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Herefordshire
LEDBURY CARRIERS
The urban hierarchy
At Elizabeth 1st death in 1603 England was still an empty country with only some four million
inhabitants: it would take another 150 years of slow growth, of stagnation, perhaps decline, followed
by renewed slow growth to reach the six million mark. Yet England was already one of the most
urbanized of European countries, with a fifth or more of the population living in towns of over 2,500.
These towns formed a regular hierarchy with London at the apex.1 The capital was always an
exceptional city, growing much faster than all the others. At Elizabeth 1st death 200,000 - that is one
in twenty of her subjects - lived in London and the proportion would rise to as much as one in ten. By
1780 London with its 675,000 inhabitants was the largest city in Europe, surpassing even
Constantinople. It was a major centre of industry, of overseas trade and also of consumption, exerting
its pull everywhere - witness the field behind the Feathers Inn in Ledbury which over-night housed
Welsh cattle for the London market while their drovers stayed, as George Wargent remembered, at the
Drovers Arms.2 Below London came the major regional capitals, cities like Exeter, Bristol,
Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester, often ports and themselves centres of industry (for Bristol,
like Liverpool, the discovery of the Americas had created splendid new markets for its merchants and
manufacturers as well as new commodities for its trade at home). Such a regional metropolis in turn
supplied county towns like Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford.
At the lowest level in the hierarchy came the market towns, spaced out a day’s travel apart
across the countryside. There were five in Herefordshire, of which in 1801 Ledbury was narrowly
second largest “... a fine well-built town near the end of the Malvern hills, noted for its clothiers ... Its
market is on Tuesday.”3 Their function, as markets, was to bring together at one time and one place
the scarce and scattered customers of the countryside whom they serviced and supplied. (In 1801 all
Herefordshire only mustered 88,000 inhabitants). Equally such markets served to assemble the
produce of the countryside, including handicraft industries like handloom weaving, glove-making or
stocking-knitting for the regional and national markets.
The road to town
The whole urban hierarchy was knit together by its carriers. In 1637 John Taylor in his
Carriers’ Cosmography could already write: ‘... what a man sends to Hereford may thence be passed
to St. David’s in Wales [while] Worcester carriers can convey anything as farre as Carmarthen.’4 In
the 17th century some still operated with strings of pack-horses. In Herefordshire and the Marches
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wheeled transport only arrived in the 18th century; neither coach nor wagon could reach Liverpool
before 1760.5 Elsewhere, however, the heavy stage-wagon was already operating and was sufficiently
important to provoke an Act of Parliament of 1691 which required the Justices of the Peace in Easter
Quarter Sessions everywhere ‘... to assess and rate the price of all land carriage of goods’ within their
area.6 This measure, designed to prevent wagon owners combining to push up rates, would continue
right up to 1827, as would other measures imposing maximum weight limits on wagons in winter and
in summer, the width of their wheels and the number of draught horses employed. Such common or
public carriers were required to carry whatever goods were offered to them to any destination along
their route and to do so at ‘reasonable rates’.
Such measures were designed to protect roads, but the real answer was to improve them. By
the mid 18th century Turnpike Acts, allowing tolls to be levied to improve and maintain roads were in
place for Ledbury, Worcester, Tewkesbury and Hereford and all the way via Gloucester to Oxford and
London. The new techniques of road-making introduced by MacAdam and Telford carried the
improvement forward. The result was that costs of wagon transport fell while journey times were cut
by a third or more by the 1840s. It was possible, too, to raise the maximum load limits from 30 cwt.
per wagon in 1662 to 60 cwt. in 1741 and 120 cwt. (six tons) in 1765.7 By then there was a dense web
of stage-wagon movements from town to town, a pattern which, as Turnbull has shown, the national
and provincial trade directories can lay bare.8 In 1755 some 83 carrier firms provided 148 wagon
services out of Bristol,9 while by 1767 some 54 firms were managing 160 services a week from
Birmingham. These included regular services to London and other regional capitals but with perhaps
two-thirds to towns inside a 30 to 40 mile radius - which from Birmingham or Bristol included
Leominster, Worcester and Gloucester. By the 1780s Worcester had entries of its own, with 17 firms
and 36 services, four of them to London.10 Finally in 1793 Pigott’s Directory included Ledbury itself
with two wagon services to London. One via Worcester left at seven o’clock in the morning on
Tuesday to return a week later on Thursday evening. The other via Gloucester left on Saturday
morning to return early on Thursday morning six days later.11 (Wagons, clumsy and heavy at a ton
and a half, only managed about two miles an hour.) That specialist carrier, the mail-coach, was of
course already running from Hereford through Ledbury and Worcester to London three times a week,
with another three running via Gloucester as were a number of stage-coaches. It was to make way for
this increase in traffic that the Upper Market House in Ledbury was removed from the middle of the
Southend Road followed by the Butter Market in 1818, part of Butchers’ Row in High Town by 1821
and the rest in 1835.12
Herefordshire carriers
In 1820 Henry Watkins’s wagons left The Maidenhead in Eign Street on Mondays and
Thursdays to travel through Ledbury and Worcester to London. Richard Lockett was working daily
from his warehouse in Friar’s Gate to Birmingham and all North England via Ledbury and Worcester
Author: John Harrison
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and daily to London ‘and all points intermediate’. His was already a major enterprise and destined to
grow larger. By 1822 R. Jones had added five new services from Ledbury: three a week to Worcester
via Malvern, one to Monmouth and another to South Wales via Ross, out on Tuesdays and Fridays and
back next day to his office in New Street.13 With the Cambrian stage-coach running thrice weekly as
far as Carmarthen, South Wales was now built into the network. By 1830 Hereford and the four
market towns on its English flank between them offered 131 stage-wagon services a week:
Leominster 40, Hereford 36, Ledbury 22, Ross 18 and Bromyard 15 - a pretty exact reflection of the
four towns’ size and importance.14 Nineteen of these services were to London, ten were to Manchester
and ten to Birmingham. Surprisingly in 1830 while there were five services to Wales, both North and
South, only one wagon service a week ran to Bristol, to which both Wye and Severn provided routes.15
The other 86 services all lay within the 30 mile radius which covers the three county towns.
