1900s chauffeurs and car storage

eldergrantaire · Aug 9, 2018

For plot reasons, my character (17 year old girl) needs to persuade a servant to take her somewhere without telling her parents where they're going. It's 1905 and her family are wealthy, so I don't think it's unreasonable for them to have a car. She is an only child and lives in London with her parents.

I'm getting into a bit of a tangle about the details, though. Would they have a dedicated chauffeur who does that and only that? If so, what does he do all day, given that I imagine they only have one car and it surely doesn't need to be looked after all day long? (I know nothing whatsoever about cars.) My alternative is that one of the footmen doubles as chauffeur, but I don't know how likely that would be.

Also, where would the car be kept? I don't imagine many London townhouses in 1905 had garages. If it's just on the street, surely the chauffeur isn't just chilling on the street all day with it. Unless he is just sitting in the car all day until it's needed, but that seems like a stretch. The internet is bringing up a whole lot of Downton Abbey and not much else.

benbenberi · Aug 9, 2018

In cities like New York and London before the automobile there were structures separate from townhouses (often called "mews") where the well-to-do kept their horses and carriages & the people who cared for and drove them. These were also used for early cars and chauffeurs until those got their own garages and the mews were mostly repurposed or torn down & replaced.

A chauffeur, or anyone else who was in charge of a car, in 1905 had to be their own mechanic too, and those early cars required a great deal of manual maintenance. Also cleaning & shining. (Think of the amount of soot and dirt that could accumulate on the machine just in a normal day.) Beyond that, what does a chauffeur (or coachman) ever do when he's not actually driving people around? Your guy probably does that.

lonestarlibrarian · Aug 9, 2018

There's a nice overview here which refers to a JSTOR article here. ("The Chauffeur Problem in the Early Auto Era")

There's also a reference here to a magazine in Edwardian England called The Chauffeur. ("Servants or Professionals? An Edwardian magazine offers insights into a world where the chauffeur was essential, says Daphne Jones") If you could track down some way to get ahold of (scans? faxes?) from a library that holds the journals, it would definitely give period color to issues we might take for granted these days--- the puncture-prone-ness of the tires, for example, or having to be your own garage mechanic.

You might pick up a story from the period, like The Count's Chauffeur, or Two Thousand Miles on an Automobile or The Man Who Drove the Car, and give it a read. While it would be a fictitious account, there's a good chance that it might have period details about motoring around, and what a chauffeur does when he isn't motoring around. There are also handbooks from about 10-15 years later than your period that would also be helpful to refer to.

But, yes. During that period, they started turning old carriage houses into garages. You read about how fires would start because they would insist on storing cans of petrol in a poorly-ventilated garage... because, presumably, there weren't a lot of gas stations all over the place. If it's more of a townhome situation, and there aren't any convenient mews or carriage houses, it's common to read in stories from the 1920's-30's-40's set in large cities where the car would be stored a good walk from the actual residence. So the chauffeur doesn't just hop in the car; he takes a ten or fifteen minute walk to go get it, and drives it to the front door so he can take his person to where he needs to be driven.

Alessandra Kelley · Aug 9, 2018

The neighborhood just north of me in Chicago (where President and Michelle Obama still own a house) is full of what were grand mansions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The biggest, grandest ones, have what I have seen called “carriage houses”.

These are entire separate houses, on a smaller scale but with architecture and decoration to match behind the big main house, lining the back alleys that go down the middle of the blocks. Their first floor was a garage and the second floor was an apartment for the chauffeur and his family.

(These days most of them really are separate houses and separately owned, as the neighborhood went into a major decline for long decades and only started getting fixed up in the 1970s by people willing to move into beat-up Addams-family-type grand old wrecks near a by-now very dodgy neighborhood and fix them up themselves. But that’s not really related to the question.)

tl;dr: Sometimes chauffeurs lived in a special servants’ house with the car behind the main house, especially if the house was built relatively recently.

1900s chauffeurs and car storage

eldergrantaire

benbenberi

practical experience, FTW

lonestarlibrarian

senior bean supervisor

Alessandra Kelley

Sophipygian