Mailbag: Children’s Coaches, etc.

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Well this query is a bit of a longshot but here goes:  I live in England and have just bought a miniature Victoria carriage (ie an exact replica of a full size Victoria carriage as used by the well to do in the 19th century but on a much smaller scale and designed for a child).  It is an original and was designed to be pulled by a small pony (or possibly even a goat or large dog).  It has the usual driven carriage amenities – whip holder, coach lamps, underseat storeage etc and there is (as on the traditional Victoria) a small driver’s seat for the coachman as well as the passenger seat.

I’ve been trying to find out about the history of children’s coaches and find the similarity between the coach and early prams really interesting.   There is very little information out there about children’s coaches (well, I suppose it is a pretty obscure subject in the general scheme of things!) and I wondered if by any chance you knew anything about them – I suppose my main curiosity is about at what age did a child go from using a pram to using a coach (if indeed that is what happened).  There’s a story that Queen Victoria’s children rode in miniature coaches around one of the estates but I can’t find any facts to substantiate this.

The link between horse-drawn carriages, coaches and prams is no accident, of course. Just as prams were heavily influenced by automobile styling in the latter half of the 20^th century, so were early prams designed with adult coaches in mind. A sure-fire quality endorsement for a traditional perambulator was to call it “coach-built”, implying that it was made by hand by true craftsmen. (And, yes, they were men!)

When  horses were abundant, coaches were a practical means of travel for people of all economic levels, and it’s quite possible that Queen Victoria’s children gallivanted about in child-scale versions – an excess of wealth often leads to this sort of extravagance. In line with the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words, this charming children’s coach illustrates the point (it sold, according to the auction house, for £1,880):

When automobiles were new, early designs owed a lot to the old-style, equine-driven buggies.  Here’s a photo of Lord Howard de Walden in his horseless carriage (a Panhard, I think, late 19th, early 20th century). It’s obvious that these two buggies are cousins, if not outright siblings:

As the 20th century lumbered onward and prams acquired steel bodies, baby carriage design was often influenced by what was going on in the automotive world.  But that’s a post for another day .  .  .

Your question about “what age a child [went] from using a pram to using a coach” isn’t entirely simple. Prams became ubiquitous in the late 19^th and early to mid 20^th centuries (at least in England), but proper children’s coaches were mostly playthings of the wealthy, as were other elaborate wheeled toys.

Jack Hampshire’s book, Prams Mail Carts & Bassinets, has a photograph of two of Queen Victoria’s children, not in a coach, but in an elaborate carriage with two pretend horses prancing ahead.  There’s a pushbar at the back, but this may have been more of a plaything than serious transportation. Certainly, a toddler would not be sleeping in it.

A pram used to walk a baby, or to put the baby out into the garden, might have been used from birth to five or six years, especially if Mother did her marketing in the village, and had to lug baby, toddler and slightly older child all home along with the day’s haul from the butcher and the greengrocer. Utility, rather than age, often defined “use” in the case of the old “nanny prams”

However, simpler carts like this one, from an 1886 newspaper ad, were used by children generally, as noted, from four to twelve (as the ad claims):

Similar carts (“mailcart” style), as noted by Jack Hampshire, were pulled by goats or donkeys (and probably a pet pony or two), commonly at the seashore, where even non-coach owning children could enjoy the novelty of lurching along behind a pretend horse.  Here’s a fictional rendering of little Harry in his goat cart (1894):

I can’t be sure exactly how your “Victoria carriage” fits into the scheme of these things, though, and not just because this is out of my area of expertise. It sounds as if yours is a marvelous miniaturized version of an elegant full-sized coach, which would be rather different from what Jack Hampshire defined as a “Victoria” style perambulator. Here is, for example, is Prince Charles in his “Victoria”, which is definitely a pram, not a small coach:

The phrases “Victorian” and even “Victoria” have become so imprecise as to be essentially  meaningless; often people just mean “something old and quaint-looking”.  Hampshire uses it quite specifically, though, to refer to this style, which developed from invalid chairs (early versions of what we call “wheelchairs” now), rather than from coaches or carts, though there’s obviously some borrowing here and there.

• Miniature Child’s Carriage from Loughlin Bowe
• Lord de Walden’s horseless carriage from Kilmarnock.com
• Royal mail cart from The Quack Doctor
• Goat Cart from Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad, Project Gutenberg

Prams Mail Carts & Bassinets, a marvelous book, has been reprinted, and a limited number of copies have recently been available from the Jack Hampshire Trust; however it seems to be off-line now.  I’m investigating, and will post when I learn what’s happened to the site.