Many stage-wagon services were operated by small men, handling one or two short-range
routes, Ledbury men like Henry Brown whose wagon went to Tewkesbury on Saturdays or Thomas
Smith who sent his twice a week to Worcester. But there were men of much more substance. From
Ledbury in 1830 George North ran stage-wagons to Ross and Worcester, but also three more from
Ross to Worcester, Gloucester and South Wales. In 1835 another such man, William Butt, appeared in
Ledbury. From his house in High Street he operated to Gloucester on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday
nights and to the Packhorse Inn at Worcester on Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights, returning on
the following days. 16 He was still working to Worcester in 1844 on the same three days but then
from the New Inn in the Homend. A much larger figure was Joseph Page, first recorded as working to
Gloucester in 1822 but by 1830 operating weekly services from Ledbury to Ross, Gloucester and
Worcester. He also had services from Hereford and twice weekly carried from Ross to Worcester and
to Gloucester. Finally, he ran twice a week from Ross to London and to North and South Wales. His
total of 14 weekly services was no match, however, for the 29 of Richard Lockett. On Mondays,
Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays his wagons set out from Ledbury to Worcester and as many on
the same days to Hereford. But Lockett also ran daily services from his Friar’s Gate warehouse in
Hereford to London, to Birmingham and to Manchester and the North. At a guess Lockett in 1830
would have used some 25 wagons and from 150 to 200 horses in his business. He even had two other
carriers, Meredith and Wheeler using his Hereford office.
Wagons and costs
Operations on that scale required considerable expenditure on wagons, which lasted some five
years and cost £100 and on horses, at their best between five and nine years old, bought at from £20 to
£30. Then there were warehouses, stables and offices to buy or rent. There was a constant outlay too
on feed, the oats, beans and hay needed to keep hard-working, heavy horses in good condition. With
four or six, perhaps even eight horses hauling each wagon, with others necessarily resting at grass or
in the stables, every one of them eating eight tons of fodder a year, their feed bill was roughly half of a
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firm’s running expenditure. (Some carriers chose to buy and store their fodder supplies themselves;
others contracted with inn-keepers along the route to feed the teams and act as agents in handling local
customers’ goods.) More was spent on harness, shoeing and veterinary services. Then there were
horse-keepers and waggoners, washers and greasers, porters, book-keepers and agents to employ and
rent to pay for the buildings needed at each staging point on the route. Finally firms had to pay the
tolls on turnpikes along the way and insurance against theft and damage to both goods and teams in
arriving at charges to their customers.17 The stimulus to towns along important carrier routes was
considerable, though in Herefordshire, as in Hampshire, improved communications damaged its local
handicraft industries, though in both counties boosting hop growing.18
The maximum rate that those customers might be charged was set by each county’s Justices of
the Peace and it was this rate that those not in trade - ‘gentlemen’ as they were classed - had normally
to pay. Such customers were likely to be found listed in directories as ‘Private Residents’ rather than
‘Commercial’. An effective carrier would cultivate them by personal visits or circulars and build up a
‘connection’. (In 1780 a Hereford stage-wagon firm was sold for £471 - but its good will, its
‘connection’ cost another £250.)19 For trade goods from merchants, manufacturers and wholesalers
what was paid depended on the strength of active carrier competition and from year to year on the
prices of animal feedstuffs and on whether war was curtailing shipment by sea. What the gentry and
traders of Ledbury actually paid cannot be known in the absence of carrier account books or those of
their customers. For that same reason we do not know how often Ledbury tapped into the wagon
services to London which came through Ledbury from Hereford on their way via Worcester and
Oxford to the capital. However, lumping together the movements of carrier wagons for Hereford and
its four eastern satellites the figure suggests an annual movement of goods by carriers of from 25,600
tons to a maximum of 38,400 tons a year, the latter figure arrived at if loads both out and back were at
the 1765 legal limit of 6 tons.20
These approximate figures are those for public carriers operating from town to town. But
every estate and farm had its own carters and there were carriers - hauliers as they would later be
called - busy with local work in every town. Goods coming by stage-wagon into Ledbury had to be
distributed to the out-of-town customers to whom they were consigned. The aptly-named Thomas
Carter of New Street, Ledbury,21 or Edwin Jones, carrier and provision dealer The Homend 22 were
the sort of town-based haulier who would do such work - though at rates up to a third higher than the
stage-wagon charge, in recognition of the more occasional nature of their work.
Competition from canal and railway
This expansion of stage-wagon services and tonnages had taken place in the same period as
major efforts were being made to improve river navigation and while a great canal boom was under
way. In 1830 John Easton, William Cooke and Swift and Co., each sent barges weekly to Bristol
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down the Wye, while Gloucester had become a major inland port for traffic on the Severn. After 1798
it was linked to Ledbury by the Herefordshire and Gloucestershire Canal.23 The canal’s promoters had
stressed that it would bring coal and ‘the sugar and other articles of grocery, iron and iron-mongery
goods, Manchester goods, furniture, pottery, glass, cheese’ currently brought by stage-wagon and do
so more cheaply. When the canal reached Ledbury the price of coal duly fell from 24s to 13s.6d a
ton.24 By 1835 there were four canal carriers at Ledbury: the canal company itself, Joseph Holloway,
William Taylor and Gibson and Co.25 (G. Gibson was a Hereford carrier whose wagons and vans
operated from his warehouse in Maylords Lane four times a week via Ledbury and Worcester to
Birmingham, Manchester and London.)26 In 1842 the canal was pushed as far as Canon Frome and it
was the arrival of Gibson’s first barge there which led the Hereford Journal on 11 January 1843 to
pronounce the Wye navigation thenceforth dead. (But not quite. In 1844 William Bunning’s sloop
operated every week from the Hereford Castle Wharf to Bristol, Droitwich, Gloucester and Stroud,
with barges from Commercial Wharf ‘occasionally’.)27 The canal only reached Barr’s Court in
Hereford in 1845 and it never paid a dividend, but in 1848 it carried 43,000 tons of freight. The
Ledbury wharf early saw a cluster of coal merchants but it also saw ‘Canal and General Carriers’ like
Joseph Trokes, together with Pickford and Co., both with extensive stage-wagon operations. From
1844 boats were running twice weekly to Birmingham via the Hereford and Gloucester and Worcester
and Birmingham canals while in 1858 Robert Smallwood was shipping from Ledbury to Birmingham
by canal, together with Pickford and Co., with Danks, Venn and Sanders and with Mounsell and Co.,
all working ‘by canal etc. to London and all parts’. The ‘etc.’ is a reminder that all three firms used
stage-wagons too - to Bristol, to Gloucester and to Hereford. In 1876 there is a last reference to
conveyance by water by the Severn and Canal Carrying, Shipping and Steam Towing Co. Ltd.,28 for in
1881 the canal was closed by the GWR, its owners since 1870, and built over by the Hereford,
Ledbury and Gloucester railway.29
But while the canal was disappearing, another more deadly competitor had appeared - the
cheaper, faster railways. Their approach had been heralded as early as 1844 when Haines and Co.,
operating a stage-wagon service from The Feathers, Ledbury, to Hereford, Hay and Brecon also
provided a twice weekly service by tram-road from Hereford to Abergavenny. At the same date
Crowley and Co., for goods arriving at Worcester, offered a forwarding service to Spetchley station,
three and a half miles away, and then by rail to London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and all parts of
the North of England.30
One carrier ignored these warning signs. In 1858 Levi Clifton, from the New Inn, Ledbury
was working out to Evesham on Mondays and Fridays, to Tewkesbury on Wednesday, to Cheltenham
on Thursday, to Hereford on Tuesday and Friday, to Gloucester Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and
Friday and to Upton on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.31 This was a major enterprise, but a local
one, its sudden appearance possibly the result of a buy-out of an earlier firm like Haines and Co.32
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whose name is missing from the directories from now on. But what is interesting is that Clifton was
not visiting these towns only on market days. Nor was he a regional or national operator like
Pickfords. Were the county towns sufficiently different in character and economy to make a regular
stage-wagon movement of goods between them necessary?
