In the next part of a series looking at the history of the built environment of Rickmansworth and its surrounding areas, Three Rivers Museum Trust chairman Fabian Hiscock reflects on how we used to get from place to place.
How did our forebears travel? It depended who you were, and on your means. Until the middle of the 19th century the vast majority of people simply walked to wherever they were going. Labourers would often walk six miles each way to their work (although most lived near their work, especially the agricultural labourer who made up so much of the Hertfordshire population); and even long distance travellers were often long distance walkers, often shunned by the inns at which they might have stopped.
If you had luggage (perhaps you were moving house), the next step up will have been the local carrier’s cart or waggon. This cost a little, perhaps a halfpenny a mile, and was slow – and when going up hill the passengers often had to walk. Long-distance waggons sometimes took passengers – or rather, they took the passenger’s baggage, with the ‘passenger’ walking alongside. But the combination of local and long-distance waggons did allow people of the most humble background to travel long distances when they had to – which most did not.
Those who could afford more would often use the stage coaches, and even the mail coaches, but the luggage capacity was limited and any large items would go separately, by waggon or cart. It was possible to go by canal and river, but there was very limited (and often informal) provision for passengers, and going by sea was expensive – you had to have a very good reason, which of course some migrants did, for example those leaving Ireland for this country, America and Australia. But generally, people weren’t moving far, even here so close to London.
This was the general pattern until about 1840. It all changed very quickly once the railways began to appear, and the stage coach disappeared almost at once, the heavy goods waggon a bit more slowly. The local carrier’s cart continued to be important, though: the local station wasn’t always within walking distance for everyone, and a considerable business quickly built up to get people there by coach or horse-drawn omnibus, although the need for a horse limited their number and range.
Those who could afford it would take their own trap or gig to the station and travel easily: farmer John White of Rickmansworth, for example, drove into Watford and then went to London almost as soon as the London and Birmingham Railway was available from 1838, and by train from Rickmansworth to Watford routinely as soon as the branch was open in 1862; and the arrival of the Metropolitan Railway in 1887 allowed him and his family to go into London at will, and for people of all sorts to visit the sights and events as they wished. It will have been quite a change.
And then of course, came the motor bus, which had no need of anything much. Suddenly, people in the villages (our photos highlight Loudwater) could travel cheaply and relatively effortlessly to the town (Watford, St Albans, Uxbridge) and to the station, and take advantage of the railway just as those better off in the towns were already doing – mind you, there were still stories of the passengers having to get off, and even push, at a steep hill until quite recently. The car, of course, came later and for the affluent – even in 1921 there were more motorbikes than cars in the UK, and my own university group in 1968 had only five cars among 120 of us.
Travel nowadays has its own challenges and frustrations. But it’s vastly easier than it was for our ancestors!
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