Cabbie

London Black Cab drivers are renowned for being ultra-brainy: we are expected to memorise the routes of up to 25,000 different roads in the capital, along with places of interest, important buildings, miscellanea, and we are not given a licence until we’ve have demonstrated we have “The Knowledge”.  And boy, can we talk politics and solve the world’s wrongs!  With 70 per cent of trainees dropping out along the way and some Knowledge “boys” taking up to five years to qualify. Although your blog author only took 4 years 10 months and 13 days, but I wasn’t counting!

Scientists have now discovered that cab drivers have a strong internal sense of direction that in many people is absent. The scientists found the brain area known as the hippocampus was larger than average in cabbies. This area of the brain starts firing neurons like mad as their cab driver owners ruminate on what route to take from A to B.

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust put dozens of cabbies in a brain scanner, asked them to play a computer game recreating London streets and then analysed their brain activity.

“The hippocampus is crucial for navigation and we use it like a ’satnav’,” Dr Hugo Spiers of the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience at University College London told the BA Festival of Science in Liverpool. “London taxi drivers have powerful innate satnavs, strengthened by years of experience.”

He identified three types of cell behind the satnav effect: place cells map our location, direction cells tell us which way we are facing and grid cells how far we have travelled.

In addition, it is said that if you can drive in London, you can drive anywhere. One notable London cabbie was Fred Housego an ordinary working-class London Taxi Driver who won the BBC TV programme Mastermind, normally populated by posh lecturers and civil servants, with his amazing memory for random general knowledge, and his ability to memorise his chosen subject for study.

A recent study also found that an enlarged hippocampus might be the reason why people with dementia might not show signs of the condition. “A larger hippocampus may protect these people from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease-related brain changes,” announced Deniz Erten-Lyons, MD, with Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, at the American Academy of Neurology 60th Annual Meeting in Chicago.

So you see Cabbie Blog has an amazing brain compared to the rest of humanity, or has Alzheimer’s and is unaware of it . . . now where DID I put my glasses!

I’ve lost count of the number of times “how’s business” has been said to me recently.  Who do they think I am Warren Buffet? Well for all of you who have not had the advantage of travelling in my cab:

Supporters of these Master of the Universe in banking say that their international telephone number salaries are to attract the Brightest and the Best, well if what has happened this year is from the Brightest and Best, give me Useless and Stupid any day.

Margaret Thatcher once proclaimed “you cannot buck the markets” and a light touch regulation was all that was required.

In reality, the governments on both sides of the Atlantic have now had no alternative but to bail out these banks run by the Masters of the Universe, because in an ironic twist of the Keynesian maxim that if you owe the bank £10,000 you’re in trouble, but if you owe them £10 million they’re in trouble. So if these banks are not supported the likely outcome will be not a recession but a full blown depression not seen since the 1930s.

The ramifications of this financial meltdown will be felt by every person in this country for generations. In bailing out these morons the immediate effect is that the government will have to look for savings elsewhere, that that means fewer schools, hospitals, roads, and a cut in real terms in benefits. With large scale redundancies in banking we cabbies will soon feel the pinch.

Cabbie takes the view that the government should not succumb to a knee-jerks reaction, maybe a few banks should have been allowed to go to the wall. A full investigation should be launched and radical changes made to the financial sector, the most important being that it should never again be allowed to self-regulate. What the City and hedge fund managers have been doing is the equivalent of going down the bookies and putting £1 to win using our pensions for the stake money and giving themselves enormous bonuses in return. Lehman Brothers for example owed $35 for every $1 it made. You don’t have to be a financial genius to realise that sooner or later the game would be up, even your average Cabbie would have told them, if only they had asked, but they never do.

In Defence of the London Taxi Driver

“Foul-mouthed, rude, obnoxious, bigoted, argumentative, extreme right-wing, money grabbing thieves . . .” and that’s just the good guys - upset a London taxi driver at your peril you and will become a fully paid up member of the endangered species list.

But are we really like this? No, of course we are not, “we’re all angels, ‘onest guv’nor”.

Don’t take my word for it, take the late Bob Payton, founder of the Chicago Rib Shack; he called us and the police “the only true professionals in Britain”. Whilst we accept his praise, it’s a bit much lumping us with the British bobby, after all, some of them carry guns, and we have to resort to other methods to deal with cyclists (or moving targets as I prefer to think of them).

Are we really the demonic force we are made out to be or are we the victims of a bad press after a newspaper reporter fails to get a cab home?

In fact our greatest supporters are not the indigenous population but foreign tourists and foreign business people. It is these who can compare the London taxi trade with taxis from their own countries and other places from around the world and a surprising number of people recognise just how good we actually are.

It could be said that there is not much difference between driving a cab in London than driving one in New York - except that we speak in English and have to rely on our brains to get us from one part of the city to another and not rely on a numerical grid system.

The licensed black cab trade of London is unique for two reasons, our history and the “Knowledge”.

London was the first city in the world to have a licensed taxi trade and the licensing can be blamed on a little known English playwright called William Shakespeare.

His productions at the Playhouse at Blackfriars were so popular that all the carriages that arrived to pick up and drop off the theatre-going public would cause a “stop” - in modern day parlance a traffic jam.

Just to show that red tape is not a modern phenomena, it took the authorities about forty years after Shakespeare’s death to introduce licensing.

