard.

There are some reminders of these original London cabbies and their horses which still survive on the streets of the city today - thanks largely to the efforts of their modern-day counterparts, London’s black-cab drivers. They’re called cabmen’s shelters and in case you’re wondering, no, they aren’t homes for distressed cab drivers who’ve lost ‘the Knowledge’. To find out more about these mysterious green huts which adorn several street corners around the capital, I hailed a taxi and took my seat behind a man who’s done more than his share to keep them going. As Peter Raymond weaved his way expertly through the west London traffic towards Warwick Avenue, he wasn’t taking me to the tube station made famous by Duffy, and I wasn’t worrying about being chucked by my girlfriend, I was heading for the site of one of the surviving huts.

Peter filled me in on the history of these places. It was not long before a familiar story began to emerge of a worthy philanthropic impulse which concealed a far more sinister agenda: to keep London’s cabbies out of the pubs.

The story begins with a gentleman called Captain Armstrong. He’d noticed that whenever the weather was bad - a rare occurrence in London admittedly, but still an occasional hazard - it was almost impossible to find a cab driver (no change there then). Investigating this problem further, he discovered that the elusive cabbies were often to be found taking shelter in cafes and pubs. When they finally emerged into the daylight, they often displayed the inevitable consequences of whiling away the long rainy hours in a licensed premises, and were in no fit state to steer a coach and horses from the Coach and Horses and through the streets of the city. Along with like-minded souls, including Lord Shaftesbury, who you’ll recall was one of the driving forces behind the drinking-fountain-and-water-trough movement, Armstrong decided to offer cabbies a place of refuge which would be dry in both senses of the word, a series of havens in the shape of sheds scattered around the city, where they could shelter from the storm and enjoy ‘good and wholesome refreshments at moderate prices’.

Between 1875 and 1914, 61 of these shelters were erected at a cost of about £200 each. As they were all placed on the public highway, the police specified that they should not take up more space than a parked horse and cab, hence their size and shape. The idea was so successful that it was later adopted in cities as far afield as Melbourne in Australia, where they not only copied Armstrong’s idea but even the shed design itself. I’m told they still have one surviving shelter in Melbourne to this day, a tasteful cream rather than the characteristic green of London’s originals. I’d have liked to check out the Melbourne version for myself but sadly I couldn’t afford the fare Peter demanded to drive me there in his cab, so I had to make do with the Warwick Avenue example instead.

As we pulled up outside this beautiful, oblong, green-panelled hut, it felt for a moment as if we’d arrived at a scaled-down cricket pavilion. There are 13 huts like this across the city, all of them Grade II listed, but this is one of the finest. As I approached the door, I dreamt of entering a Tardis-like structure, with corridors leading off into ballrooms and libraries. Actually, it turned out to be exactly the same size on the inside as the outside, but it still crams a lot into a small package. Though there’s no ballroom, there is a compact working kitchen and enough room to accommodate up to 13 cabbies.

There is an air of exclusivity to these places and Peter admitted that he was quite daunted when he stepped inside his first shelter in Clapham in south London. From those first wary steps, he has risen to become the secretary of the Cabmen’s Shelter Fund, and an inheritor of the Earl of Shaftesbury’s mantle. Before you all rush to take advantage of these charming sheds, the first rule here is you have to be one of the current 25,000 licensed black cab drivers in London to be able to enter. It’s probably not the most exclusive members’ club in London, but it requires significant dedication to get your foot in the door. I mean, do you know the quickest route between Dalston Lane and Bhowani Junction?

I was lucky enough to have the rules temporarily waived to allow me to sample the atmosphere for a few minutes. Breathing in the enticing aroma of a breakfast being prepared just a few feet away from where we sat, I asked Peter what the draw was. He suggested that one of the great things for cabbies was the opportunity to learn the nuts and bolts of the job from fellow drivers. When to take a cheque. When to ask for the money first. Or, ‘When to go south of the river?’, I asked. But mostly they were there just to gossip. ‘You should have seen who was in the back of my cab last night. And as for what they were doing . . .’ There are some pretty strict rules too: no gambling, drinking or swearing. I imagine that keeps the numbers down, but I guess you have to with a potential 25,000 covers to serve.

As I stepped out of Peter’s peaceful haven and waved him off into the mid-morning traffic, I wondered what his horse-driving predecessors would have made of the motorised frenzy of the modern city. But I was forgetting that there was a time before the combustion engine reigned supreme, when horses and cars shared the streets of London. Just over the road from Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children is a little side street called Barbon Close, WC1, where you can still see the painted advertisement for a firm called G. Bailey and Sons, who promoted themselves as both ‘horse and motor contractors’ - many businesses kept a foot in both camps while the battle between the two forms of transport played itself out on the streets of the city. I can picture the scene in their workshop: someone re-shoeing a van in one corner while his colleague changed the oil on a carthorse.

