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Friar Gate depot opened in 1881 as a Derby Tramways Company horse bus and horse car depot, stables and workshops. This view, probably from the 1890s, shows drivers and conductors (or "cads" as they were then known) are holding honest boxes into which fares were placed

This 1907 photograph was taken by C Dakin Turner at Surrey Street and shows Ashbourne Road dug up as conversion work for electric trams was undertaken. The man standing by the tram is Mr A Bates with W Crother standing with the driver. Courtesy Derby Local Studies Library

Horse trams usually served Ashbourne Road until 1907. However, in this view from the autumn of 1904, a Derby Corporation horse bus is shown on the route. This kind of substitution would happen again in the summer of 1907 when electric tramway works disrupted the thoroughfare. Courtesy WW Winter

June 1, 2007 marked the centenary of the running of Derby’s last horse car service. Here, retired teacher Barry Edwards, who was born in Derby but now lives in Nailsea, looks at this landmark date in the city’s transport history and shares some of his wonderful collection.

It was June 1907 when Derby said goodbye to the corporation horse trams which had plied the town streets for 27 years.

Initially run by the Derby Tramways Company, the service was taken over by the corporation in 1899.

Its demise started in 1904 when “new age” electric tramcars started in service and soon spread to many parts of town. These tramcars heralded the dawn of clean and efficient transportation and brought to an end the use of tramway horses which had been described by critics as “barbarism”.

But how much truth was there in this charge? Paradoxically, photographic evidence appears to show relatively well turned out animals, standing docilely at a terminus, while self-conscious drivers and conductors pose for the camera. However, surviving records, originally examined by myself in the archives of the then Derby Corporation Omnibus Department, lend support to the view that life for these creatures was hard, painful and short.

The Horse Register, firstly compiled by the Derby Tramways Company from 1880, lists the registration number, name, age on purchase and, illuminatingly, the ultimate fate of each horse, or mare.

Horses worked for up to four hours per day in harness, hauling a tramcar for up to 15 miles in the process. In one day, a car might be pulled by four pairs of horses.

Once retired (if they reached that point) at about 14 years of age, a common description in the register was “worn out”, which indicated when an animal faltered, its legs bowed with hard work and collapsed from total exhaustion.

The sale of dead or worn-out horses for cat food was carefully recorded in each year’s accounts, as was the collection and sale of manure from the stables and streets.

However, a disturbing picture of the fate of a very large number of horses that did not reach a “worn-out” state is also revealed.

The register records horses that had ruptured intestines and stomachs, fatal injuries as a result of accidents (ribs fractured by a cart’s shafts or contact with a tramcar), broken backs, split aortas, twisted bowels and burst blood vessels. Indeed, the burden of a horse (or even two side-by-side), pulling a laden tramcar through Derby’s thoroughfares, was immense.

Most of the injuries described are attributable to the enormous strain put on these creatures by the process of stopping and starting and hauling up to 40 passengers on the double-decker cars bought by the corporation from Glasgow.

With the help of artefacts and contemporary descriptions, we can begin to create a picture of what it was like to experience a journey in a horse tramcar a century ago.

Firstly, we would probably be conscious of the noises connected with the cars. The horses had bells attached to their collars to warn of their approach, and drivers and conductors communicated by whistle.

Then there would be the smell of manure that the horses dropped en route, especially at stopping stations (as stop were called).

The fly-infested ordure fouled the roadway and got on to the boots and shoes of passengers, contributing to the fusion of aromas inside the cars, where the harsh smell of oil from the lamps that illuminated the vehicle would add to the pungent mixture.

The Derbyshire Advertiser, in a display of initial optimism, had called the horse cars “comfortable, rapid and easy in motion”.

But the reality was that the vehicles pitched and swayed their way along the streets and passengers were often inclined to feel queasy.

However, tram rails meant smoother motion and more efficient use of animal power than that experienced by the horse buses on rutted and muddy roads.

Overcrowding on the Alvaston route in the 1880s led to more than 50 people overloading vehicles and causing enormous strain on the horses, even when in three-horse combinations.

The press raised the issue of the treatment of the horses which “became a matter of general concern in the town”. Letters to the Derby Mercury also complained about the conditions of the horse tramway workers whom it was stated had only one day off a fortnight (later decreased to one day off every three weeks) and were on shift seven days a week, clocking up 90 hours in the process.

For this, drivers were paid 27s and conductors 20s. Only later were meal breaks introduced.

There is no doubt that the corporation takeover in 1899 led to an improvement in conditions, though municipal officials and tramway committee members were constantly aware of costs and disputes over wages and conditions would feature as flash points throughout the period of corporation control.

However, by June 1, 1907, a new era had already begun in Derby as electric “state-of-the-art” tramcars took over from horse-drawn vehicles.

The process had started on Wednesday, July 27, 1904, when electric services had commenced on the first routes to the Midland Station, Alvaston and Osmaston Road.

By 1907, electric cars had replaced the “rattlers” (as horse cars were colloquially known) along Normanton Road, with an extension from the Normanton Hotel to the Cavendish and a previously unserved route to Pear Tree, via Douglas Street. These two sections were linked as a circular route from September 1905.

At the same time, Burton Road was added to the network as far as Vicarage Avenue, with Kedleston Road upgrading to electric services in July 1905, having previously been served by a horse charabanc.

Ashbourne Road was, therefore, the only route in Derby left to be converted from horse trams to electric ones, along with Uttoxeter Road and Nottingham Road which still had horse buses.

Plans were made and contracts put out to tender with the work actually starting on May 27, 1907.

The original intention was to run single deck electric cars on this route because of Handyside’s GNR bridge. Indeed, the corporation had already taken single-deckers into its fleet in anticipation of their use on the Ashbourne Road route and had even placed an order for three more from Milnes Voss.

However, just before work started on the conversion, the town council took the decision to lower the roadway under the railway bridge after the tramways committee diverted £1,500 into the council’s improvement fund. This, of course, meant that higher capacity, closed-top double-deckers could be used on the route with potentially greater returns.

So, by June 1, 1907, roadworks were encroaching onto the horse tramway and, as the daily receipts register clearly shows, horse buses were substituted on the route with a diversion via Becket Street, Newland Street, Friary Street and Stafford Street until November 28, when the electric service was inaugurated. The horse tram depot beside the railway arches in Friar Gate was, as a result, isolated though it remained in corporation use until March 1908.

By this date, all but 10 of the remaining horses had been sold off. However, this is not quite the end of the story for equine transport history in Derby.

Horse buses remained on the Mansfield Road route until May 1917 with the chestnut mare Flower in casual use until 1923 and Badger kept on for even longer as a dray horse.

Two old ex-Glasgow horse cars were kept on as “salt cars” and not disposed of until the 1930s, at the end of the electric tram era.

However, we should spare a thought for “Punch”, “Marquis”, “Jenny”, “Jolly” and the scores of other hard-working horses who gave their lives developing public transport services in Derby.

And don’t forget, too, the equally over-worked stable boys who, no doubt, looked after them with some affection. Just as the horse era came to an end, so, inevitably, did the electric one.

Tramcars ran to Windmill Hill Lane until December 30, 1933, trolleybuses taking over one day later. In turn, the trolleys, which ventured into the post-war Mackworth Estate as far as Morden Green, finished on September 9, 1967, giving way to diesel-powered buses that are still in vogue today.

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