What do you know about taxi drivers? Not enough?
Find out more here.
Discover what The Ten Commandments of St Fiacre and the 10 Commandments of Road Safety are all about. Discover the lives of taxi drivers: hidden in plain sight, here, there, and everywhere - sometimes, invisible! Learn the history that created taxis, Hackney carriages and all. Consider their urban setting with case studies and interviews from Milton Keynes. And, taxi drivers: who are they, where are they from, how did they get here? Trials, traumas and triumphs. What is 'The job' what is 'The Knowledge'. What's new? All this ... and more.
Discover the 'real me' behind the taxi driver. This accurate, meticulous, account of a down-to-earth subject like the taxi drivers in Milton Keynes unexpectedly leads into the deeper fathoms of the human soul.
The organisation, origins, folklore , literature and history of taxis and the “parallel universes” of their drivers’ lives and dreams. Your view of the familiar streets will be transformed!
DEDICATION: To the taxi drivers, and all those other immigrants, who have enriched our knowledge and our culture and day by day continue to do so ..
Like many of my generation, I grew up thinking that using taxis was self-indulgent and unnecessary and certainly not for me.
I’ve changed my mind. When I stopped driving in my 70s I couldn’t really expect my husband to drive me all over the place. So I saw that I would have to engage taxis to go to the shopping centre or the doctor or the dentist or wherever.
So I started, at first reluctantly, to take taxis. Being a chatty person my habit was to sit in the front beside the driver. We found we were exchangIng our life stories, as far as that was possible, that is, in the typically 20-30 minute rides. And theirs were fascinating, varied, surprising.
As a result, I kind of fell into taking note by accident and then was hooked! So this study, like so many (and, come to think of it, some of my previous ones too), came about by chance.
But chance is a fine thing! for it turned out to link in remarkably with my earlier research interests. Like many anthropologists, I have always, I suppose, been intrigued by things that were somehow just “there”, but that I, and perhaps others too, actually knew little about in any depth.
In this case it was something literally going on all around me, here on the streets, right before my eyes.
And then I saw that the here-and-now familiarity but at the same time seeming invisibility of taxi drivers - hidden in plain sight - chimed in with my continuing interest in the extraordinary and notable in the apparent “ordinary” and unnoticed. For me this had in the past extended to trying to delve into the not-then-fully-studied topics of oral literature, extra-university researchers, amateur musicians, non-sensory communication, or the significance of personal names (as in Finnegan 1970/2007, 2011, 2017a,b, 2020). Taxi drivers’ lives were just another instance.
So I started to pay more attention to the fact that, at first without deliberately planning it, I was in practice amassing a substantial amount of information about taxi drivers. When I got a taxi whether by phoning from my own home or picking one up from the station rank or elsewhere, I would, as I say, automatically and without thinking fall into conversation with the driver. Looking back I can see this was actually a kind of informal interviewing supplementing my general offhand observating.
This new - to me - topic had many surprises in store. I hadn’t realised how much there was that I didn’t know. It also, luckily for me, turned out, as I say, to follow on well from my interest in life stories, explored among other places in my Tales of the City, and in the local informal economy and culture as in The Hidden Musicians.
I had also been fascinated from away back by memory and modes of thinking. Taxi drivers’ acquisition and retention of knowledge - both remembering all the local roads, and learning of and from their passengers - proved to fit exactly with that interest. But this time it was not about something far away or long ago as many of the previous studies had been, but from people that I was meeting here and now.
And then, beyond that, I started to see taxis and taxi driving in longer perspective. There was for example the long development of hired transport which goes a fair way to explain the design and practices of modern taxis. Taxi driving in its various forms - hired transport - has, it seems, long played a crucial if largely unexplored role in the local economy of British towns (elsewhere too), interacting, for example, with transport networks, work practices, life stories, immigration, and social mobility - a pivot, in fact, in much of the social, cultural and economic history of urban space. Here were yet further dimensions to explore.
All of these aspects, and more, also built into my long interests in, among other things, African studies, classical and mediaeval history, personal knowledge, and the mind.
Besides I love working on an in-depth ethnography, especially one in which detail can be explored both in its own right and in wider perspective. In this case the ethnographic setting was my home city of Milton Keynes in south central England. I had the advantage that as a long established local resident I already had substantial local knowledge to build on. In addition I had already engaged in some investigation of certain aspects of Milton Keynes’ lives (Finnegan 1989/2007, 1998/2021). So it greatly pleases me to find that, unexpected by me, the present study will now be the third volume of an ethnographic trilogy about this beautiful green city of Milton Keynes, focusing down, as anthropologists sometimes do, on where I already am.
The book that has resulted, to give a brief overview (also previewed in the preliminary treatment in Finnegan 2021), gives an account of taxi driving and its organisation in Milton Keynes with special reference to taxi drivers’ lives and stories and the cultural, economic and personal contexts in which they work. I have also included a modicum of parallel evidence from other UK cities such as Belfast, Birmingham, and Cambridge, and, to introduce an international dimension, the results of a few short forays abroad including several weeks' research in Auckland, New Zealand.
It also looks at some rather seldom considered aspects of taxi drivers’ experience. In particular I have tried to explore their interaction with passengers in the, as it were, quasi-magical intimate space during their short, shared, journeys. And then there is the surprisingly rich symbolic lore associated with taxis, taxi journeys, and their drivers; their immigrant status; their names; their dreams; and finally of who - unique individuals within what we often see as just a general category of “taxi drivers” - they, ultimately, are: as one put it, their “real” selves.
All in all when I got into it I found myself wondering why I hadn’t before considered - why no one seemed to have considered - taking a detailed look at the intriguing subject of taxi drivers’ lives: often regarded as in a way “the common man”, yet each fully unique, individual. I embarked on it without question. Well, as I say, I just found I was in it. I had no idea, though, what a long and demanding and at the same time enjoyable pursuit it would turn out to be.
I hope that you too may find it of some interest and that the remarkable taxi drivers who participated will find it a worthy attempt to chart some of their many and diverse experiences and the settings in which they operate.gg
RF, Bletchley, August 2022