Knutsford Royal May Day The Sedan Chair Since 1884 the Sedan Chair has added a touch of Cranford days to the procession, as the daintily-dressed young lady acknowledges the crowd with a gracious wave of her little gloved hand from behind her curtains.  The Sedan Chair used in the procession was formerly owned by Lady Jane Stanley, a sister to a former Earl of Derby.  In those days there were no footpaths in the streets, only the hard cobbles.  Lady Jane felt the discomfort of those cobbles so left a sum of money to provide a footpath. However, as she disliked seeing young people walk arm in arm, she stipulated that the footpaths be only the width of a single flag, just wide enough for one person as she didn’t want to encourage the common form of courting.  As a result of this the lasses occupied the flags whilst the swains had to walk behind or pick their way in the channels.« Ronald McDonald, the ITGWU and Soviet Russia. Patrick Abercrombie’s vision of Dublin (1922) »

A brief look at the sedan chairs of eighteenth century Dublin. February 21, 2013 by Donal Thankfully, sedan chairs have long vanished from the streets. I saw one recently at a museum in Edinburgh, and it really is difficult to picture a time when they were a common sight on the streets of British cities. Essentially a sedan chair was a chair or windowed cabin, which would be carried by at least two porters through the streets. You could say that these were human taxis in their day. In his study of Irish tourism between 1750-1850, W.H.A Williams noted that in 1771 sedan chairs “outnumbered licensed carriages in Dublin, to the benefit of the Dublin Lying-In Hospital, which had been granted a duty on the chairs. The use of sedan chairs persisted in the largest Irish cities into the 1830s.” The process of licensing the chairs is made clear in this brief piece from the front page of the Freeman’s Journal in 1786: Thanks to the licensing process, we are able to see just where the owners of sedan chairs lived, and Peter A.Clarke researched this in the study Two Capitals: London and Dublin, 1500-1840.

Based on the 1785 returns, it is evident that “over two-thirds of the holders of sedan chair licenses were members of the titled nobility”, going on to write that “the licensees lived for the most part in Henrietta Street, Rutland Square, Sackville Street, St.Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square”. These were among the wealthiest streets and squares of eighteenth century Dublin, popular with parliamentarians and other elites.cheap recliner chairs usa Colonel Henry Luttrell was assassinated while traveling in a sedan chair in Dublin on 22 October 1717, by a “band of ruffians” according to the Biographical Peerage of Ireland, which was printed in 1817. office chairs on castersFrank Hopkins writes about this in his book Rare Old Dublin: Heroes, Hawkers and Hoors. best massage chair 2011

Luttrell was a figure who had deserted from the army of the Catholic James II to fight alongside Williamite forces following the Siege of Limerick in 1690. None too popular then amongst Catholics, he was murdered when travelling between a Cofffee House on Cork Hill and his lofty residence on Stafford Street. In a talk given on ‘Early Dublin Transport’ in 1938 for the Old Dublin Society, A.M Fraser detailed how in 1779 there were actually more hackney coaches in Dublin, in proportion to its size, than were to be found in London, and likewise with sedan chairs. cheap ghost chair canadaShe also noted that the revolutionary Lord Edward Fitzgerald was conveyed to Dublin Castle in a sedan chair following his capture in 1798. baby shower chair rental vaThis is also found in Thomas Moore’s account of the arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, where it’s noted that “from Thomas Street he was conveyed, in a sedan chair, open at the top, to the Castle, where the papers found upon him, – one of them confirming the line of advance upon Dublin, from the county of Kildare, were produced and verified.”red leather chair victoria bc

Only last December, an interesting find at a Dublin auction house brought sedan chairs back into public discourse in Dublin. Michael Parsons wrote in The Irish Times that: A rare book published in 1788, which has turned up at Mealy’s auction, contains a list of private sedan chair owners in Georgian Dublin, published to pressure them into paying annual charges.high heel chair rooms to go More than two centuries later, the book reveals that some of the city’s wealthiest residents were “in arrears” and were being carried about without having paid their annual licence fee.chair cushions for back pain Many names of the rich and powerful in Dublin were contained within that book, some of which can be read in The Irish Times article here.baby high chair sling

An article in the same paper from 1910 looking back on the earliest forms of public transport in Dublin noted that “the hazard on Rutland Square, opposite the Presbyterian Church, is called ‘The Chair’, as it was originally one of the stands which the sedan chair proprietors occupied.” It was undoubtedly the rise of the hackney carriage in the nineteenth century which brought about the demise of the sedan chair in British cities. What a sight they must have been in eighteenth century Dublin however, carrying the rich to and from their coffee houses, and revolutionaries to Dublin Castle! Posted in Dublin History | Fung Chi Ming: The type of man-powered transport known in English as “sedan chair” has different regional names, including jiao (轎) in China and kago (駕籠) in Japan. In Hong Kong, where it is no longer used as a means of passenger transport, it is known in local Cantonese dialect as san-dau (山兜, “mountain cabin”), k in – y ue (肩舆, “shoulder carriage”) and chuk-kiu (竹轎, “bamboo sedan”).