Horses were phased out eventually, of course. The benefits of motorised transport were recognised pretty early on by the bus and tram companies, and the speed with which they switched to motorised vehicles was phenomenal. Horse-drawn buses had pretty much disappeared from London by 1915 - perhaps not surprising when you think about the cost of running that stable out in Fulham which Gordon described. But for general haulage and goods deliveries, the change was much more gradual. In fact, the horse stayed on the road delivering goods well into the 1950s, hence the darkly comic rag-and-bone men of the 1960s classic television series
Steptoe and Son
, who plied their trade with a cart pulled by a horse called Hercules.

From the sublime to the more ridiculous, in what I imagine to be the suburbs of London, Benny Hill’s Ernie drove a horse-drawn milk cart, while his rival Two-Ton Ted from Teddington drove the baker’s van, in a song which is a reminder that the world of the milkman and his horse-drawn milk cart was still recognisable to Benny Hill’s audience in the 70s. Clearly our sympathies were meant to be with Ernie and his horse Trigger and not the van driver, or maybe I’ve got that wrong and there is some other deeper message about the moral superiority of dairy produce over baked goods.

These days, people stop and stare at the sight of a horse walking down the road, and when you see one it’s usually mounted by a policeman doing a spot of crowd control. But, strangely enough, the horse-drawn funeral - which is, I am sure, how Ernie would have preferred to make his last journey, the hearse pulled by Trigger, of course - is one Victorian tradition which has survived into the twenty-first century.

Horse-drawn funerals were once the only way to go, although these days they’re much rarer, and sometimes have more sinister connotations. When Reggie Kray - the last of the infamous gangster brothers - died in 2000 his funeral included a hearse drawn by six black horses. Not surprisingly Bethnal Green Road in the East End came to a standstill for more than an hour as the procession passed by. Wouldn’t you stop and stare at the sight of six horses in full funeral regalia drawing a coffin through one of London’s inner-city suburbs? Nowadays you’d be forgiven for thinking that such funerals are just the preserve of old-school gangsters. But you’d be wrong, as I recently witnessed in Soho. One family firm in the East End is still harnessing its horses and offering ordinary Londoners of all colours and creeds (no criminal records required) the chance of a more traditional farewell. I thought that the Kray funeral represented a theatrical one-off until I came across T. Cribb & Sons of Beckton.

This firm was established by Thomas Cribb in the 1880s. An advert featuring its founder conveys the kind of in-your-face Ronseal message that today’s undertakers might blush at. I particularly like the reassuring statement: ‘Always in readiness for the removal of bodies from hospitals and asylums on the shortest notice.’ I don’t think you’d see that advertising strapline in the
Yellow Pages
these days. Today it’s run by Thomas Cribb’s great-grandson, John Harris. In my quest to find out a bit more about how and why this firm of undertakers still preserves the horse-drawn tradition, I went to see John and some of his horses dressed in their funereal finery. John told me that these black horses come from the northern part of Holland but were known in the trade as ‘Belgian blacks’ because they used to be transported overland to Antwerp before coming across in barges to London. These horses would then be taken to the Elephant and Castle, just south of the river in Lambeth, where there was a big horse depository. I could say many unkind things about the Elephant and Castle as it stands now - time has not been kind - but the word ‘depository’ and the image of a pile of steaming horse dung is lodged uncomfortably in my mind’s eye when I conjure it up now, so I’ll leave it at that.

John told me that once a month his grandfather would go to the Elephant and Castle to buy and sell horses. That trade lasted until the Second World War, and never picked up again. The car had taken over. Cribb gave up the old ways and converted to four wheels for almost three decades until an old lady gave firm instructions before she departed: ‘When I go I want a horse and cart.’ In order to oblige, the company hunted around for a pair of horses and got the carriage from a prop supplier to the Hammer Horror film studio. John now admits that this was not a particularly authentic solution, but it gave the old girl the send-off she had desired.

Funnily enough, our friend Mr Shillibeer, who brought London the horse-drawn omnibus, couldn’t make a go of his business, so he turned to a more reliable trade where the business is steady. He designed a form of horse-drawn hearse that became the thing to die for. The Hammer Horror carriage was probably a rip-off of one of his designs.

The firm thought the request was a one-off, but demand just grew and, as John said, ‘Very quickly we thought, well, we’ve got to get this sorted out properly.’ They tracked down an original hearse carriage and restored it. So having disappeared for a while, horse-drawn funerals were rediscovered and are now, to coin a phrase, back from the dead.

It is slightly odd that of all the journeys made by Londoners 120 years ago - by tram, omnibus or simple horse and cart - it’s only the journey to the grave which can still be made much as it once was. The tradition of the funeral procession is to travel slowly and with formality, and perhaps these requirements - satisfied by the sedate pace of the horse - explain why this tradition has survived. And not only survived but, as I discovered, reinvented itself too.

John Harris’s family business now represents the archetypal London mix of old traditions adapting to change. Cribb’s now caters for Hindi and Sikh funerals and has a Buddhist prayer room as well as a chapel of rest. Sometimes the firm uses white horses and white hearses because not all cultural traditions they serve in London have black as the colour of mourning. So for that last journey to the cemetery horses still have a place in modern multicultural London, even though they’ll never reclaim the streets they once ruled like kings.