The Hackney Carriage in Cork: Vehicle of a Victorian Irish City 1854–1902

Introduction

The Victorian city was one which, thanks to a variety of innovations, from gas lighting and later electric lighting, was alive night and day. This was a transformative element of city life in the nineteenth century. Cork was one city where, despite an overall trend in population decline across the nineteenth century, it nevertheless bore many of the hallmarks of more celebrated cities of the Victorian era. ¹ Cork city underwent considerable economic and social changes in the nineteenth century. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, it had lagged behind nearby Waterford in its role as a port city of export trade, with Waterford supplying greater quantities of butter and meat for both the transatlantic and some European markets. This was to remain the case until a combination of the American revolutionary war and the Napoleonic wars saw a shift and decline in the export trade out of the port of Waterford. While the Napoleonic wars impacted on Cork’s trade too, thereafter Cork became the primary exporter of butter in the world and the city expanded considerably over the course of the nineteenth century. This was but one area in which Cork emerged as the most significant city in the province of Munster in the nineteenth century, far outstripping either Limerick or Waterford in terms of development, although its economic story in the nineteenth century was largely that of a faltering economy. ²

Despite this faltering economy, Cork as a city took on the appearance of many similar cities in nineteenth-century Europe with a city centre that was the main place of industry and commerce, as well the home to slum dwellers and the working classes, circled by suburbs populated by Cork’s emerging middle class. Suburbs of Cork such as Sunday’s Well and Blackrock were seen, as in so many Victorian cities, as the perfect combination of the urban and rural – devoid of the city’s temptations and vices and containing the best of rural simplicity. Thanks to the building of a variety of railway lines, this suburban middle class could live on the outskirts while remaining linked to the city centre and their places of business. In addition to these forms of transport, the hackney carriage similarly had a role to play in cementing the increasing ability of Cork’s middle classes to loosen the previously necessary proximity between home and work. Indeed as Angela Fahy notes:

Members of the predominantly Catholic middle classes lived in the suburbs in substantial terraced and detached houses; set in neat gardens, behind walls, safe they hoped from poverty, crime and ill-health associated with much of the city’s population. ³

Divided into three sections, this article will examine the following aspects of the hackney carriage in Cork: the regulation of the trade from the enacting of the first bye-law in 1854 to the Cork Exhibition of 1902 – the Edwardian cap on the city’s Victorian development; an exploration of hackney drivers; and finally, this article will explore the hackney as semi-private/semi-public sphere in which differing moral codes competed as the carriage made its way from city to suburb and vice versa. The argument will be put forward, by close examination of the available sources, that the bye-law governing hackney carriages and the apparatus implementing that bye-law – the Corporation, the Hackney Carriage Committee and the Inspector of Hackney Carriages – were the corporeal and institutional forms of a liberal governmentality which sought to professionalise the behaviour of the working-class men and women who made up the ranks of the hackney drivers in the city. ⁶ In all, this article will show that the hackney carriage was an important mode of transport in the development of Cork city as a modern urban centre. More than this, though, the hackney carriage was also a rare site of interaction between classes who were increasingly geographically as well as socially separate. This separation was aided by the existence of the hackney carriages, while at the same time, they can be read as a site of the struggle between different types of what passed as acceptable ways to behave. This struggle took its most potent form in the various collective actions of hackney drivers to protect their work and to organise effectively, even joining the Cork Trades Council, putting candidates forward in local elections and engaging at different times in forms of disobedience and sympathetic striking.

Moreover, the case will be put that collective action provided the best means for drivers to resist the attempted imposition of social norms on drivers, which was mainly realised through a system of punishment devised by the so-called gingle committee. The way the hackney carriages were thus regulated, its drivers policed and the bourgeois norms of its users imposed reflects how ‘the city moved to the centre of the concerns of the governers about how the new society then emerging might be governed’. ⁷

The Hackney Carriage as Suburban Connection

In this section, we will consider the emergence of the new bye-law and its specific regulations around the behaviour expected of drivers. This will help us to understand better the reasons why drivers offered resistance on a variety of occasions. In their use and regulation of these cars for travel between the suburbs in which they shut themselves off, the middle classes of Cork exemplified what Joachim Schlör indicated when he wrote that ‘the streets constitute a field in which conflicts between “authority” and “subject” are played out…[there is] a constant tension which manifests itself in the claim to unimpeded access to the street’. ⁸ On Monday, 23 October 1854, a new bye-law was passed at a meeting of the Cork Corporation to issue licences, set fares and provide a guide for both drivers and customers of Cork’s hackney carriages, driven by what were locally termed ‘ginglemen’. Over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, these bye-laws and a subcommittee of the Corporation – officially the Hackney Carriages Committee, though popularly called the gingle committee – were alone responsible for the regulation of this business.

