Yes, well, but even if you did construe the term literally
I suspect it wouldn't help define the word 'employee' in the trade, it would just mean that the likes of s. 48 wouldn't apply to the vast majority of drivers who weren't also proprietors:
TPCA 1847 wrote:
48 Proprietor to retain licences of drivers when in his employ, and to produce the same when summoned.
So we would say that because a jockey is self-employed then s. 48 doesn't apply to them, so I don't think it's particularly useful to use employ/employed in the modern employment law sense
Haven't actually looked into it in depth, but a quick google on labour law history suggests that one of the main pieces of legislation in the 19th Century was the Master and Servant Act 1867, thus 20 years after TPCA. So I'm guessing that you wouldn't interpret legislation passed twenty years earlier using a more modern definition of the word employ/employee, particularly when that legislation was about HC licensing rather than employment law. I suspect employed and employee only took on their more current meanings in the last 40 year or so maximum.
Another example is maybe s. 51:
Quote:
Number of persons to be carried in a hackney carriage to be painted thereon.
No hackney carriage shall be used or employed or let to hire, or shall stand or ply for hire, within the prescribed distance, unless the number of persons to be carried by such hackney carriage, in words at length, and in form following, (that is to say,) “To carry persons,” be painted on a plate placed on some conspicuous place on the outside of such carriage, and in legible letters, so as to be clearly distinguishable from the colour of the ground whereon the same are painted, one inch in length, and of a proportionate breadth; and the driver of any such hackney carriage shall not be required to carry in or by such hackney carriage a greater number of persons than the number painted thereon.
I mean, nobody is going to think today that the number of persons has to be literally painted on
And obviously even the term hackney carriage means something different now to what it meant back in 1847