On June 24th 1654 (during Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth) the Court of Alderman of the City of London authorised the use of 200 licenses for hackney coachmen (there were no women drivers but following the death of her husband a widow could take over the vehicle licence which allowed her to rent the coach out to a licensed driver - a rule still in force today).

Although the licensing reduced the number of stops in the City, there were still a few unlicensed coachmen working, it was the Watermen of the Thames who complained bitterly. Until the arrival of the Hackneys the only way to get from one part of the City to another or to Westminster was by boat and which would include the then hazardous act of trying to row under London Bridge (built for wise men to go over and for fools to go under).

The Watermen frequently complained about their drop in income but the writing was on the wall though many, such as Samuel Pepys would “take boat to White Hall . . . and so home by coach”.

The initial licenses were revoked after just three years following accusations that ex-cavaliers were being favoured instead of the Roundheads who had fought for Cromwell. Following the Restoration of the Crown in 1660 licenses were again issued but there were continual disputes and the process was continually suspended, amended and revoked until the time of William of Orange since which time the licensing has been continuous.

The history of the cab trade is more certain than the cornerstone of the present system - the Knowledge. Nobody knows when it was introduced, though Phillip Warren, cab trade historian, has researched the matter and his book The History of the London Cab Trade which is available from Amazon [ASIN: B000Z7GJIU; Taxi Trade Promotions (1995)].

The theory is that it as introduced in the 1850’s following the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace and the influx of tourists (we needed them then as well).

London had been expanding rapidly and urbanisation had stretched the boundaries from the docks at Wapping in the east to Kensington in the west London was the largest and most populous city in the world at the time, and the authorities, which were now the lately formed Metropolitan Police, ensured that anybody plying the streets for hire as a hackney would at least knew where they were going.

One hundred and fifty years later we are forced to go out “and do the Knowledge”. Jack Rosenthal (another playwright but not as popular as that chap Shakespeare) summed up the Knowledge in his play of the same name, “All the Knowledge requires is that you commit to memory, every street within a six mile radius of Charing Cross; every street and what’s on every street, every church, synagogue, mosque; theatre, cinema, restaurant. You name it – you’ve got to know it.”

It is said that there are about 17,000 streets within six miles of Charing Cross and countless points (places of interest). The process can take two or three years and will take over your life completely. You get no diploma at the end of it, just a tin badge which is worthless outside London.

Unlike the cabbies of New York we do not pay for a medallion, it is all done on merit - give the badge up and you might get a “thank you” from the person behind the counter at the licensing office. Three years of frustration, out in all weather, being knocked off by blind car drivers or skidding on ice . . . all because of a few tourists to the Great Exhibition.

I described the knowledge as the cornerstone of the taxi trade in London, remove it and the whole edifice will come tumbling down around us. There is not a single driver out there who regrets doing the Knowledge, it is what makes us unique, our public can climb into any cab in anyone of the 650 square miles of London knowing that the driver will not only know where they are going and how to get there but will get them there safely.

“Foul-mouthed, rude, obnoxious, bigoted, argumentative, extreme right-wing, money grabbing thieves . . .”, even a cab driver can have a bad day but if we were all like that we could not have stood the test of time.

Next time you get into a cab in London, spare a thought for 350 years of history and a few tourists in the last century who made it all possible.

Sean Farrell

Copyright 1999 Virtual London Limited
www.virtual-london.co.uk

This Remembrance Day go along to the corner of Clerkenwell Road and Hatton Garden. There you will find a blue plaque to Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim (5 February, 1840 – 24 November, 1916) an American born inventor who emigrated to England and adopted British citizenship. He was the inventor of the Maxim gun, the first portable, fully automatic machine gun.

Maxim was reported to have said: “In 1882 I was in Vienna, where I met an American whom I had known in the States. He said: ‘Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others’ throats with greater facility”.

As a child, Maxim had been knocked over by a rifle’s recoil, and this inspired him to use that recoil force to automatically operate a gun. Between 1883 and 1885 Maxim patented gas, recoil and blow-back methods of operation. After moving to England, he settled in West Norwood where he developed his design for an automatic weapon. He thoughtfully ran announcements in the local press warning that he would be experimenting with the gun in his garden and that neighbours should keep their windows open to avoid the danger of broken glass.

Maxim founded an armaments company to produce his machine gun which later merged with Nordenfeldt and the Vickers Corporation in 1896, becoming ‘Vickers, Son & Maxim’. Their updated design was the standard British machine gun for many years. Sales of the Maxim gun were bought and used extensively by both sides during World War I.

The Battle of the Somme fought from July to November 1916, was among the largest battles of the First World War. With more than 1.5 million casualties, it is also one of the bloodiest military operations recorded. The Allied forces attempted to break through the German lines along a 12-mile front north and south of the River Somme in northern France.  The battle is best remembered for its first day, 1 July 1916, on which the British suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 dead - the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army.

Maxim died four months after the start of the Battle of the Somme, profoundly deaf as his hearing had been damaged by years of exposure to the noise of experimenting with his gun.

If only he had stopped with his other weapon of mass destruction, history might have been different . . . the ubiquitous mouse trap.

As a curious footnote the building opposite the blue plaque was the Old Holborn tobacco factory, another purveyor of death.