Omnibuses in the 1830s were cheap and on time

Maxwell Craven describes the early days of omnibus services in Derby.

Omnibuses are usually thought of as short-haul phenomena, but this was not always so. In 1829, the first omnibuses ran in London, from Paddington to the Bank of England, a considerable cross-London journey. The operator was George Shillibeer, who had got the idea from the Paris of Charles X.

The novelty was that, whereas a coach ran a fixed route non-stop, omnibuses could make frequent stops and pick up or set down passengers in the street.

The legislation that permitted this hazardous practice was the Stage Carriage Act of 1832. From the moment of its passing, omnibuses began to proliferate all over the UK.

The average omnibus was entered from the rear and contained longitudinal seats for up to eight people on either side. Initially, there were no outside seats but as a result of some people perching themselves on the cambered roofs with predicable results – especially bearing in mind the state of the roads in those days – a central seat, running the length of the roof, was added.

It was reached by a vertical ladder nicknamed, from 1852, the “Knifeboards” after an iconic Punch cartoon. Outside travel was a penny cheaper than inside, as on stage coaches.

There was no platform for the conductor and this unfortunate operative was obliged to perch himself on a rear step. Rates were cheaper than for Hackney carriages (taxis) and enormously cheaper than for coaches, especially elite mail coaches.

Thus, some years before you could reach Leicester by train, you could catch an omnibus. An advertisement in the Derby Mercury for August 7, 1833, reads:

“John Mitchell and J Shepherd beg leave respectfully to in form the public  that they have commenced running an omnibus from Derby to Leicester.

“It will leave the Saracen’s Head, Derby, at half past seven every morning and the George Inn, Leicester, for Derby at half past four o’clock every evening.

“NB, the passengers and parcels are booked at the above named inns.”

Nor was that the only one from Derby for, within a very few years, a bus called The Protector ran three times a week to The Green Man and Black’s Head at Ashbourne from The Bell in Sadler Gate.

Nor was this the only one, for there was competition on the Ashbourne run. John Miers, proprietor of the Wheat Sheaf at Ashbourne, ran a bus from 1837 called The Victoria from there to the Nag’s Head in St Peter’s Street, Derby, at 8.30am on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

From there. one could take a further omnibus called The Standard to either Ashby or Nottingham.

From about 1840, the Ashbourne service was extended to Derby Station to meet the trains.

From the date of the opening of the station, a shuttle omnibus ran to and from the station to the town centre, too. Like the Ashbourne bus, these initially went from the Nag’s Head in St Peter’s Street.

The right-angled passageway through the present Audley Centre marks the course of the ancient Nag’s Head Yard down which the omnibus proceeded.

By the mid-1840s, this bus was running from the similarly demolished New Inn at the corner of Bridge Gate and King Street, while, a decade later, it went from the also vanished Durham Ox in St Peter’s Street.

The station services were run by William Wallace Wallis, a descendant of the dynasty that built the New Inn in the 1760s and which ran coach services nationwide until, with the coming of the railways, they diversified.

So it came about that on Saturday, January 11, 1877, William Hunt and John Davis started a service from the Traveller's Rest on Ashbourne Road to Derby station – a distance of two miles at a flat fare of 3d.

This was such a triumph that, only 11 days later, an acquaintance of Hunt, Francis Horsley, together with William Woolley, inaugurated a complementary service from Five Lamps, running hourly from 8am. The buses also picked up at the Royal Hotel in Victoria Street, from where it was a penny cheaper to the station.

One suspects that Horsley had, in fact, planned his service well before Hunt’s was begun; 11 days is too short a time to acquire vehicle, horses and competent drivers. In fact, Horsley’s father, George, had been running an omnibus to Melbourne for years and young Frank’s innovation was soundly based.

With Wallis’s services, there was, by March 1877, a 10- minute station to town centre service in operation and a combined timetable was published by Harwood’s.

Three years later came Derby’s tramway system, which was municipalised in 1899, and the wheels of public transport moved on.