The Omnibus Murder available on Kindle

The Omnibus Murder

London 1878: Tamar Fleet is proud of her job. She rides the London omnibuses, helping to prevent pilfering from the omnibus company. While the country is deeply divided about whether Britain should go to war with Russia, Tamar takes no interest in world affairs, but occupies herself with her work and her friends.

Then there is a murder on an omnibus and Tamar is drawn into events which may have their origins thousands of miles away. There is trouble for her friends and Tamar has to make decisions about duty and loyalty and face danger herself.

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Horse Power

It’s not possible to write contemporary fiction without, sooner or later, mentioning motor cars.

It’s not possible to write historical fiction without, sooner or later, mentioning horses.

For a writer who, like me, doesn’t know much about cars or about horses, this can present difficulties.

These can be circumvented to some extent by having a central character who doesn’t know much about them either.  But at some point over the course of a writing career, a central character will be in a position where he or she has to deal with a car or a horse, depending on the setting. Or there will be a secondary character whose job, or personality, requires that he or she knows about one or the other.

Cars and horses are possessions, and like other possessions they can be revealing of the characters of their owners. A man who owns a flashy, expensive car in a contemporary novel would own a flashy, expensive horse in historical fiction.

Horses were everywhere in the past. In 1695 it was estimated that in England about half a million horses were used as cart and plough horses. There were probably at least as many again employed in private ownership, in the carrying trades, in industry and other uses, making a million horses in all. The human population of England at this time was perhaps a little over five million.

The expanding industries of the eighteenth century used horses in increasing numbers. In 1726 a coal mine at Jesmond used more than seven hundred horse drawn wagons to move coal from the pithead to the quayside on the Tyne. 

In 1766 two thousand horses a week were used (or two thousand horse journeys per week were made) carrying lead from the mines at Nenthead to Penrith.

In 1835 one coach operator employed 1800 horses.

The arrival of the railways ended long distance stagecoach travel, but overall  probably increased the number of horse drawn vehicles on the roads. There were frequent complaints about the congestion caused in London by the railway companies’ vans transporting goods from the termini to their final destinations.  

In 1893 one writer estimated that there were 25,000 horses employed in the carrying trades in London. When omnibus, tram and cab horses, and brewers’ horses,  were added, that brought number up to 75,000. There were also horses kept for private carriages and by small tradesmen.

All those horses had to be stabled. One railway company had stabling for five hundred horses and one stables near Paddington. Large numbers of men were employed in caring for horses, large quantities of leather were used in making saddlery and harness. 

Horses had to be fed; fodder was shipped along the Thames to London in large quantities.  The amount of land that had to be devoted to pasturing, and growing fodder for, horses gave cause for concern when the human population was growing rapidly and needed to be fed.

And horses produced manure, which had to be disposed of. A horse might produce fifteen to thirty-five pounds of manure a day. This was not a problem in the countryside where manure could immediately be put to good use and even had a monetary value. It did create difficulties in the towns.

Overall, I think I would rather write about horses than motor cars. Stables and horse fairs are more attractive locations than garages or car showrooms. The weather or the landscape can be used to greater effect in  an account of a journey by horse than in an account of a car journey.  And a fictional horse can more easily be given a name and a personality than a fictional car.

A brief history of time

The clocks went forward for British Summer Time last night.

The idea of Daylight Saving was first proposed by William Willett. On his early morning rides in summer he noticed how many hours of daylight were being wasted when the sun rose at four or five in the morning.

William Willett published a pamphlet advocating the idea in 1907, but although Daylight Saving attracted the support of MPs and bills were placed before Parliament, it was not taken up by the government until 1916. Then it was introduced as a means of saving resources during the War.



Less than a hundred years before 1916, different parts of England still had their own local time. People measured time by the sun, and sunrise and sunset in the West of England were twenty minutes or so later than in London.

It was only when the railways arrived that it became essential for the whole country to have a uniform measurement of time. In 1840 the Great Western Railway decided that all its timetables and stations should operate according to London time. Other railway companies gradually followed.

From 1852, the installation of telegraph lines alongside railway tracks enabled an electric time signal to be sent throughout the country from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, so that clocks could be properly synchronised.

Mariners also needed to know the time accurately for navigation purposes. Time ball towers, the ball dropping at a fixed time each day, were established at Greenwich, visible to shipping in the Thames, and elsewhere around the coast.



At a conference in Washington DC in 1884, Greenwich was adopted as the  prime meridian of the world. Greenwich Mean Time was established as the standard by which time all over the world would be calculated.

The London Underground is born

On this day, 10 January, in 1863, the Metropolitan Railway, the first part of the London Underground, and the world’s first underground railway, was opened to passenger traffic. The line (which is now part of the Hammersmith and City Line) ran for three and three quarter miles from Farringdon to Paddington.

‘Many prophets started with the positive assurance that it would be a failure; that it would never be commenced, or if commenced, never finished; that London would be undermined, blown up, or collapse on each side of the tunnelling.’

Nevertheless the work was completed, at a cost of around £1.5m, despite ‘immense difficulties, of shifting grounds, swelling clay, falling houses, bursting drains, and continued incursions of the Fleet Ditch.’

At least 25,000 people travelled on the line on its first day of operation. Such was the demand that at King’s Cross the sale of tickets to eastbound passengers was suspended for an hour or more around midday, as the trains coming from Paddington were full to capacity.

The intention was that the Metropolitan Railway would eventually link the London, Chatham & Dover (then under contsruction), the Great Western and the Great Northern railways.

‘It will afford a direct and expeditious means of conveyance for the enormous traffic between the east and west ends of London,’ said The Times. ‘If the traffic of our main thoroughfares continued to increase as it has done for the last few years locomotion would, without some relief, become impracticable…. The time has come when some means were absolutely required for removing a great part of the traffic entirely from the streets, and that great object will, we hope, be secured by the opening of the Metropolitan Railway.’

As well as reducing congestion on the roads, the Underground, and other forms of public transport, played an important part in easing overcrowding in inner London. Large numbers of people could now be moved quickly over long distances. Men and women no longer had to live within walking distance of their workplaces. The Tube, railways and electric trams stimulated suburban development, and the cheap ‘workman’s ticket’ brought suburban life, and healthier, less crowded living conditions within the reach of the less well off white collar workers and the skilled working classes.