Chris,
I have a different interpretation than Colin. I thought that "dickey seats"
are the "seats in a trunk," the seat that is created by opening a
rear-hinged hatch behind the (usually 2-seater) compartment in a car. The
inside cover of this hatch served as the back of the seat.
What Colin describes, and what I consider jump seats to be, seems to me more
like the collapsible seats in a passenger compartment, behind the driver and
front seat passenger and well ahead of the rear seat.
Chuck Vandergraaf
'52 +4
Pinawa, MB
> ----------
> From: Colin Cobb[SMTP:cobmeister@zianet.com]
> Reply To: Colin Cobb
> Sent: Saturday, May 29, 1999 3:27 PM
> To: ROWEMOGS@aol.com
> Cc: morgans@autox.team.net
> Subject: Re: 'DICKEY' SEATS
>
> Hey Chris,
>
> Do we remember books? Indeed we do! I have one holding up the front of
> my computer monitor even as we speak...
>
> Ah! Dickey! That's a dicey question...
>
> Sorry, but once again you lot are blaming a corruption on the colonies
> that really originates with your ownselfs (that one, I grant you, is
> ours).
>
> "Dickey seats" are found over here rarely if at all. We have "jump
> seats," you guys have "dickey seats." It appears that you lot used to
> call the driver's seat in a carriage a "dickey seat." I suspect that at
> some time or other the King or Queen or some Duke or something issued an
> edict that all coachmen were to be, henceforth, named "Dickey" so that
> the upper classes wouldn't be troubled with learning large numbers of
> names.
>
> "Yo! Dickey! What, ho?" is ever so much simpler than "Yo! Mr. Carriage
> Driver, could you give me ride? What, ho?"
>
> I figure you lot started calling "jump seats" (so named because they
> operate the same way parachutists' jump seats work... NOT) because some
> carriage driver once sat in one of the folding seats in an auto and it
> became another instant tradition... "Mustn't sit in that seat, it's
> Dickey's, donchaknow?"
>
> It is also possible they are so called because they resemble carriage
> driver's seats, particularly the driver's seat on a hansom cab.
>
> Over here the term "jump seats" dates to 1864 when the term was applied
> to folding carriage seats. The current meaning of the term is "a folding
> seat between the front and rear seats of a passenger automobile."
>
> Cheers!
>
> --Colin Cobb, Las Cruces, NM, USA
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