On-course bookmakers becoming ghosts of another era

In 1935 there were just three men still driving hansom cabs in London: a Mr Frisbee, a Mr Lamont and a Mr Woolf. These last ghosts of the Victorian age plied for hire around Piccadilly and the Embankment, where once thousands of horse-drawn carriages jostled for space until they were driven from the streets by the motor car and their numbers dwindled to almost nothing.

Sadly, history does not record who was the bearer of London's last hansom cab licence, eventually relinquished in the surprisingly recent year of 1947, but the testimony of Mr Frisbee, given in a newspaper interview in 1935, offers us some idea of what it was like to be one of the last relics of a dying trade.

Mr Frisbee, who by the time of his interview had been driving a cab for more than 40 years, lamented that his few remaining customers tended to be the curious, the romantic or the drunken. Even finding a spare part for the old carriages was becoming downright impossible as so many thousands of hansom cabs had been broken up for glass, wood and springs at a huge dump out in Hendon and the knowledge of their construction had disappeared from the minds of man.