Text 1: Ten hours behind the wheel, by Rhian Gwynne

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

Tariq Hussain starts his shift at eight in the evening and finishes at six in the morning, five nights a week. He has driven a black cab in Manchester for nineteen years.

Before he earns a penny, Tariq has bills to pay. His cab cost him forty-eight thousand pounds, and fuel, insurance and his licence come to around three hundred pounds a week. ‘The first two or three hours of every shift,’ he says, ‘I’m working for the car.’

Night work suits him, mostly. The roads are quiet and the fares are higher after ten. But Friday and Saturday nights bring passengers who have had too much to drink. He has been sick on, shouted at and twice left with an unpaid fare when someone jumped out at a red light. A camera now records every journey.

To get his licence he had to pass a test on the city’s streets, and he still prides himself on never using satnav. ‘The apps send everyone the same way,’ he says. ‘I know the back roads.’ The apps worry him for another reason: ride-hailing firms have taken many of his daytime customers.

What keeps him going? The people. He has driven a woman to hospital in labour, talked a lonely widower through a long ride home, and once returned a violin worth more than his cab.

Text 2: The cabman’s day, by A Correspondent

An original magazine feature written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this feature, published in a London magazine in 1871, the writer describes the working life of the drivers of hansom cabs, two-wheeled horse-drawn carriages that could be hired like taxis.

Few persons who hail a hansom in the Strand give a thought to the man upon the box behind them, yet his is one of the hardest lives in London.

The cabman seldom owns his cab. He hires it, with the horse, from a proprietor in the mews at sixteen shillings a day, and until he has taken sixteen shillings in fares he has earned nothing for himself. He is commonly out from nine in the morning until midnight, and many work longer.

The legal fare is sixpence a mile, but disputes are endless. The gentleman who has been driven three miles swears it was two; the lady has no change and promises to send it. The cabman has a remedy at the police court, but it costs him a day’s work to use it.

He sits high up, exposed to every weather, and wet days, which bring him the most custom, bring him also rheumatism. One old driver showed me hands so swollen that he could barely close them upon the reins. He must also know every street, square and court of the metropolis, for a fare will not be pleased to be lost.

Yet I found them, for the most part, cheerful and honest men. The lost property office at Scotland Yard receives hundreds of articles a year from cabmen who might easily have kept them.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what the working lives of the cab drivers were like.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.