Whatever the case, the day of the stage-wagon was ending, Clifton had built his empire too
late. In 1861 Worcester, Ledbury and Hereford were linked by rail. By the end of the decade rail
links were in place with Evesham - for Oxford and London - and with Redditch for Birmingham while
in July 1885 the Ledbury and Gloucester Railway at last opened, providing a further route to Newport
and South Wales. Carriers by land would need a new function, as complement to rather than as
competitors of the train.
Village carriers
Lascelles Directory signalled the change in 1851, when besides listing town-based stagewagon firms he also named six village carriers coming into Ledbury from Dymock, Eggleton and New
Town.33 All six only came in on Tuesday, market day which would remain their focus. There were
three markets on Tuesday - the livestock, the corn and the general market but it was the last which
most drew the carriers and their customers. Markets were cheap, friendly and at close of day likely to
become cheaper still, and this was where the countryman got his perishable food-stuffs. In the 1850s a
river of carriers headed towards Leicester’s vast market, bound not for the few stalls selling cheap
crockery, furniture and shoes but for the 242 butchers’ stalls, 50 fruiterers, 20 market gardeners, 16
fishmongers, five cheese-makers, one baker and numbers of butter, egg and poultry dealers.34
Hereford’s Butter Market might be much smaller, but there, too, two-thirds of the stalls were selling
fresh food-stuffs. At Ledbury, as in Hereford, Butcher Row had stood in the centre of the market
place.
Such village carriers everywhere set out from home early in the morning for their market
town. There, at a chosen inn, they stabled their horses, feeding and watering them, lining up their tilt
carts, two or four-wheelers, along the street or in the inn yard until in the afternoon with up to two tons
of goods they set off back on the slow journey home. With stops to collect orders and then to deliver
goods they might average 3½ miles an hour. Each market town had its own carrying system, dictated
by topography, distance and the size and variety of the market itself. Each occupied its own territory,
its boundary set by the influence of its neighbours, like a group of competing trees. Ledbury’s
territory was defined by the Woolhope Dome to the west and the Malverns to the east, both of them
barriers to the carrier’s cart, especially returning fully laden from market. Those villages, like Bishop
Frome, from which carriers worked out to Ledbury, Hereford and Bromyard or Bromsberrow whose
carrier worked to Gloucester as well as Ledbury, defined the boundary.
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What is striking is the success of this system. That a village had its own railway station did
not mean that it would not have a carrier. Ashperton welcomed its first village carrier after its station
had opened with four trains a day. From 1895 it had two carriers, in 1920, three. Nor did it matter
that most villages came to have a shop or two, small though most Herefordshire villages were. In
1867 Castle Frome with 160 inhabitants had its butcher’s shop, Putley with 197 had both a butcher and
a general shop while Tarrington with a population of 543 was served by a grocer, two butchers, a
shoemaker, a tailor and two shops.35 Yet all three villages had carriers. Much Marcle, far larger at
1,029, was provided with a draper-grocer, a baker, a butcher, a tailor, four shoemakers and no less
than four shops, yet by 1902 had seven carriers to Ledbury.36
What’s more, such villages were also served by other carrier systems too - those of the townbased hawkers who travelled out to the village with pony or donkey-cart. At the 1851 Census there
were in England some 26,000 hawkers, licensed to distinguish them from vagrants. Their number
would rise to 69,000 by 1911. Peddlers, even humbler carriers, took their goods far out into the
countryside on their own backs, opening their packs of pins, ribbons, lace or combs, brooms or mats at
their customers’ very door. This was a real blessing in an agricultural area, for farm labourers, live-in
apprentices and the many girls and young women in domestic service, 900,000 of them at the 1851
Census, had few leisure hours and those not on market days. Not only did hawker and peddler bring
the market to the customer, they also broke down the cost of their goods either by selling piece-meal half rather than a whole sheet of pins or needles - or by selling larger items on instalment. They were
of considerable importance in developing new markets among the labouring classes.37
At the other end of the social scale county and upper-middle class families were being catered
for by the van deliveries made by high-class town butchers and grocers. Much cheaper and more
frequent postal deliveries made it ever easier to place orders with them as did the telephone, though
Ledbury itself, in 1946, only had 195 telephone subscribers.38 F. W. Taylor, wine merchant of
Ledbury, telephone no. 12, promised “All orders delivered in the Country promptly,” while Gurney’s
of Hereford offered groceries at London prices delivered to any railway station in the county.39 Rather
later, in 1911, Ledbury’s enterprising fishmongers, McDonald & Co., in the High Street, turned the
tables on the carrier by sending their fish carts out far and wide. By the turn of the century steam
trawlers and railways had made fish a staple food instead of a luxury; McDonald’s carts, setting out
every day but Monday, brought it to nearly every village touched by Ledbury’s carriers and a few
more besides.40
By the last quarter of the century the countryside was also penetrated by great department
stores, such as Nobles in Manchester or Marshall & Snellgrove in London which built up enormous
mail-order departments, promising that ‘ladies residing in the remotest hamlets ... may supply all their
wants ... as if they were to undertake the most tiresome shopping expedition’. A single store might
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handle a thousand customers’ letters a day, their packers despatching parcels by railway or by the
cheap Post Office parcel service, with payment by postal order.41 Even the lower middle class or
superior artisans were catered for by firms such as Gamages in Holborn, with its monster catalogues,
or Great Universal Stores in the North.
