Dogcart

A dogcart (or dog-cart) is a light horse-drawn vehicle, originally designed for sporting shooters, with a box behind the driver's seat to contain one or more retriever dogs. The dog box could be converted to a second seat. Later variants included :

  • A one-horse carriage, usually two-wheeled and high, with two transverse seats set back to back. It was known as a "bounder" in British slang (not to be confused with the cabriolet of the same name). In India it was called a "tumtum" (possibly an altered form of "tandem").
  • A French version having four wheels and seats set back to back was a dos-à-dos (French for "back-to-back").
  • An American four-wheeled dogcart, having a compartment for killed game, was called a "game cart".[1]
This article is about horse-drawn vehicles. For carts pulled by dogs, see Dogcart (dog-drawn).
Tandem-driven dogcart in the Netherlands.
Later type of dogcart designed exclusively for a driver and passenger

A young or small groom called a "tiger" might stand on a platform at the rear of a dogcart, to help or serve the driver.

Frequent references to dog-carts are made by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his writings about fictional detective Sherlock Holmes,[2] and indeed by many other Victorian writers, as it was a common sight in those days.

Fashions in vehicles changed quickly in the nineteenth century, and there is a great variety of names for different types. The dog-cart bears some resemblance to the phaeton, a sporty, lightly sprung one-horse carriage; the curricle, a smart, light vehicle that fits one driver and passenger, but with two horses; the chaise or shay, in its two-wheeled version for one or two people, with a chair back and a movable hood; and the cabriolet, with two wheels, a single horse, and a folding hood that can cover its two occupants, one of whom is the driver.

  • Dos-à-dos style carriage
  • Dokar, the horse cart of Indonesia

See also

References
  1. Seabrook Coaching Stable Dispersal Auction: Game Cart Trap. Archived April 1, 2008, at the Wayback Machine The Carriage Association of America, Inc.
  2. Dogcart - Things in "Speckled Band". Melançon Enterprises
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