The range of places for which specific fares were set is remarkable and worthy of some examination. Fares were set from the borough boundary in almost every direction as well as the various suburbs into and out of the city. In addition to these specific fares for particular places on the city’s boundary, there were also varying fares for those operating between midnight and 6 a.m. and those operating from 6 a.m. to midnight. Additionally, fares varied depending on whether the passenger was travelling by a four-wheeled covered carriage or a two-wheeled uncovered carriage. These fares ranged from 6d, 9d, 1/-, 1/3, to as expensive as 2/6 depending on the distance, with prices doubling after nightfall. These carriages were, at such prices, undoubtedly the reserve of Cork’s middle and upper classes. ⁹ When the bye-law for the hackney carriage was first introduced, it was to licence specifically hackney carriage drivers who were plying for trade within a five-mile radius of the general post office in the city. This helps to place the business of hackney carriages within the orbit of other communication networks of which the General Post Office in the city was the centre: the telegraph and mail coach. It was in the context of such communication networks that their regulation was begun. The bye-law was extraordinarily detailed and allows us to not alone map the limits of the city but offer a plethora of behavioural controls to ensure the ginglemen conducted themselves in a manner deemed appropriate by the authorities on pain of fine or loss of licence. These behavioural norms included an insistence that the ginglemen waited either on the seat of their car or standing by the head of their horse until they were approached to be employed by a customer and that they not approach potential customers or shout out to them in advance of being approached.

In all of this, we can detect what Chris Otter has described as the ‘bourgeois visual environment’, one in which sight can prevail, civil conduct be exposed to view and those eminently Victorian qualities of reserve and distance maintained.’ ¹⁰ Additionally, the gingleman was expected, in the words of article seven of the bye-law, to ‘be careful, able, decent in his apparel, and civil in his appearance’. Under this subheading of the bye-law, it was decreed that:

If the driver of a Hackney Carriage shall be of an age less than sixteen years, and not of decent apparel and of good and civil behaviour while on his stand; if he shall not wait on his driving seat; if he shall at any time sit, lie, or rest himself within the body of his carriage, or shall molest, disturb, annoy, or insult the owners, occupiers, inmates or inhabitants of any house opposite to, or in the vicinity of his stand, or any passenger or other person whatsoever, either by riotous, turbulent or disobedient behaviour, or by abusive, obscene, or improper language or gestures, or in any manner whatever, in violation of public decency or morals, misconduct himself towards or in respect to such owners, occupiers, inmates, inhabitants, passenger, or other person or persons, respectively for every offence, the driver and proprietor of such carriage shall be liable to a penalty not exceeding 40s. ¹¹

The Gingleman: Precarious Worker or Self-employed Businessman?

If the city and those who ran it were constantly trying to improve both the city and its inhabitants through regulation, then what do we know of how those who were affected by these bye-laws reacted? How did they see themselves: as individual actors or as a collective group with broadly similar interests? In this section, we will look at the work itself and through a close examination of the available sources, see how drivers responded and reacted to their own work, using examples from the press. We will also look at the available statistics on who owned licences as well considering the role played by the small minority of women drivers in the period. By examining the statistics around licence driving, we can posit that rather than being one single homogenous group, drivers made up for distinct subsets.

The work of most ginglemen was difficult. His or her wages were determined by the number of fares they got – the distance they were able to cover in dispatching fares and the speed at which they could complete fares without breaking one of the many articles of the bye-laws. While operating with fixed rates for fares, there was no fixed wage and drivers were dependent entirely on their own ability to get fares. For the bulk of those driving these hackney carriages then, this was a precarious work.