Shops and shopping
Local shops were also regularly courted from the 1850s onwards by commercial travellers,42
sent out by manufacturers armed with catalogues and price lists. The trade in shop goods was in fact
enormous: ‘in about 1880, one London drapery firm alone reckoned to send 200,000 bales and parcels
every year to 12,000 outlets throughout the country’.43 To handle the goods despatched by such firms
the railways built up their parcel services: at Ledbury the GWR office was at The Royal Oak, that of
the Midland was at The Feathers.44 Competing with both was the specialist parcel firm of Sutton &
Co., who had Luke Tilley as their local agent. His Almanack, listing them under general carriers,
explains that they ‘make a specialité of the traffic’ and that their extensive organisation ‘enables them
to deliver rapidly in all parts of Great Britain and the Continent.’45 Yet despite all this competition the
village carriers grew steadily in number throughout the nineteenth century. Thus Littlebury in 1867
listed seven village carrier services to Ledbury, by 1885 there were 14, in 1890 22, even though the
Ledbury to Gloucester rail link was now in place, while in 1898, conflating Kelly and Luke Tilley, the
carrier total peaked at 32, falling in 1914, but only to 29.
Why did their number grow? In Herefordshire it was not because of any rise in population.
The county’s population, according to census returns, was 113,272 in 1841 and still only 114,125 in
1901, having peaked at 125,370 in 1871. Ledbury’s population showed a similar curve, with a bump
in the 1860s caused by the inclusion of railway contractors and their navvies. Thereafter, the
population of Ledbury stagnated up to the Second World War. Some loss was certainly caused by
emigration. In February 1852 the Ledbury ironmonger, Walter Pitt, joined in a presentation to Joseph
Meacham off to London and California.46 In 1874 Tilley’s Ledbury Almanack had adverts for
steamers of the Inman Line, sailing from Liverpool to New York twice weekly with through bookings
to towns across the continent. Kelly, in 1895, listed two Ledbury agents - Joseph Baker (the Midland
Railway Agent) for the Anchor, the Allan and the White Star Lines and George Webb for the
American Line sailing from Southampton to New York.
Nor was demand for carrier services to town increased because new factories had provided
local women with better paid work - rather, in Herefordshire, old handicrafts such as weaving, glovemaking or stocking-knitting were lost to mechanisation elsewhere, while new jobs as typists and clerks
were too few to matter. The rapid national growth of the middle classes was not a cause in
Herefordshire either; they did not then live in Herefordshire villages. Populous Much Marcle in 1885
could boast no more than a curate, a schoolmaster and a draper/sub-postmaster.47
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It may be that Ledbury had become more attractive as a shopping centre, yet the market itself
had been strengthened by the abolition of the old chartered fair days and their incorporation in the
market rota, to the end every carrier to Ledbury came in on a Tuesday. 48 What may indicate that the
pull of shops was becoming more significant is that, from 1900 to 1914 especially, increasing numbers
of carriers also came in on non-market days. Three did so before 1900, ten between 1900 and 1914
and five post-war, choosing Friday or Saturday. Overall, however, the intensification of the carrier
network seems mostly to have depended on the growth of demand - more particularly from the farmer
and his men - fostered by growth in real incomes.
For improving landowners certainly, for many farmers and for the artisans who served them blacksmith, wheelwrights, harness-makers - the period up to the last decades of the century were good
ones. The agricultural slump in the century’s final years hit Herefordshire’s fruit, hops and livestock
farming less than the arable of Eastern counties. Emigration and movement to the industrialising areas
of Britain drew off from the land some of the surplus labour which might have depressed agricultural
wages. 49 So though Herefordshire’s farm labourers were some of the worst paid in the country, with
no industry to push up wages as happened in Lancashire, a fall in the cost of living left a margin even
for them. One notes, however, the comment of George Wargent - ‘Poor people had to study not what
to do with, but what to do without.’50
The railways, by breaking down the cost barriers to the movement of goods, helped level up
the prices for Ledbury’s crops and lower those of manufactures. Canals, tram-roads and railways in
turn had cut the cost of coal for everyone. For those on modest incomes clothing became cheaper as
factory production of cottons and then of woollens expanded, together with that of footwear and a
variety of household goods. Other items followed - Chicago pork, the beef of Argentina, the mutton
of New Zealand, first tinned, then frozen. By 1880 Pedlinghams, at 4 High Street, were offering
‘Compressed Beef in Tins’ and J.W. Webb ‘Prime American Cheese’.51 Nearer home steamship and
railway moved 4½ million cattle, 13 million sheep and 2 million pigs a year from Ireland to Bristol
and Liverpool. Most significantly the cost of bread repeatedly came down as Canadian, Australian,
Russian and Punjab wheat flooded in. During Victoria’s reign the price of the quartern loaf fell from
11d. to 7½d. and finally to 5¼d. Even so bread or potatoes remained the poor man’s staple - 12½ lbs
of bread per week for an adult - and the agricultural labourer spent three-quarters of his wages on
food.
The railways provided the means of carrying the output of factory and prairie more cheaply to
town markets and in quantity too - the 88 million tons of railway freight carried in 1860 had leapt to
508 million tons by 1910. The new cheap press and widespread advertising encouraged the mass
consumption which mass production required. Even local girls would be advertised in Luke Tilley’s
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Almanack. In 1921 it proclaimed ‘Better Servants cannot be found than in the village homes of
Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Shropshire’ and offered an advertising campaign
to promote them.52
The link between the more plentiful goods in Ledbury’s market and shops and the consumer
was provided by the village carrier. He did not bring villagers in any number to Ledbury, though there
was usually room for a handful in his cart - some women, perhaps, with butter, eggs or poultry for sale
under Ledbury’s market hall. For carrying people there was the occasional horse-drawn omnibus.
Pigott, in 1844 has an omnibus from Dymock to Ledbury, referred to again in the 1850s, while Walter
Pitt, the Ledbury ironmonger, in 1853 noted in his diary going to Gloucester by Tipton’s omnibus and
back by Tipton’s mail,53 as well as to Worcester by Meaks coach. But though a few villages were thus
served, the carrier’s main task was always to take to market not the villager but his goods and his
orders.
Exactly what was carried into Ledbury is unknown since no carrier’s notebook or records
seem to have survived; indeed there is only a handful for the country as a whole. Carriers, it was said,
often carried their instructions in their heads. There is evidence, however, from other counties, of
what was carried for delivery to market stall or shop: rabbits, game and poultry slung swaying on
poles, eggs gathered up by the thousand, fruit and vegetables, hides for the tannery. But there were
also parcels for the railway, pre-paid telegrams and money orders for the post office, bundles of
laundry, clocks to be mended, and razors to be sharpened.
