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Old Lady (emerging wrathfully from a Cabmen's Shelter), "I say, Conductor! If you don't send this 'ere tram on directly, I'll report you! Arf a hour I've been settin' a-waitin' a'ready. Ain't you ashamed of yourself?" The clay pipe in the bemused cabby's hand would have identified him as an Irishman to contemporary Punch readers. Expatriate Irishmen made up a significant part of the cab driving fraternity in both England and North America. The semicircular shape at the near bottom corner of the shelter in this picture may represent a wheel. At least one early shelter (in Oxford) was equipped with small wheels so that it could be moved if necessary. Even without wheels the size and dimensions of the cabmen's shelter and its location on the street gave it some resemblance to a tram. Perhaps not enough to fool old ladies, but enough to make the joke plausible.
Source:
A Mistake. Cartoon by J.P. Atkinson, Punch, 1878.
Pictures from "Punch", volume 1 (London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co., 1894), p. 35.
Bloomsday for Cab Drivers / 31
The Cabmen's Shelter / 9
The scene in Ulysses that takes place in the Butt Bridge cabmen's shelter is fraught with significance for Joyce scholars, who debate its symbolic role in the book as a whole. For the rest of us it is rather disappointing. Joyce's jarvies don't talk shop, so they tell us next to nothing about the 1904 Dublin cab trade. The one exception is a news item which one of them reads aloud:
This turns out to be a real news item, although it did not appear in the Dublin Evening Telegraph until June 27, 1904, ten days after the scene in the cabmen's shelter.
George Henry Cadogan, the fifth earl, was lord-lieutenant of Ireland from 1895 to 1902, and it was a dinner of the Cabdrivers' Benevolent Association that he presided over.
In the opinion of Vance Thompson the CBA was among the best of the philanthropic organizations devoted to the interest of cab drivers:
The cabby read out of the paper he had got hold of that the former viceroy, earl Cadogan, had presided at the cabdrivers' association dinner in London somewhere. Silence with a yawn or two accompanied this thrilling announcement. [16 1162 / 27363]
The cabman who becomes a member pays in an annual subscription of five shillings. When old or disabled he receives an annuity of twenty pounds a year; at least twelve annuitants are yearly chosen by vote of the members. Among those elected this year were our friends Knock Softly, who had driven a cab for forty-three years, Crimea Sailor Jack, who retires at seventy-one after forty-five years on the box and Little Hill of Westbourne Park and Davis Street, who had driven nearly half a century.