Like other precarious workers, what we know of the drivers of the hackney carriage comes to us not from records of their own experience but rather is mediated to us through third parties. The hackney carriage driver, gingleman or sometimes even jingleman, typically only made appearances in the local press in Cork as a result of the following: either in relation to a transgression of the bye-laws which governed the business he was engaged in or else as a witness to a crime. We will tease out these two different strands of the hackney carriage drivers’ encounter with the law. Aside from this, the other sources for their experience are the minute books of Cork Corporation’s Hackney Carriage Committee Minute Books. Again, typically ginglemen are only mentioned in these records when they breach the bye-laws governing their trade. This means circumspection is required when reading the accounts in these records as the ginglemen are not in a position of authority when we encounter them, be it in the courts or in front of this municipal committee.

First, though, it is important to acknowledge that as a result of their low-standing in Cork society in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, the hackney carriage drivers as presented to us in the press of the day neither were representatives of the those working in this business as a whole nor were they speaking freely of their own experiences. As they waited at their stands, they were in active competition with one another for fares. Despite being sole traders, they were in a business that, like street traders and even prostitutes, was in effect, highly regulated by the municipal authorities but which also had the potential towards collective action and disobedience, which they enacted variously throughout the period under discussion.

Like street traders, their licences were subject to corporation bye-laws rather than the willingness of an employer to hire them for their labour. Like prostitutes, and prostitution, the business of plying their trade was about disciplining and making them as inconspicuous as possible: not alone were they to remain stock still until approached for a fare, their behaviour as laid out in the bye-laws needed to be above reproach to ensure they were not fined substantially. The extent of the policing of this trade is evident from the extensive and detailed minute books of the Hackney Carriages Committee of the Cork Corporation. The extant records of this committee, which were not published in the newspapers, begin in January 1890 and run until 1929, and they provide for us the main source to talk about almost all aspects of the business. Therefore, the picture we can build of their work and their relationship with other ginglemen must be supplemented where possible by recourse to not just the local press but any other available sources.

One of the earliest references to a gingleman in the pages of Cork’s main daily newspaper, the Cork Examiner, was of a driver, acting as witness in a trial, who refused a drunken female passenger. ¹⁵ Being called as a witness was common, as an analysis of the Cork Examiner reveals. Indeed it might be considered as one of the hazards of the job – unlike the tram or the train, ostensibly the hackney carriage was a 24-h form of transport, and thus many ginglemen were privy to a good deal of the goings on in Cork city that happened under cover of dark. Sometimes such hazards were very real indeed. For one gingleman in the city in 1854, this saw him returning from a fare wounded by a pistol shot. ¹⁶

Working with horses, as these men did, also presented its dangers as the case of a gingleman named Carroll attests. Bringing his car to the docks to the Liverpool steamer, the horse took fright and took Carroll and his car into the river, where the horse drowned. It was noted in the brief report that this was the only livelihood of the man and his family who were dependent upon him. While the horse drowned, the car was recovered but was, in the words of the paper, in a ‘considerably dilapidated condition’. Like Carroll, Brien noted in his testimony to the court that it was very lucky indeed he was not killed by one of the gunshots, as he had a wife and family depending on him and his work as a hackney carriage driver. ¹⁷ Yet another case in the 1850s highlights the hazards not alone of the work of the gingleman but of the still emerging city of Cork in the period. An unnamed individual, described as ‘a poor gingleman’, was drowned in the river when using one of the many slips along the river in the city to fill a bucket of water for his horse, was dragged into the water having nothing to hold onto when the bucket filled up. ¹⁸ On another occasion, a driver was brought before the courts to testify in a case whereby stolen goods were pawned. ¹⁹

As well as facing the dangers of drowning, being shot or dragged into court cases in which they were witnesses to other people’s criminal behaviour, ginglemen themselves often had little comeback in the court due to their position as lowly members of society. Consider the story of John Joyce, fined 2s 6d plus costs for apparently insulting Mr Harris of South Main Street in the city. Harris, who wished to reach his destination quicker, was apparently told by Joyce that he would not kill his horse (the journey included a trip up one of Cork’s vertiginous hills) for ‘any damned scoundrel’. A defendant for Joyce claimed that what had annoyed Joyce was that Harris had called him a ‘drunken blackguard’, which Harris denied. Evidently, those presiding in the police office agreed. Here was a clear example of the gulf between those who drove and those who were driven. As we saw above, the rules governing the behaviour of a gingleman were so comprehensive and exhaustive that almost anything perceived or even justified infraction could lead to a fine and reprimand for these workers. These early examples of ginglemen appearing before the courts would be replicated throughout the nineteenth century. Consider these remarks of the mayor in 1896 when Edward Morrissey, a gingleman, was prosecuted and fined 5s for being uncivil to R. A. Powell, a solicitor. The mayor said that