Even more important, the carrier took with him orders from customers all along his route.
Every study of the carrier emphasizes this latter role and from the few notebooks that survive emerges
an extraordinary list of goods purchased on their customer’s behalf by carriers trusted to buy well and
carefully, even occasionally with his own money. The pencilled notebook of Frederick William
Palmer, a Leicestershire carrier, records everything from sheep-netting to wallpaper, from lamp oil to
cups and saucers, from knitting wood to patent medicines, joints of meat and pounds of tea which he
bought on commission for the villagers and farmers along his route.54 In the recollections of Thomas
Payne, the Bosbury carrier who worked via Ashperton to Tarrington and Hereford, the whole
emphasis falls upon his task of buying on the villager’s behalf.55 Village shop-keepers also used the
carrier to bring out their stock, some of it supplied at a discount by those Ledbury firms, like
Bebbington Bros., who proclaimed themselves wholesalers as well as retailers.56 As Marchant and
Matthews ‘wholesale and retail grocers’ in Hereford pompously explained: ‘retail dealers find it is
more economical to avail themselves of the experience of so well-known a firm than to trust entirely
to firms at a distance... this plan saves much trouble and the waste of keeping large dead-stock
themselves, and also economises largely in transit charges.’57
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Every village carrier had a regular inn which he used as feeding and watering place for
himself and for his horse and as a collecting point for goods and passengers for their homeward
journey. Many such inns had a carrier room, often shelved, in which goods could be assembled as
they were brought in by passengers or sent there by the market stall holder or the shop to which the
carrier had delivered orders. Their errand-boys would all know which inn served which carrier.
In Ledbury only ten inns were regular carrier bases. The Feathers was scarcely ever used by
them, though in 1867 part of it was fitted with stalls and used as the Corn Exchange and of course it
had been the main halt for mail and stage-coaches; as the leading posting house it had its own vehicles
and horses to accommodate. It was perhaps seen as too grand, too ‘county’, for village carriers and
their customers. Instead they used eight inns close to the centre: The Seven Stars, The New Inn, The
White Lion, Talbot, Vine Tap, The Royal Oak (occasionally), The Crown and Sceptre and The Ring of
Bells, together with the much used Plough a little further out on the road to Bromyard or Hereford.
An unexpected addition from 1902 was The Central Café, close to the Clock Tower.58
As might be expected the inns chosen were usually on the street by which the carrier would
arrive, e.g New Street with its Vine Tap and Talbot for those arriving from Ross, The Plough for
villages to the west. Why they were chosen is unknown. Clearly ample stabling and a good-sized
yard through at the back, a building big enough to have a carrier room to spare and a landlord
welcoming the carrier and the trade he brought were all to be desired. 59 Once chosen the individual
carrier usually stuck to his or her inn, James Bowkett from Ashperton thus using the Seven Stars from
1895 to 1914, Kempley’s Mrs. Evans The Central Café from 1910 to 1930. Likewise, particular inns
seemed to become attached to particular routes: carriers from Ryton and Bromsberrow used the Royal
Oak from 1880 to 1926 - seven of them in turn: Underwood, Hardman, Parker, Watkins, Powell, Mrs.
Luther, Mrs. Hyett and then Powell again. The Plough was the destination of a Bosbury carrier in
1870 and still was so in 1914. In 1902 all five carriers from Castle Frome put up at The Plough,
doubtless a convivial bunch at dinner there, for the carriers’ inn had a social role, an exchange for
gossip and news. But what is notable is that of the ten carrier inns just three or four came to dominate.
The six patronized in 1880 had each attracted just one or two carriers. In 1890 of the seven used, the
Seven Stars, Plough and Central Café, had emerged as by far the most popular, a choice further
narrowed by 1914 to just the Seven Stars and Central Café. Everitt, noting this pattern, comments ‘...
as a consequence, the “carriers dinners” and “market dinners” at the big inns formed a great gathering
centre for country people from all over the region.’60
What were the capital and running costs of a carrier? What did he charge? The Sanitary
Laundry Co., Hereford Ltd. between 1899 and 1901 spent £33 on the horse to draw their £26 van,
bought from the Bristol Wagon and Carriage Company and £14 on harness. Their 1901 running costs
were £20 on feed plus £12 for hay, £1.5s. on shoeing and 5s. on horse powders from Chave &
Author: John Harrison
Page 11
Jackson, together with £70 for their driver.61 A carrier presumably faced a similar outlay, though he
may have bought his cart locally from R.E. Daw, Ledbury timber merchant, wheelwright, cart and van
builder,62 and if he had a field or two he might have spent less on hay. His wages came from the profit
earned. What the Ledbury carriers charged seems unknown but a Wiltshire carrier at this period
charged 1d. for small parcels, 2d. for parcels from 1lb to 7lb in weight and for a drive of some five
miles charged passengers 6d.63 Labourers would rather walk.
Some carriers were professionals operating in different directions on different days to exploit
their capital outlay and their own labour more fully. But for many the expedition to market was only a
supplement to some other profession. Thus William Parsons serving Ashperton in 1876 was a broommaker and barm (yeast)-dealer;64 Bishop’s Frome had carriers who were shopkeepers, beer-retailers,
monumental masons and in James Pullen a fruit grower and grocer too. Blacksmith, carpenter, baker,
boarding-house keeper, castrator, pig-killer and farmer, all these professions were found amongst the
carriers to Ledbury. Often the extra family income from carrying was earned by a wife, sister or
daughter; over the years 30 women, three of them spinsters, worked as carriers, some clearly widows
carrying on their husband’s round. At Colwall the John Powell recorded as carrier in 1890 was
followed in 1895 by Mrs. Powell, by both John and Mrs. Emma Powell in 1902, by Mrs. Powell once
more in 1906 and then by Miss Powell in 1910 and 1912. Herefordshire in fact was remarked on as
having a larger number of women carriers than usual - in the case of Ledbury 30 out of something
over 100 carriers in all. The women’s presence was most obvious after the First World War when
they were nine to twelve men, but by then the carrier system was in sharp decline.
