DAYS OF THE HANSOM

Evening Star, Issue 22261, 12 February 1936, Page 15

DAYS OF THE HANSOM

WHEN ALL LONDON USED a I am glad that I knew London in the days of the hansom, before that perfect vehicle gave place to the taxi. We were often taken to drive in the park by our smart friends in their fine carriages, but for me there was nothing like the fun of driving about London in a hansom cab. Next to the London hansom I loved best the box seat of a coach tooling along over the fine hard roads to Hampton Court, Brighton, or Richmond, where thp coach drew up at the historic pastrycook’s to let the passengers buy those perfect cheese cakes, the “maids of honour.” Hardly less dear than hansom or coach was the top of the omnibus that took us down to Barings’s in Threadneedle street to draw our money or to go sight-seeing in the city. “ Benk, benk. benk!” cried the guard, swinging on the back of the bus; “ ’lgh Holborn, ’lgh Holborn, Shepherd’s Bush, Elephant and Castle!” An artist friend took ns one night to see Edgeware road. The long street was crammed with people buying their Sunday dinners. At the doors of the butchers’ shops stood men in long white aprons with long glittering knives, chanting a peculiar monotonous cry:

“Buy, buy, buy! Beef, pork, mutton, will' you buy, will you buy?” On either side the way was lined with costermongers whose barrows were lighted by flaring lamps. They, too, shouted their wares—shrimps, periwinkles, oysters, fruit, vegetables, toys of all descriptions, cooking ware, and clothing, for on Saturday night Edgware road was transformed into a nocturnal fair, where the poor of London bargained, haggled, and gossiped. It was an amazing spectacle, and a strange pendant for another picture that still remains with me, Hyde Park, after church on a Sunday morning, with its beauties and its “ swells.” Eight o’clock in the evening is the hour I remember best of those memorable days. Then I would be driving through Hyde Park in a hansom beside my mother. The long twilight still hold, and through the lilac haze the lamps glowed and shone as wo passed an endless stream of vehicles coming from the opposite direction, filled with neople going out to dine like ourselves. There were a few of the old-time coaches with two powdered, silkstockinged footmen standing on the footboard behind, a vast number of. smart broughams, but the majority, like ourselves, drove in hansom cabs. "We caught glimpses of ladies of dazzling beauty, gentlemen immaculate in evening dress and opera, hats; sometimes we recognised a friend in a swiftly-passing hansom, or some celebrity. The possibilities suggested, the romances guessed ~ . . as hansom after hansom flashed by and eye

met eye, sob the heart beating, the imagination dancing. Vanity Fair I Vanity Pair! will the world ever again see anything like that London I remember?—Maude Howe Elliott, in ‘ Three Generations.’