As mayor he was much obliged to Mr Powell for bringing that case, and the public should be thankful to him. They were anxious that tourists should visit their city, and one of the necessary preparations was that the hackney drivers should be made to conduct themselves properly. ²⁰

In addition to criminality, the modern cityscape has also provided many opportunities for new sexual encounters. As Leif Jerram notes the undergrounds, trams and buses of major European cities were new spaces in which people of the opposite (and same) sex saw each other regularly at the same times each day for the first time, meaning ‘they were almost designed for cruising.’ ²² In a similar mode, although chance encounters with strangers were not part of the hackney carriage experience, it still provided a mode of discrete travel for prostitutes and their customers. Since hackneys were allowed to operate from midnight to 6 a.m., it is not surprising that on occasion the carriages themselves were used as rendezvous points for illicit encounters. For instance, a gingleman named William Nagle was reprimanded by the committee after a Constable Begley reported seeing prostitutes in Nagle’s car at 4 a.m. on Patrick Street. Begley also reported seeing a man emerge from the carriage and take off into the night. ²³ This exemplifies the view in the nineteenth-century Ireland about prostitutes that ‘it was most often the visibility of prostitutes which caused anxiety, an anxiety not only about the use of public space but the contamination of that space’. ²⁴

This same fear about the use of public space feeds into how the hackney car drivers themselves were disciplined as a group and further strengthens the view of the street as a site of conflict between the authority and the subject. The volume of the reprimands meted out by the committee means that the type of breach, or the bye-law breached, is not recorded, only the name of the offending gingleman and the number of previous offences they committed. As a result, a systematic analysis of the most common breaches of the bye-laws is impossible to construct. One of the most prominent reasons for reprimand from the committee and the inspector was the operation of a hackney carriage without a licence, or not displaying your driver’s badge.

An excellent example of a figure who repeatedly offended in this regard was a man named Edward Hannan. One of the early entries of the committee’s minute books noted that the inspector, in his weekly report, noted that Hannan was doing just that. However, an attempt to prosecute him was adjourned at the magistrate’s court to allow Hannan’s solicitor to petition the committee directly; however, they declined to hear any such plea from the solicitor. ²⁵ Hannan would prove something of a bête noir for the committee that year. In the middle of February, the inspector noted that

Edward Hannan, Hackney Car Owner, had been convicted a sixth time of plying an unlicenced car; that he was a troublesome man of violent temper, but had now taken the Temperance pledge and that Ald. Hooper had written suggesting he should get another chance – Letter from Hannan apologising for anything he may have said or done to the members of the committee and promising not to offend again. ²⁶

On 27 March 1890, the inspector once more noted that Hannan had been fined 20/- for plying an unlicenced car, the alternative to which was fourteen days imprisonment while also being prosecuted for being drunk while in charge of a horse and car. Additionally, he was sentenced to a month’s hard labour for assaulting the inspector in his own home, for which he had to also give bail or face a further term of three month’s imprisonment. ²⁷ Given the strained nature of the relationship between the committee and Hannan, it is unsurprising that they decided, when Hannan and his unlicenced car appeared once more in June 1890, that it was better a solicitor deal with the matter than they doing so themselves directly. ²⁸ Evidently, Hannan represents a rather extreme example of the conduct of a gingleman, and his relationship with the committee was especially sour. It was not just the committee who wished to stamp out the driving of unlicenced hackneys. The ginglemen who were licenced were equally likely to call out those who were unlicenced. While the drivers may not have relished the rules, they did, collectively, insist that all within the group adhered to the requirement to purchase and maintain a license. ²⁹

As noted already, most of those who were licenced were self-employed and their wages were entirely variable, depending on the fares they could earn in a given day. Of course, not everyone involved in the business was a simple owner–driver. The annual inspection of the current hackney carriages for the renewal of their licences provides us with excellent detail as to who owned how many cars and licences as well as giving us an indication of how many women were employed in this line of work. At the end of the period of inspection – which typically ran from April through June – in 1890, we learn that some 431 cars were to be licenced for the coming twelve months. While the majority of operators only owned one single car and thus had one licence, some controlled substantially more. Table 1 gives a list of those drivers who in 1890 owned five or more licences for hackney carriages.