New forms of transport
For the individual the arrival of the safety cycle in the 1890s had provided new mobility: and
cheap, too, if second-hand.65 By 1902 W.L. Tilley had a well established cycle works, building and
repairing machines. However, ever the entrepreneur, he had transformed this by 1905 into a ‘Cycle
and Motor Works’ with stocks of ‘Motor Spirit, Motor Grease, Lubricating Oils, Tyre Patches,
Sparking Plugs, Accumulators and all other Motor Accessories, together with a complete stock of
Dunlop Motor Tyres.’ By 1908 George Hopkins & Sons, the long-established coach and carriage
builders in New Street were also a Motor Works, ready to fit solid rubber tyres to both carriages and
motor cars. Tilley countered by announcing a ‘Motor Garage recently erected with Inspection Pit.’
By 1912 he was AA accredited and a contractor to His Majesty’s Motor Mail, while Hopkins was
official repairer for the RAC. The Feathers, still offering ‘Covered Coach-Houses for carriages and
good accommodation for horses’ also had motor-cars for hire.66 The attempt to cater for a wider
public by putting on motor-buses failed, however, both in Hereford and in Malvern where Morgan &
Co. ran a service round the hills.67
Author: John Harrison
Page 12
But mechanisation had appeared in more work-a-day forms with the reaper and binder and the
steam traction-engine to drive the threshing machine. It was the steam-engine, as steam-roller, which
from the 1880s had made cycling easier and the solid tyred bus less uncomfortable, while as a steamwagon it had taken over the heavy haulage once done by teams of horses.68 (From the Heavy Motor
Car Act of 1903 on, steam-wagons of up to 5 tons were allowed to run at up to 5 mph.). By 1909 F.C.
Flower, farmer at New Mills, Ledbury, also appeared as ‘haulier by steam or horse power’.69 Steam
traction also served, as local mills and railways had done, to train up a competent body of mechanics
and fitters. By 1909 William Wargent & Sons of Canon Frome proclaimed themselves agricultural
engineers, as a little later did F.C. Swift & Co., agricultural and motor engineers in Ledbury. Yet at
that date there were only 154,000 registered motor vehicles in the whole of Great Britain but 832,000
horses employed in haulage alone.70
It was the first World War which really fostered technical advances in the motor vehicle,
encouraged its production and required large numbers of men to train as drivers and motor mechanics.
This new form of transport now threatened village carrier and railway alike. It had much of the
flexibility of route of the one and was cheaper than the other. Railways might reply with cheap fares
on market days but they served too few stations and those often inconveniently far from the town
centre to be serious contenders. When the motor-bus was revived as a public people-carrier, the threat
was seen as very real. A leader in The Hereford Times of 27 March 1920 reported on the initiative by
James Fryer Ltd. to run light buses from a base at Newtown which would ‘work Bromyard,
Leominster, Ledbury and Hereford district on the various market days of those towns.’ These buses
would cater ‘expressly for country people, many of them in out-of-the-way districts,’ for whom they
would ‘play the part of the country carriers’. As indeed they did. Morgan & Co. with their single
deckers had carried passengers but also their goods: some in the boot and up to 3½ cwt on the roof.
The new firms followed suit. On Tuesdays, market day, they took in both people and goods and in the
afternoon, parked near the market, ‘the errand boys started to appear, on bicycles or with porters’
trolleys, bringing parcels for passengers or for the busman to deliver.’ For ‘... there was no
recognizable limit to the nature of the commissions entrusted to, even thrust upon, the regular busman.
Goods for repair, faulty items rejected, clothes (outer and under for both sexes), wreaths for funerals,
bills to be settled: he could be relied on in every way.’71 The larger operators, like the ‘Midland Red’
did much the same, witness their 1929 advertisement: ‘Parcels accepted for delivery To All Parts of
the Midlands’ care of their local parcels agent in Ledbury, Mr. Cheshire at the New Inn Hotel.
Early buses not only functioned like village carriers, they often followed their routes from
village to market town. Tilley’s Almanack in 1927 with its bus timetables and ‘Midland Red’
announcements charts the steady expansion of the country bus. The ‘Midland Red’ Motors provided
daily services between Ledbury and Hereford and between Ledbury and Ross, while the ‘Blue’ Motor
Bus linked Ledbury with Gloucester. But Tilley has a second page headed ‘“Midland Red” Motors Author: John Harrison
Page 13
Tuesday Service to Villages’: Bosbury to Ledbury four times in the day, last bus home at 4.15 pm.;
Colwall to Ledbury, three services and Much Marcle to Ledbury again three services. 72 This
timetable is followed by a list of 12 ‘Miscellaneous Services’, nine on Tuesdays. These ran
Gloucester, Newent, Dymock to Ledbury; Much Cowarne via Eggleton, Newtown, Canon Frome and
Ashperton to Ledbury; from Newtown via Yarkhill, Stretton Grandison, Ashperton and Pixley to
Ledbury; from Staunton via Redmarley, Bromsberrow Heath, Broomsgreen and Greenway to Ledbury
and finally Hollybush to Ledbury. With the weekday school bus from Much Marcle calling at
Rushall, Aylton Court and Putley Green the roll-call of carrier villages served by buses is almost
complete.73 By 1930 two new firms had appeared, the Rover Motor Bus operating between Gloucester
and Ledbury by way of Newent and Dymock and Davis & Sons who had absorbed all the
Miscellaneous Services, running on both Tuesdays and Saturdays.74 There was no role left for the
carrier.
However, even in the 1920s, the motor-bus had not been the only threat to the village carrier.
By 1921 Wilks’ Stores in Ledbury were offering ‘deliveries by Motor Van to all parts of the district
once every week.’75 Such vans were capable of penetrating much deeper into Ledbury’s hinterland
than slow-moving horse and cart had done and light vans, used by manufacturers, traders and
shopkeepers for their retail deliveries formed some three quarters of the 128,200 goods vehicles in
Britain.76
National companies like Sutton & Co., who had long specialised in parcel deliveries also
motorized, expanding to some 600 branches and agencies (like that at Ledbury) and operating daily
services to Bath, Bristol, Birmingham etc.77 In 1929 the Council thought it necessary to designate
public parking places for cars in five streets with ‘the east and west sides of the lower part of High
Street ... reserved for motor buses.’78
The post-war spread of the motor-bus was matched by that of the motor-lorry. The end of the
war in 1918 released a great array of ex-army lorries going cheap and men war-trained to drive and
maintain them used their gratuities to buy many of them. There is little direct evidence of their
working impact, but even more than the motor-bus they were free to operate in every corner of the
countryside. Farmers soon took advantage of the lorry which linked the farm directly to market with a
speed which made fruit and vegetables easier to handle and got hops to waiting brewers quickly each
autumn. The glass-lined tanker could collect milk from dozens of farms for carriage to creamery and
dairy. Whereas in 1924 three-quarters of farm output had gone by rail, by 1938 nearly two-thirds was
going by road. The same was probably true for farm inputs.79
The rapid death, post-war, of the village carrier probably provides the best, if negative,
evidence of the lorry’s success. Of the 31 carrier services from 16 villages in 1917 only 11 services
from 6 villages survived in 1926. Just two village carriers to Ledbury survived from the first to the
second World War, Mrs. Evans from Kempley and Much Marcle and Oliver Howe from Fromes Hill.
