Thomas Hobson

Thomas Hobson (c. 15441 January 1631) was an English carrier, best known as the origin of the expression Hobson's choice.

Eponym

The term "Hobson's choice" originated in the mid-seventeenth century, after Hobson's death. The poet John Milton made Hobson, and the phrase, well known, by satirising him several times in mock epitaphs.

Career

Joseph Addison and his co-editor Richard Steele commented on Hobson in The Spectator:

Hobson arranged the delivery of mail between London and Cambridge up and down the Old North Road, operating a lucrative outside the gates of St Catharine's College, Cambridge as an innkeeper.

Hobson soon discovered that his fastest horses were the most popular, and thus overworked. So as not to exhaust them, he established a strict rotation system, allowing customers to rent only the next horse in line.

This policy, "this one or none" ("take it or leave it"), has come to be known as "Hobson's choice". It is not an absence of choice, rather choosing one thing or nothing.

In legal jargon, Hobson's Choice is known to barristers as the "cab-rank rule"; the gentleman's agreement that a barrister take a client who is first in line, whether the barrister likes it or not. This may come from Hobson's choice of renting out hackney horses strictly by rote (long before the creation of the London Hackney Carriages Act 1843).

Public works

Hobson is best remembered in the English vernacular as something of a miser, but he was actually a very public-spirited man. He funded the construction of Hobson's Conduit (or "Hobson's Brook"), a man-made watercourse built in 1614 to provide clean drinking water to the population of Cambridge. The conduit channelled water from Vicar's Brook, a lesser tributary of the River Cam fed by springs at Nine Wells five miles south of Cambridge.

Hobson is commemorated at Nine Wells on a nineteenth-century obelisk and in Cambridge on a seventeenth-century stone fountain at the conduit head. The fountain was moved there in 1856 from its original location in the Market Square after a fire in 1849, when it was replaced by a cast iron drinking fountain. Downstream from the conduit head, the watercourse divides into four separate branches, mostly in underground culverts; the original drainage runnels on Trumpington Street, the oldest branch, are still visible on either side of the road.

Hobson had acquired lands around Chesterton, Cambridgeshire by the late 1590s, but by 1608 had assigned them to his son Thomas. Thomas junior predeceased his father (d.1627), and the lands were subsequently bequeathed to the latter’s son Charles. Hobson was buried at St Bene't's Church, Cambridge, near the chancel —although without inscription or monument. All 8 of Hobson's children were baptized in the church, and in 1626 he donated a 1617 edition of the King James Bible to the church (now held by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, of which Hobson was a benefactor).

Hobson Street, in Cambridge city centre, is named after Thomas Hobson, and Hobson's Passage takes its name from Hobson Street.