Bamboo is the main material for the making of the Chinese sedan chairs. The sinologist, J. Dyer Ball (1847-1919) remarks in his delightful compendium, Things Chinese (1903, page 73): “The street-coolie, or the chair-coolie, would be badly off without the bamboo: it provides carrying-poles for the first, whilst the whole framework of the sedan-chair, and the shafts are often of this material.” In Hong Kong, public (for-hire) sedan chairs were of two main types. The light-weight ones consisted of a seat of rattan affixed to two bamboo poles, having a narrow board linked by two cords for the purpose of resting the feet of the passenger. The more elaborate sedan chairs were enclosed and fitted with overhead canvas hoods for protection against sunshine. A memorable depiction of Hong Kong’s street scene in the 19th century can be found in John Thomson’s 1873 masterpiece, Illustrations of China and Its People, Volume 1: “Chair-stands are to be found at all the hotels, at the corners of the chief thoroughfares, as well as on the wharves, where the eager chair-coolies pounce upon each freshly-arrived stranger as he lands at the port.”

Indeed, the Registrar General and Captain Superintendent of Police of the Hong Kong Government could direct that certain parts of the street space be set aside as places where unengaged sedan chairs should stand ready for public hire. They could also specify and revise, subject to approval by the Governor in Council, the scale of fares for public sedan chairs to be charged. In Victoria Barracks 1842-1979, a book prepared by the Headquarters British Forces Hong Kong, there is a mention of military life in Hong Kong in the period 1888-1900: “The duty officer had to visit guards around Murray and Victoria Barracks and in particular the magazine in the top corner of the latter. The tour took two hours by night and for this duty the orderly officer called out a sedan chair. This was carried around by four coolies.” The Peak residences usually had sedan-chair sheds and quarters for chair coolies. Leo D’Almada e Castro, a Portuguese barrister in Hong Kong, recalled the pre-1941 days: “Many of the upper level residents, particularly the Japanese, had private chairs.

These were made entirely of wickerwork instead of the usual oilcloth. These chairs were carried by four coolies with two more in reserve. They moved at something like four miles per hour, even uphill. The average chair with two coolies was much slower.” (South China Morning Post, 25 January 1975) Riding in a sedan chair was a symbol of status. “Even from mid levels down to Central,” Leo D’Almada e Castro recounted, “people used chairs. Somehow walking must have entailed loss of face, I suppose. My grandmother lived near the university and we went by chair when we visited her.” Sedan chairs remained a widely used means of city transport in early 20th century, so much so that in 1901 the Governor Sir Henry Arthur Blake appointed a commission to enquire into the causes of public complaints about the difficulties of procuring and retaining carriers for private sedan chairs and rickshaws (The Hong Kong Government Gazette, November 30, 1901). Sedan chairs that came into use in Hong Kong were locally made.

The Anglo Chinese Commercial Directory, published in 1915, records five “rattan chair maker stores” under the store names of Cheng Kee (津記), Hang Yuen (恆源), Teen Shang (天盛), Yue Tack (裕德) and Yue Wo (裕和). Two of them were located in Wellington Street, the others in Aberdeen Street, Belchers Street, and Staunton Street. Sedan chairs reached a peak in 1921 when 1,218 were licensed. That year, Carl Crow remarks in his work, The Travelers’ Handbook for China, Including Hong Kong: “The [Hong Kong] island is covered with rugged hills and small valleys through which flow a few rocky streams…. A form of exercise very popular in Hong Kong is to ride to the top of the hill on chairs or in the tram and walk back to the city.” The steep and narrow paths to the upper parts of Hong Kong Island known as “The Peak” made the sedan chair a convenient form of transport to cover the distances between home and office in the early colonial days. For a thumbnail account of the unique role of the sedan chairs in Hong Kong, one should read the words of a journalist of the Hong Kong Times (February 14, 1874):

“Sedan Chairs in Hong Kong are different from Sedan Chairs in any other parts of the world … Doubtless, it is owing to the peculiar formation of the City that the bearers are so superior to any to be found in the open ports … We at one time thought that our streets were, some of them, so remarkably steep, that a wheeled vehicle could not possibly go up them, unless drawn by some power much greater than possessed by two men.” When John Thomson visited Hong Kong in the 1870s, he was “for a time affected with a sentiment of compassion towards the unfortunate men [sedan chair carriers] who bear him about on their shoulders. This, however, soon wears off: he feels the necessity of rest after a hard day’s work in a hot, trying climate….” (John Thomson, Impressions of China and Its People, London 1873) More and more people deplored the use of human beings as “beasts of burden” and protested when sedan chairs were shown in cinema pictures or posters, especially after the first road going up the Victoria Peak by cars were completed in 1920.

In the year 1936, the Hong Kong Travel Association’s poster, with a sedan chair being carried up the Peak, was much resented (South China Morning Post, April 8, 1936). Licensing records show that sedan chairs became progressively fewer in Hong Kong. There were 219 sedan chairs in 1939, compared to 451 in 1933, 731 in 1927, and 1,173 in 1922. During that same period the number of registered cars rose from 595 to 5,209 (Figures from annual reports of the Police Department, various years). Due to the shortage of cars and fuel, human transport revived during the Japanese Occupation. The sedan chairs which had begun to fall out of use before 1941 became a means of transport of the rich. A Hong Kong Sedan Chair Syndicate (香港駕籠組合) was formed in 1943 at the behest of the Japanese, with an aim to supervise the trade such as the scale of fares to be charged (Wah Kiu Yat Po, July 17, 1943). After the war, sedan chairs were increasingly squeezed off the roads. No sedan chair was re-licensed since the early 1960s.