Carriage Driving

Carriage driving is an activity requiring considerable skill and courage, qualities for which I have enormous respect and admiration, but which I personally lack.

But Driving is NOT exclusively Carriage Driving. Driving INCLUDES Carriage Driving, but it includes many other activities as the next article shows.
This is the opening passage of a lengthy article on Driving in Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 11th edition published 1910-1911. At no stage is the automobile mentioned.

Driving (from "to drive" i.e. generally to propel, force along or in, a word common in various forms to the Teutonic languages), a word used in a restricted sense for the art of controlling and directing draught animals from a coach or other conveyance or moveable machine to which they are harnessed for the purposes of traction. This has been an occupation practised since domesticated animals were first put to this use. In various parts of the world a number of different animals have been, and still are, so employed; of these the horse, ox, mule and ass are the most common, though their place is taken by the reindeer in northern latitudes, and by the Eskimo dog in Arctic and Antarctic regions. The driving of each of these requires special skill, only to be acquired by practice combined with knowledge of the characteristics peculiar to the several animals employed. The most accomplished driver of spirited horses would probably be in difficulties if called upon to drive sixteen or twenty dogs in an arctic sledge, or a team of oxen or mules drawing the guns of a mountain battery; and the adept in either of these branches of the art might provoke the compassion of a farmer from Lincolnshire or Texas by his attempts to manage a pair of Clydesdale horses in the plough or the reaping machine.
Under all these different conditions driving is a work of utility, of economic value to civilised society. But from very early times driving, especially of horses, has also been regarded as a sport or pastime. This probably arose in the first instance from its association with battle.

The article continues with the start of "Carriage driving". "by the beginning of the 19th Century the improvement in carriage building and road construction alike had greatly diminished the discomfort of travel; and interest in driving for its own sake grew so rapidly that in 1807 the first association of amateur coachmen was formed. This was the Bensington Driving Club, the forerunner of many aristocratic clubs for gentlemen interested in driving as a pastime."

Here we have the great divide between Carriage Driving, an aristocratic skill developed by those to whom battles are a sport or pastime, and those of us with less courage, who just want to do things with horses and ponies safely. The milkmen, miners, dockers, farm labourers..... the van drivers of their day who drove, day in, day out, with skill and precision because it was their job, and they were proud of it. The Industrial Revolution relied on them, as did Transport Command in both World Wars and hundreds of minor squabbles.
Their skill were as varied as their jobs, and we will lose these skills if we allow "Carriage Driving" to dominate "Driving" a hugely varied field where scarcely 1% were "Carriage Drivers". The Saddlechariot is driven Milkman, not Coachman style, and is proud of it.