'A kind of portable coach': Sedan chairs and London's Irish Chairmen
The very first sedan chairs belonged to grand individuals in the late Elizabethan period, who employed fit young men to carry them through the streets as part of their household retinue. Then, from 1634 Sir Saunders Duncombe took a fourteen year licence in Westminster to provide sedan chairs to the public. They had two great advantages: you could get inside the chair in your own home, and get to your destination without being seen or recognized, and they were legal on both the pavement and the roads, so avoided the traffic wherever it was necessary. They were also very good for invalids, although many complaints were made about the public sedan chair rank at St James' Park as it was open air and the leather chairs got soaked through in bad weather, making them smelly and unpleasant to travel in.
The chair itself is a strong wooden frame with metal fitting through which two stout poles fit. As long as the frame, floor and seat of the chair were strong, the idea was to make the rest of the chair as light as possible. Very grand chairs were carried by four men, but almost all street chairs were carried by two, who were fitted with a leather harness to distribute the weight across the shoulders and prevent them from dropping the handles of the chair. At night, they were helped on their way by one of London's link-boys, who made a few pence by carrying lighted torches through the streets and escorting the 'chairmen' to their destination. The link-boys were indispensible, as they knew the warrens of London streets, and most chairmen were Irish. They worked in teams of at least two, and were licenced by the authorities, having to wear badges on their sleeves with numbers. Public sedan chairs were like large boxes, clad only in stiffened leather stained black with a bench seat inside. They were the property of carriage companies or teams of chairmen. Most smart pubs, inns, hostelries, and clubs would have had at least one chair for the use of patrons, but they didn't want to keep (or feed) a staff of brawny chairmen on hand, so the teams of Irish chairmen grew up on the streets. After all, as a poor but strong immigrant, being a chairman was ideal: it paid well (about a shilling for a cross London-trip), you didn't need any more than basic local knowledge because the link-boys worked days as well as nights, and your working apparatus was a wooden pole and harness. (This is also why hardly any sedan chairs apart from the very grandest have their original poles; the two rarely belonged to the same person.) Being a chairman, provided you were strong to begin with, and had the appropriate and well-designed harness was extremely physically demanding but would have made a man enormously powerful. Last year I came across the sedan chair (pictured in the gallery) in an auction. This is the chair of a reasonably wealthy private individual. I pushed it about a little to see how much it really weighed, and it wasn't light, probably weighing in excess of 60 pounds. If we say the average person in Georgian London weighed 140 pounds (some would weigh much more, or less, but I would imagine particularly heavy or even corpulent people would have known better than to attempt to get a sedan chair through London's busy streets and taken a more comfortable carriage instead). Still, we are talking about a constant load of around 100 pounds for each chairman, not including his poles and harness. It was rewarding work, but even if it was for seven hours a day, it was hard graft (a phrase for which we most likely have to thank the Irish, but not until the 1790s). Still, the chairmen of London were generally regarded to be the best by Continental visitors, being strong and agile enough to overcome most obstacles, as well as remarkably rapid. A young Frenchman records being knocked over four times by sedan chairs during his visit to the capital. During the Georgian period, there was a large increase in the Irish presence in London. Hardship at home, plus the opportunity to labour in a city expanding as fast as London was, drew them to the English capital. They began known for their brawn and willingness to work at any hard task. They also became known for making trouble, and their love of fist-fights. Boxing has long been a popular English sport, but as chairmen men got fitter and stronger, it was common for the English boxing promoters of the day to advertise fights between 'the Irish chairmen', as they could sustain many 'knockdowns' and provided excellent entertainment. The newspapers of the time contain frequent occasions when riots had to be broken up because in excess of 500 people had come to watch and bet on the chairmen.The Irish were derided during the Georgian period, for their stupidity and for their drinking habits. This worsened during the gin craze, and by the time Victoria came to the throne, the Irish population of London, which lived mainly around Marylebone and Southwark were viewed as the lowest of the low. Illustrations of the chairmen often show very coarse faces, to the point of caricature and there can be no doubt that they were not viewed favourably by the majority of the population. In 1719, an Irish sedan chairman was sentenced to a whipping for spitting on the Princess of Wales. I am surprised at such a light sentence frankly. They were regularly fined for cursing loudly in the street (although one might forgive them if it was for the purpose of clearing their path), and as young men they were notorious Romeos, probably much in demand for their stamina, like footmen. Irish immigrant Denis O'Kelly, later a successful racehorse owner made his initial fortune after starting out as a chairman and bedding a countess in Hanover Square, probably one of his customers. By the 1790s, London was growing rapidly, and the use of sedan chairs was falling, that of the small 'hackney-carriage' rising (although the hackney-coaches had been running with licences from around the same time as the chairs - more in another post), and the Irish were moving to work on the navigation canals and roads that were being laid in and out of London. (They dug both canals and pavements with spades, the width of which was known as a 'graft', and they termed their heavy digging 'hard graft'). Long a protected industry (like plumbing), building and paving were open only to family already established in the trade, supply could not keep up with demand, and the legend of the Irish navigator was born.
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