Monday 15 October 2012

Transport in Georgian Bath: The Sedan Chair



Sedan Chair
 
 
by Marie-Louise Jensen
 
 
When I first began planning a story set in Georgian Bath, I assumed that horses and carriages were the normal mode of transport within the city. I was completely wrong.
 
There were several good reasons why. Firstly, the city of Bath in the early days of the reign of George I was really tiny. Just a handful of streets, squares and alleys. There was no way it would have been worth harnessing horses to the carriage for the short journey to the hot baths or the assembly rooms. Space was also at a premium in a city still confined by its medieval walls. The city was full to bursting with visitors during the season and there never would have been space for stabling for everyone as well.
The streets and alleys of Bath were both narrow and steep and filled with piles of refuse besides, which would have made them impassable to horses and carriages.
The city expanded greatly through the 18th century, spilling out over its original city walls into the green space around. The new streets were wider, grander and cleaner but they were even steeper than before as the city climbed into the surrounding hills. Sedan chairs continued to be used, even once they had fallen into disuse in London. Some of the grander new houses even had huge curved porches incorporated into their design to allow the chair to be carried right into the house and turned around there, so that the wealthy passengers did not need to walk out into the street to climb in. In their defence, it does rain A LOT in Bath.
 
The chairmen in Bath were notorious. They ran through the streets with scant attention to hapless pedestrians who were expected to keep out of their way. Apparently they did call out a warning, such as 'Have care!' or 'By your leave!' though they gave way to no one. At night they were obliged to either carry a lamp or be accompanied by a link boy with lighted flambeau, but accidents happened nonetheless; pedestrians were run down, passengers were spilled, chairs were smashed.
Chairmen jostled one another in their eagerness to collect passengers and fights regularly broke out between rival chairmen. They terrified ladies with their coarse language and swearing (!),  and they were known for locking their passengers into their chair and refusing to let them out until whatever exorbitant fare they chose to demand had been paid. If the passenger was stubborn, they would open the roof and let the rain in on them. (The roofs could be opened to allow passengers to wear tall hats, feathers or elaborate hairstyles undamaged, though presumably only on dry days).
Beau Nash fought an ongoing battle with the sedan chairman who preyed on visitors to the city and was responsible for a licence being introduced. After that, each chair bore a number and could be reported for infringing the rules.
Eventually the sedan chair was replaced by the wheeled Bath Chair. Our present taxi system still bears the same numbered system of licences that were introduced for the sedan chairs all those years ago.

12 comments:

Sue Bursztynski said...

I never realised there was such a logical reason for having sedan chairs! :-)

Anonymous said...

thanks

H.M. Castor said...

This is fascinating! Being run over by a chair and its men sounds nasty indeed. But I do love the idea of opening the roof for a tall hat or a hairdo. Thank you, Marie-Louise.

Caroline Lawrence said...

I love this! I wonder how many similarities there were between the sedan chairs of Bath and the litters of Rome!

Marie-Louise Jensen said...

I hope the litter bearers cheated less...and swore less!

Sue Purkiss said...

I think transport is one of the most interesting things you have to look into when you're writing about a particular period - how they travelled, how long journeys took, how much it cost, how uncomfortable it must have been. Thanks, ML!

Vicky Alvear Shecter said...

Fascinating!

Jean Bull said...

Thanks for a really interesting post. I had no idea that it was because of the narrow streets and little space that Sedan chairs were used. You learn something new every day. Especially on this blog!

Mark Burgess said...

Many thanks, wonderful post! I agree that how people travelled at various periods is fascinating. (It's one of my pet annoyances when films get carriages wrong for the period, such as 18th century carriages for Tudor times!)

Leslie Wilson said...

We saw the trapdoors in the roofs when we were in Bath - it does make you realise that people actually wore those crazy hairstyles, something I find hard to believe, though I know intellectually that it happened.. I did enjoy this post.
In Cranford, where the sedan chair men were more - sedate - the ladies liked them because you could have your chair brought into the house, get in, in the warm, with your hot brick, and be carried out to a house and leave the chair once more in the warm. Which does have something to say for it!
A litter, which is basically the same thing, was the transport of preference in Hong Kong, too, and when I was writing my novel set in HK in the 19th century, I enjoyed having the doctor get into his when answering an emergency call. 'Conduit Road and step on it!' (Of course, he didn't say that in the novel, only in my head).

Marie-Louise Jensen said...

Thank you all for your lovely comments. Mark, I don't know my carriages well enough by sight, only by name - but will now learn them in order to spot the mistakes too! Presumably there are few or no surviving Tudor carriages so instead of going to the expense of creating a replica, they use an existing (wrong era) one.

Mark Burgess said...

Marie-Louise, you may be right but sometimes I get the feeling that it is more to do with artistic vision and that the lumbering carts of the period didn't fit with the director's ideas.