Author: John Harrison
Page 14
But then, Howe who had long operated his tilt cart with two horses to Bromyard and to Ledbury, by
1921 was already motorized. He extended his market runs to Hereford and Worcester as well as to
Ledbury, acted as a general haulier and he ran The Wheatsheaf public house, kept a grocery shop and
dealt in coal and milk.80 Not perhaps a typical village carrier, though a doughty representative of a
system that had served Ledbury and its countryside so well for some 70 years.
Before the Second World War car ownership had spread from the upper to the lower middle
classes as Morris Oxfords and Austin Sevens came off the assembly lines; where William Morris in
1920 had turned out 1,550 cars a year in 1935 he turned out 140,000.81 (Between the wars the MorrisCommercial was the most successful volume van in Britain).82 But most working men and women
had still to rely on public transport - or perhaps the motor-bike. After the war the mechanisation and
motorisation of the countryside continued and intensified: tractors became more common on the farm,
the garage or petrol pump in village and town, the pattern of Midland ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ Motors bus
services was re-established. Tilley’s Almanack of 1950 records regular services between Hereford and
Worcester and their market towns, with ‘Blue’ Motors linking Gloucester to Ledbury via Staunton and
via Dymock. But the Midland also ran its ‘Service to Villages’ buses from Bosbury and from Much
Marcle on Tuesdays and from Wellington Heath on Tuesdays and Saturdays. It even added a service
to that greatest of market towns, Leicester. However, of the nine ‘Miscellaneous Services’ which in
1927 ran on market day to Ledbury from a whole variety of villages, or of the Rover Motor Bus or
Davis Bros., there is now no sign.
By 1960 the three Midland ‘Service to Villages’ routes were being operated every day of the
week and more intensively. Thus Bosbury had a morning and evening service to Ledbury on Monday,
Wednesday and Friday but five on Tuesday, market day. However, there were seven services on
Saturday - the shops had overtaken the market in pulling power, aided by sports fixtures and the
cinema. By 1970 the ‘Service to Villages’ was even more intensive from Bosbury but with only
Tuesday services from Much Marcle and two from Wellington Heath. The pattern continued to 1980
though with little emphasis on market day.83 Ledbury was no longer an effective market town.84
Meanwhile Dr. Beeching had been wielding his axe, drastically cutting rail-track mileage and
in more rural areas closing up to two thirds of their stations.85 By then buses too had lost ground overall up to half their passengers.86 The 1981 Census showed that journeys to work by public
transport had fallen by over a third since 1971.87 The gainer had been the private motor car. Mass
production in America, Europe and then globally had brought down prices while incomes had been
rising. As early as 1960 more than half of all British families owned a car. By 1980 only a quarter
lacked access to one.88 Today, as car owners in a self-service world, we have all become carriers,
whether in village or town.
Author: John Harrison
Page 15
Directories referred to in these notes
Cassey, Directory of Herefordshire
Jakeman & Carver, Directory and Gazetteer of Herefordshire
Kelly, Directory of Herefordshire
E.C. Lascelles & Co., Directory and Gazetteer of Herefordshire.
J. Littlebury, Directory and Gazetteer of Herefordshire.
Pigot & Co. Directory of Herefordshire
Robson, Directory of Herefordshire.
Isaac Slater (late Pigot & Co.) Royal, National and Commercial Directory and Topography of the Counties of
Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Monmouth, Shropshire and North and South Wales .
Tilley
The Universal British Directory (1793-8).
1
For the extensive bibliography on the urban hierarchy see, for example, J.A. Sharpe, Early Modern England, A
Social History, 1550-1760 (1988).
2
George Wargent, Recollections of Ledbury (1905; 1998).
3
Pigot (1793).
4
J. Taylor, The Carriers Cosmography (1637), 4-5.
5
W.T. Jackman, The Development of Transportation in Modern England, (1916), 142, n.1.
6
Jackman, Development of Transportation, 68-73.
7
See W. Albert, The Turnpike Road System in England, 1663-1840 (1972).
8
G.L. Turnbull, ‘Provincial Road Carrying in England in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Transport History
IV.1 (1977), 19.
9
Daniel Defoe, in The Complete English Tradesman (1726) recorded that “ ... the shop keepers of Bristol who
in general are all wholesale men have so great an inland trade among the western counties, that they
maintain carriers just as London tradesmen do, to all the principal counties and towns...”
10
Pigot (1784).
11
An 1816-17 directory recorded their London destinations as the Castle and Falcon, Aldesgate Street and the
King’s Head, Old Change. Both these Ledbury services actually started from Hereford.
12
J. Hillaby, Ledbury, a Mediaeval Borough (1973), 123. ‘That the centre of the town being occupied by the
Row, the thoroughfare is rendered inconvenient and dangerous to travellers, particularly ... when the
business of slaughtering animals is going on.’
13
Pigot (1822).
14
At this date Hereford was described by Pigot as decayed but Leominster as thriving.
15
Carriage by water was often more important and always cheaper than by road, even for moving humans.
16
See Pigot, 1822, 1835, 1835 and 1844.
17
D. Gerhold, Road transport before the railways, Russell’s London Flying Waggons (1993), 27-8. The
survival of detailed evidence about their work and costs in two long legal cases makes Russell’s
particularly interesting. Their agencies, warehouses and stables stretched from Exeter to London and
Exeter to Falmouth.
Author: John Harrison
Page 16
18
M.J. Freeman, ‘The Carrier System of South Hampshire’, The Journal of Transport History, NS, IV, 2,
(1977), 79-81.
19
Gerhold, Road transport , 251.
20
The accuracy and completeness of directory figures is of course uncertain; they relied on informants in each
town or village listed and national directories only revised their entries every ten years or so. Rival
directories rarely agree precisely. The landlord of the New Inn in 1802 mentions Messrs. Harris &
Co.’s wagons leaving the inn twice weekly for London and Brecon, but no directory mentions Harris.
There was also much borrowing. The ‘Ledbury Trades’ 1793-98 listed in The Universal British
Directory is identical to Pigot (1798), down to mistakes in alphabetical ordering.
21
Cassey (1858). He was listed in the 1861 Census with his two sons James and John, all three carriers.
