BRUNEL - Britzka

Britzka - an early 19th century, racy carriage (a pair of fine horses) with a box on the back that Brunel used as his very mobile office and home when he was surveying the fields and byways for the GWR route from Paddington to Bristol. He could complete his paper work whilst in the field and also sleep overnight in his box.

Here we have the 1830's equivalent of a Dormobile, or (in US terms a Winnebago - shades of the Blues Brothers).

Photography courtesy of SKOCZ”W - OCHABY: Horse Stud Pruchna-Ochaby

I hope that Mr Brown and his publishers will not mind me offering the Britzka excerpt from the book which, as the flyleaf states, is a "Tribute to the mystery of the kind of language he (Ivor Brown) loves." "There is a scolding of the flocculent academic jargon. Verbal flannel he tears to shreds. Old and new beauties are discovered in dialect as well as dictionary English."

Chris Jarvis

Britzka

"The horse-drawn carriage pulled into English usage a number of impressive foreign names. The Victorians were not content with their own light, four-wheeled Victoria. They had inherited from the Georgians the French barouche and cabriolet and the German landau. They also favoured the Polish Britzka 'an open carriage with a calash top and space for reclining'. I have just read of one of these in which a father and mother rode with their small boy 'bodkin'. That was the name given to 'a person wedged in between two others when there is room for two only'. It must be a shortening of the diminutive noun bodikin, a little fellow. A big bodkin would be a contradictory term and an unpopular passenger. How long did the name survive? Two seater motor-cars are frequently overloaded with a third party squeezed in. But I have never heard talk of a bodkin in our midst.

The Britzka suggests by its sound a brisk and skittish conveyance very different from the august barouche and landau. The calash or caleche was a light carriage with a hood and then was a name for the hood itself. From the trap it was transferred to the feminine wardrobe. On wet days if a woman lacked one kind of calash for transport she walked with another on her head and shoulders for shelter. The Russian droshky did not become a regular carriage-title in Britain, perhaps because the name suggests to us a shabby and bedraggled article, with a slightly drunken driver. It was used in slang for a cab.

One cannot imagine a Victorian grandee asking a Sunkey if his droshky was at the door. Britzka would be more U, as we say now. Vehicular snobbery does not dwindle. In our motor-car vocabulary we work our way up through the animal and avian worlds from the snipe to the raptors. Is there a Gazelle for the Jaguar to overtake on the road without, one hopes, lethal results? The ambitious traveller also works his way to the legal summit and becomes a Master of the Rolls."

Ivor Brown, Random Words,
Bodley Head, 1971 pp31-32

The Brunel story is developed and maintained by Chris Jarvis