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Table 1.

Hackney carriage licence holders with five or more licences in Cork, 1890.

Name	No. of licences
William Bateman	7
Jeremiah Cowhig	14
Richard Cronin	5
James R Cronin	5
Timothy Desmond	31
G. R. Dyer	8
James Hayes (Blarney Street)	5
Patrick Lynch	5
John Murphy (Evergreen)	5
John Murphy (Grattan Street)	5
John O’Callaghan	15
Mathias O’Callaghan	14
Timothy O’Driscoll	5
Timothy O’Sullivan	6
John Riordan	5
Denis Sullivan	5
John Twomey	6
Total	146

Source: CCCA: Hackney Carriage Committee Minute Books, 3 July 1890.

Thus, those owners who had five or more cars accounted for 31.6 per cent of the total hackney car licence holders in Cork in 1890. In the following year, we get a summary breakdown of the licences, and there is a total of 195 individuals holding some 448 licences. The largest of that number, 103 are holding single licences. This means that a little over half, 52.8 per cent of those involved in hackney carriage driving were sole traders. The next largest group was those with two licences, 49 individuals or 25.1 per cent of the total. Seventeen people had three or more, eight had four licences or more, while eighteen people, or 9.2 per cent, had five or more. We can thus identify four different subcategories of hackney car operators. There were those who drove but did not own the carriage; those who drove and owned their carriage; those with multiple cars and licences and, finally, rare individuals who were essentially capitalist hackney car operators, who had a veritable stable of licences and drivers working for them.

This was a very male business, but not all ginglemen were men. When the licences for 1892 were granted in July 1891, in the alphabetical listing of those who were granted licences were these women. Thus, as we can see in Table 2 of a total of 448 licences granted that year, those owned or plyed by women accounted for just 4 per cent of the total. By the time licences were granted for the year from 1894 to 1895, the number of women had declined further. While we can discern a small decrease in the number of licences owned by women, and a decline in the number of women involved in absolute terms in Table 3, it is difficult, in the absence of greater statistical evidence, to discern a pattern in the numbers of women making their living this way in Victorian Cork.

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Table 2.

Number of women licenced to drive hackney carriages in Cork, 1891–92.

Name	No. of licences
Bridget Cogan	2
Mary Hyde	1
Mary Lynch	1
Mary McSwiney	1
Mary O’Brien	4
Kate O’Driscoll	2
Ellen O’Riordan	4
Catherin Sheehan	1
Mary Walsh	2
Total	18

Source: CCCA: Hackney Carriage Committee Minute Books, 2 July 1891.

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Table 3.

Number of women licenced to drive hackney carriages in Cork, 1894–95.

Name	No. of licences
Mary Burke	2
Bridget Cogan	2
Mary McSweeny (sic)	1
May O’Brien	5
Julia Walsh	2
Total	12

Source: CCCA: Hackney Carriage Committee Minute Books, 3 July 1894.

No one had more licences to their name than Timothy Desmond, who operated in Pembroke Street, around the corner from the Imperial Hotel. With thirty-one licences to his name, Desmond was by some distance the operator of the largest hackney business in the city in the 1890s. Desmond was a determined businessman. In 1887, he and one of the O’Callaghan’s from Table 1 employed a solicitor to petition the Hackney Carriage Committee not to restrict the ownership of licences to a maximum of fifteen by any one individual. The solicitor argued, convincingly, that while it would be good for those who could only afford a single licence to make more available by limiting the likes of Desmond and O’Callaghan, nonetheless, the city should not have granted so many licences during the recent Cork Exhibition, but instead temporary licences. The Solicitor had argued that ‘Every facility ought to be given to increase the comfort of the public, and no better way could be found than to encourage the efforts of enterprising men like his clients’. The mayor of Cork, for his part, was of the opinion that if the likes of Desmond’s cars were taken off the stands, what would replace them would make for a ‘very poor display’. The motion was thus amended to apply only to future applicants rather than Desmond and O’Callaghan. ³⁰ Given this dominance, it is not entirely surprising that his dealings with the Hackney Carriage Committee could be extensive. In July 1890, he was brought before the committee for allowing three of his drivers to ply for hire while their licences had been suspended. Desmond felt aggrieved by the attention he received from the inspector apparently stating that

