Er……just to point out that Victorian cabmen, carters, etc weren’t in charge of ‘inanimate objects’ but very animate ones, namely horses, which can be very unpredictable. Around the age of 13, back in the early 60’s, I desperately wanted a horse (blame it entirely on reading horsey books) which was never going to happen, living as we did in a tiny terraced house in Peckham! But I did say to my mum one day how good it would be to have horses and carts back, to which she replied that it was terrifying to see a horse out of control careering down the road and she’d seen some awful accidents when she was young.

In my family we had a saying – if a child was having a tantrum, ‘showing off”, and generally being a pain, someone would say they had a ‘temper like a cab horse – they’d shit and stamp in it’ (sorry about the language). I never heard it anywhere else but know cabhorses had a reputation for being mean and nasty, and cabdrivers weren’t much better. One of my gt gt grandfathers, the splendidly named Henry Ethelred West, was a cabdriver, as were his many sons, so it may have been something handed down from them. I love the alteracation between Mr Pickwick and a cabman in the first chapter of Pickwick Papers – and always imagine my gt gt grandad to be something along the lines of Tony Weller:)