22
Tilley (1879).
23
See D. Bick, The Herefordshire and Gloucestershire Canal (2003).
24
C. Hadfield, The Canals of South Wales and the Border (1960), 202.
25
Pigot (1835).
26
Robson (1835-37).
27
Pigot (1844).
28
Littlebury (1876).
29
P.H. Iliffe-Moon, (ed.) City of Hereford Official Guide (n.d).
30
Pigot (1844).
31
Cassey (1858).
32
Haines & Co., from Ledbury had run stage-wagons to Hereford, Gloucester, London, Abergavenny and
Brecon and from Ross to Gloucester, Monmouth and Brecon. (See Isaac Slater (late Pigot & Co.)
Royal, National and Commercial Directory and Topography of the Counties of Gloucestershire,
Herefordshire, Monmouth, Shropshire and North and South Wales (1850) and Lascelles (1851).)
33
E.C. Lascelles & Co., Directory and Gazetteer of Herefordshire, 1851.
34
A. Everitt, ‘Country Carriers in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Transport History, N. S., III. 3 (1976).
35
Littlebury (1867).
36
Tilley (1902).
37
D. Davis, A History of Shopping (1966), 246.
38
English County: A Planning Survey of Herefordshire, (1946), 189.
39
Kelly (1885).
40
Tilley (1911).
41
A. Adburgham, Shopping in style: London from the Restoration to Edwardian elegance, (1979).
42
They, like carriers, based themselves on local inns, such as the Victoria Temperance and Commercial Hotel,
The Homend, which tempted with its ‘billiard room; hot lunch daily for commercials and motorists.’
Kelly (1929).
Author: John Harrison
Page 17
43
See M.J. Freeman and D.H. Aldcroft, Transport in Victorian Britain (c.1988), 137.
44
The Midland built extensive mills near Tewkesbury, ‘for preparing the chaff, corn and other food for all the
[cart] horses on their line.’ Olive M. Pain, Tewkesbury, The Day before Yesterday (1992), 56.
45
Tilley (1883).
46
Walter Pitt, Diary entry of 25 Feb. 1852. Herefordshire Record Office, BJ35/1.
47
Kelly (1885).
48
Littlebury (1876).
49
Wages: A.L. Bowley, Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century (1972). Table: Nominal
Weekly Wages of Agricultural Labourers, 1795-1893. Rural emigration: J. Grundy ‘Population
Movements in Nineteenth Century Herefordshire’, Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field
Club 48 (1986), 488-500.
50
Wargent, Recollections of Ledbury, 21.
51
Tilley (1880).
52
The experience of Ledbury’s ironmonger, Walter Pitt, casts some doubt on Tilley’s claim. Mary, his first
maid, too intimate with Tom Webb had to be sent home on the coach to Gloucester “very bigg”. Her
replacement, Lucy, was found fast asleep on the sofa with the policeman. See his diary entries for
March 1857. Herefordshire Record Office, BJ35/1.
53
Lascelles (1851) lists Thomas Tipton, coach proprietor, Ledbury.
54
A. Everitt ‘Country carriers’, 181.
55
See The Cavalcade of the Century, 1832-19332:One Hundred Years of the Hereford Times, (1932), 29.
56
The role of market town wholesalers in supplying village shops has been explored for Cumbria by Margaret
Noble, for Cheshire by Ian Mitchell ‘Retailing in eighteenth century and early nineteenth century
Cheshire’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 130, (1981).
57
Industries of Herefordshire (and district) Business Review (1892), 41.
58
Where George Wargent places it in his Recollections of Ledbury.
59
Sale notices for The New Inn in the 1780s stressed that it had a coach house with new stabling and a good
yard and other necessary detached buildings for a large inn. See J. Eisel and R. Shoesmith Pubs of
Bromyard, Ledbury and East Herefordshire (2003), 188.
60
Everitt, ‘Country carriers’, 197.
61
No.2 Minute Book. In 1915 they bought a one ton Hollys-Overland motor delivery van for £445 14s. No.3
Directors’ Minute Book.
62
Jakeman & Carver (1914).
63
A. Greening, ‘Nineteenth Century Country Carriers in North Wiltshire’, Wiltshire Archaeological and
Natural History Magazine, 66 B of 1971.
64
He presumably went to market to sell his brooms and perhaps to collect his barm from the brewery anyway.
65
Ownership of bicycles and similar goods became possible for working class folk because of the spread of
hire-purchase agreements of which over a million were recorded in 1891.
66
E. F. Tilley, Illustrated Guide to Ledbury and District. nd. [c.1910 ?]
Author: John Harrison
Page 18
67
C.J. Davis, Round the Hills: An account of 70 years of bus services in the Malverns, (1979).
68
See B. Johnson, Steam Traction Engines, Wagons and Rollers, (1971) p.41.
69
Kelly (1909).
70
See T. Barker, The Economic and Social Effects of the Spread of the Motor Vehicle, (1987), and F.M.L.
Thompson, (ed.), Horses in European Economic History, (1983). .85.
71
J.E. Dunabin, The Hereford Bus, (1986).
72
These are only services to villages because the buses, garaged in town, had first to go out to the villages to
collect their market-bound passengers - the very opposite of the village carriers’ pattern.
73
The school run was the bread and butter of bus companies; it also facilitated the growth in secondary
education.
74
Tilley (1930).
75
Tilley (1921).
76
H.J. Dyos and D.H. Aldcroft, British Transport: an economic survey from the seventeenth century to the
twentieth. (1969). p.366. Pelican (1974).
77
Dyos and Aldcroft, British Transport , 639.
78
Tilley (1929), 36.
79
Tilley (1929), 373.
80
Dunabin, Hereford Bus.
81
A.J. Lambert, Travel in the Twenties and Thirties, (1983). See also Roy Church, Herbert Austin: The British
Motor Car Industry to 1941, (1979).
82
C. Dunbar, The Rise of Road Transport, 1919-1939, (1981).
83
Tilley’s Illustrated Ledbury Almanack, 1960, 1970 and 1980.
The West Midland Group Survey of Herefordshire of 1946 had much earlier shown that Ledbury’s market, in
sharp contrast to Hereford’s, attracted very few extra bus services. English County, 179-80
84
85
The Ledbury - Gloucester line closed to passengers in July 1959.
86
R. Cresswell, (ed.) Rural Transport and Country Planning, (1978)
87
E.C. Davies, An Analysis of the 1981 Census for the Hereford and Worcester County Council.
88
E.C. Davies, An Analysis of the 1981 Census
Author: John Harrison
Page 19