While strict surveillance is being exercised on his drivers by the Inspector, other drivers are allowed to loiter for hire in Pembroke Street, and so deprive him of fare which he would otherwise obtain from the Imperial Hotel. ³¹

Buses, Trams and Hackneys: Crowded Streets and Competition

In this section, we will consider the changes that took place as new modes of transport began to compete with the hackney towards the end of the nineteenth century. We will also see the changed fortunes of the hackney drivers as their propensity towards collective action finds its firmest development in the final decade of the 1800s.

Ten years after his victory in holding onto his 31 licences, Desmond had a committee member move that in lieu of an additional four hackney licences, he would be given four bus licences to run to the city suburbs. The right to ply those four bus licences was hard won by Desmond, however. Back in January 1897, before the Hackney Carriage Committee came a man named D. Todd-Thornton, who applied for four omnibus licences to run from Glanmire Train Station and Parnell Bridge to Patrick Street, the Grand Parade and the South Mall at twenty-minute intervals at a price of 2d from end to end. At that meeting, a solicitor, D. Wynne, was present to oppose the buses on behalf of the Hackney Car owners. The committee rejected the decision as the same route was soon to be covered by the new electric tram. At the next meeting, Desmond applied for a similar licence to run four buses between Glanmire, Western Road, Albert Street Station at a price of 2d between any two, 1d halfway and when there was call for it, a price of 3d to the Munster Agricultural Society’s grounds for races or sporting events. ³⁴ A decision on the two applications was deferred until the meeting held on 1 March. Both men were granted licences on that day, provided the buses were operational by 1 June and on the understanding that they were limited to plying strictly on the routes set out. Desmond had his buses up and running by April and was not sticking to the agreement as the records of the Hackney Carriage Committee show. The hackney drivers wished to see the designation of special stands and that something be said to Desmond about the buses ‘being permitted to enter the Great Southern and Western Railway premises, and their not plying to the several places originally proposed in the City and Suburbs.’ ³⁵

A further round of committee meetings was taken up with arguments over the routes that Desmond’s buses would be allowed to take and where on Patrick Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, they would be allowed to set down or pick up. After these issues had been agreed at the first meeting in May, within a week, the hackney car drivers once more employed a solicitor, Mr Dunlea, to make representations to the Hackney Car Committee on their behalf. According to the weekly Inspector’s report, Desmond had imported two more buses, ‘to which he proposed to transfer the licences of two of his hackney carriages, and that he had already 33 cars and 4 Bus licences’. ³⁶

As well as putting out his fellow hackney owners and drivers, when the Inspector delivered his final deliberations on the matter of awarding Desmond even more bus licences, the committee meeting saw Dunlea representing the views not of the hackney drivers, who were represented by Wynne, but of the local coach makers, coach painters, harness makers and farriers who objected to imported buses as ‘injurious to those trades in the City’. ³⁷ Wynne, meanwhile acting for the hackney drivers, asked that the committee give Desmond no more licences for his buses and that the equating of the hackney licence and a bus licence was not ‘a fair equivalent.’ ³⁸ In the end, Desmond was only granted the four licences and not any of the other three he wished to have for buses. ³⁹ This push for bus routes in the city seems to have had a galvanising effect on the hackney car drivers and owners of the city and saw some resistance from them. In June of 1897, for instance, Edward McCarthy was cautioned by the Hackney Carriages Committee for obstructing Great Southern and Western Railway officials in relation to the buses, while in July, Timothy Desmond’s son complained to the committee that some hackneys were blocking buses at the Blackrock and Passage railway terminus, while Desmond senior complained about driver John Haley who apparently shouted at ladies getting on his buses, ‘and so driving his hackney car as to impede the passing of the Buses and try to throw down the horses.’ ⁴⁰

Such was the sense of collective grievance among the hackney car owners and drivers that their body, the Hackney Car Owners Society, was grudgingly accepted onto the Cork Trades Council. They even ran two candidates in the first corporation elections following the Local Government Act of 1898. Cronin notes that their affiliation to the Trades Council ‘had been agreed to with certain reservations’. ⁴¹ This body, also known as the Hackney Car Owners Association, was formed in April of 1893, ‘to better the condition [sic] of the drivers, the mode of traffic, and also the condition of the cars’. ⁴² It is the single strongest indication of drivers’ tendency towards collective action; although operating as individual traders, they realised that associating and affiliating to the Trades Council was their best means of having a voice in the direction of their trade.

One of the few other references to the body in the local press was in 1898, when it subscribed £10 to the Cork ‘98 Commemoration Committee. ⁴³ This tendency to associate and resist against attempts to govern their working lives was present on two previous occasions. The first was an attempt to combine against the bye-laws in 1857 to have Sundays off and the second was when some of the ginglemen joined a strike in the city alongside sailors and shoemakers in 1870. ⁴⁴ This action in 1870 by the ginglemen was part of an all-out strike in Cork characterised by Emmet O’Connor as ‘a revolt of the unskilled’. ⁴⁵ It is especially significant since it shows that ginglemen were class-conscious and understood the importance and potential impact of the sympathetic strike as a tactic.

In the first instance in 1857, this resistance had a violent dimension whereby one of those who did not combine, and who due to illness had his wife driving his jingle for him, saw his wife attacked by those in the combination for going out on Sunday. Further evidence of the politicised nature and class-consciousness of the hackney car drivers comes from the two men who were put forward for the municipal elections following the passing of the Local Government Act in 1898. These were Bartholomew Kelly of Wood Street in the West Ward and Patrick Barry of Blarney Street in the North West Ward. ⁴⁶ Barry was elected polling 1,354 votes of 2,930, one of four labour candidates elected to a seven-person ward; Bartholomew Kelly, meanwhile, managed a paltry 164 votes in his ward, where he ran on a Nationalist ticket. Remarkably this same ward saw two aldermen and two more councillors elected under the labour banner out of a total of eight seats. Perhaps, Kelly would have been better off going under the labour banner. ⁴⁷ While they may not, as unskilled workers, been overly welcomed into the fold of the Cork Trades Council, they were at least able to secure a council seat.

In addition to the threat they faced and feared from Desmond and his buses, the installation of electrified trams was one more competitor which the hackney car drivers had to face. However, the challenges presented by the trams when they began operating in December 1898 were as much about encroaching on what space the ginglemen had in their work – the committee minutes are full of references to obstructions from coal on the quays, fruit vendors on the streets and similar obstacles – as about a fear that the trams would take business from the ginglemen themselves. Again these forms of active resistance show that ginglemen understood themselves and their work as one which required action. This was a fear reserved it seems exclusively for the new buses. The issues they faced with the trams were thus much more prosaic. For instance, the Hackney Carriage Committee heard a complaint from Newsom and Sons of Patrick Street that the hackney carriages were now blocking the entrance to their shop on account of moving in the wake of the tram line that was put down and now operating. ⁴⁸

Following the first elections of the Cork Corporation in 1899, held after the Local Government Act of 1898, the focus and interest of the committee shifts considerably and detailed précises of the Inspector’s weekly reports largely disappears. On top of this, those those successful in the annual renewal of their license were, under the new dispensation, not given alphabetically in the minutes thus preventing us from knowing what if any trends were emerging in terms of the number of individuals holding multiple licences or the number of women involved in the business. Part of the changed make-up of the Corporation and its committees is reflected in a considerably more lax approach to disciplining the ginglemen, but also the slower rate at which the ginglemen presented their carriage for inspection and licence renewal. When the Cork Exhibition of 1902 was under way, for instance, the licence renewal on the usual date of 1 July saw only 327 of a possible 456 hackneys passed since inspections had begun in April. This may in part be explained by the brisk trade the Exhibition entailed since the Hackney Carriage Committee granted a month’s extension and allowed those who were now officially unlicenced to carry on plying in the meantime. ⁴⁹

The following year, even fewer carriages had been presented for inspection, this time only 309 of the 456 total plying. A month’s extension was once more granted; however, unlike in the previous year, no special dispensation was offered to the unlicenced cars to continue plying. ⁵⁰ With a broadened electorate, the make-up of the Cork Corporation had come to reflect the population of the city more broadly. By the time of the Cork Exhibition in 1902, a year after the death of Victoria, the Victorian struggle between authority and subject on the streets of Cork that took place at hackney carriage stands between middle-class customers and typically working-class ginglemen in terms of behaviour and social and moral codes seems to have largely, if not entirely, dissipated. It might be argued that the ginglemen had won, after a fashion, as they continuously showed from the 1850s onwards a willingness and ability to resist and organise in their own interests against the committee, against the emergence of new forms of transport, and by entering local politics.

Conclusion

On the streets of Cork, at the hackney carriage stands the changes wrought by the passing of the Victorian era were all around. The world that brought the regulation of the ginglemen and their vehicles into being was one now populated by omnibuses and electric trams as well as the jingles that plied for hire. The gingleman would in a few decades forsake his horse and carriage for the horseless motor car. In this article, we have sought to examine the hackney carriage as a vehicle for shaping the Victorian city as it developed over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, using Cork as a case study. What has emerged is a picture not just of a vehicle with a functional role in getting passengers from the city centre to the suburbs; we have also seen how these carriages were the site of a struggle over the morality of public space in the Victorian city – the interaction between the driver and the passenger was often an interaction between divided classes, authorities and subjects. Through the application of the Corporation bye-law, the Hackney Carriage Committee and in the personage of the Hackney Carriage Inspector, we saw attempts by those in positions of authority to impose a particular moral code on the drivers and operators of these hackney carriages in the city of Cork.

The extent to which these attempts were successful is moot. The continued necessity of reprimanding, suspending and prosecuting ginglemen – often the same people multiple times – as well as revoking licences in some cases suggests that the project to improve the moral condition of those driving Cork’s middle-class suburbanites was less successful than they might have hoped for. While in this respect the bye-laws were exceptionally detailed, nonetheless, it was the case that some of those reprimanded were incorrigible in their own way.

Thus, we might say that, like Tom Crook’s examination of the sanitary inspector, it is insufficient to characterise the Inspector of Hackney Carriages – the embodiment of the bye-laws governing them – as strictly either disciplinary surveillance or as interventionist for much the same reasons, chiefly ‘the interpersonal nuances manifest at the level of practice’. Like the sanitary inspector, then, the inspector of hackney carriages was ‘a mode of liberal surveillance and as embedded in a liberal culture of governance, conscious of the rights and freedoms of the public and the need for social order’. ⁵¹ This doesn’t fully explain it, since in this instance, that consciousness of rights and freedoms of the public was weighed heavily in favour of those people who were the customers of the ginglemen. In other words, it was a particular liberal kind of social order for which the inspector of hackney carriages was responsible and the acceptable mores – hailing potential custom, for instance – of the more working-class drivers was seen to be against this continuous work in progress that was the urban public space.

As for the ginglemen as workers, and the hackney carriage as a trade, there is a clear need from the evidence presented not to speak of them as a single class of worker. As suggested above, it is best to see those who were involved in the business as forming four distinct groups: drivers, owner-operators, multiple licence holder-operators and in two cases presented here, capitalist operators. While almost all of these people were self-employed, nevertheless, they were effectively precarious workers. With no fixed wage except their fare prices as guides, it took until the 1890s and the overwhelming dominance of one figure in the city’s private transport networks for the majority of ginglemen (and women) to assert their potential as a collective group with specific interests and to enter local political life in a more meaningful way than previously attempted. The relative success of this in the 1890s can be seen in their joining of the Cork Trades Council and the running of two candidates in local elections in 1899, with one of these getting elected to his ward. This was a ramping up of an already existing tendency towards collective action going back to 1857. Their decision to join a sympathetic strike in 1870 also points strongly to the class-conscious nature of many in the trade.

The hackney carriage then was more than a mere mode of transport from city centre to suburb. It was a crucial site of engagement between the authority and the subject, of the ‘ongoing play of power between state and society’ and we might add, between classes. ⁵² A fixture of a modernising city for over 80 years, the hackney carriage was a space in which so much of the battle between one conception of the city and another was fought out. In all, this article has shown that when considering the impact of various transport forms on the shape of the Victorian city, the role of the hackney carriage deserves to be recognised along with the tram or bus as a vehicle of Victorian urban transformation.