SHORTLY before Edward VII was crowned " Spy " drew
a cartoon for Truth which was regarded at the time as being diabolically clever. It represented, as I seem to recall it, General Kitchener, Sir Alfred Milner and a Distinguished Personage, with a background, as in a charabatic perspective, of complacent Public Figures, all miraculously seated in a single motor-car. At this considerable distance of time I am not sure where Spy's acid shafts were aimed or what precisely were Mr. Labouchere's stimulating reactions to the results of the Boer War, but the main idea of the picture, so far as I remember its being explained to me, was that only a Government and a High Command capable of producing anything so futile as the South African War would be at home in so absurd and unreliable a conveyance.
I may well have it all wrong—in spite of Spy's perfect clarity of intention—but I certainly remember very well what that car looked like. It had many levers like beer- engine pulls. It had several .bath-room taps, pedals in profusion, horns, paraffin lamps and at unexpected places outbreaks of inexplicable machinery. It was a dream of well-meant confusion, the satirist's idea no doubt, and perhaps not so grotesque a caricature of what most people thought an automobile looked like. In 1902, the Great Year, the popular conception of a car was a machine as dangerous as a bomb with the pin out, as stubborn as a donkey, as reliable as the climate and with only one destination —the nearest ditch. Whatever happened to this complex of hidden dangers, the end was always in a ditch.
Yet it certainly was the Great Year, was 1902. For it was the first year when cars were built, comparatively speaking, on the lines followed today, the first year of modern motoring. Such patriarchs as the de Dion, the Renault, the Mercedes, the Panhard, the de Dietrich and the Napier were already making reputations, already showing in long road-races like the Paris-Vienna that the foundations of speed and reliability together had been laid. Two years after Edward VII came to the throne the best cars made were at least as reliable as the average today and, speed apart, quite as. useful. Far fewer people drove to Rome and Berlin than do now, but those who did got there on time, and the road to the Riviera in winter was alive with all sorts and conditions of cars.
Those were the days of two things some of us would like to sec restored to modern- design—,chain-drive and low- tension magneto ignition., Chain-drive had several mechanical advantages over shaft-drive, but the chief one for those who used their :cars as Continent-going land-yachts was the convenience of being .able easily and cheaply to alter the gcar-ratio. On setting out for Innsbruck you fitted,24.:toothed sprockets, for fast work over the plains, carrying in the tool-box a_ pair of_ 20400t1IS for -the,Alps. You,'could gear your car as you pleased and, almost as yOu drove. LOw- tension magnetos were probably_ the most efficient igniters , we have yet seen and 'the simplest. They. would be qUite ; unsuitable fir modern' highspeed engines,:.oWing to the impossibility of making current-breakers capable of working three times as fast as their originals had to, but the system was nearly ideal. . _ Ccachwork lagged considerably behind mechanics in those days, but as nobody was in the least interested in keeping either warm or dry, at any rate, until the Cape Cart Htiod became manageable and effective, it was of no importance. The engine was the ihing, and so long as that ran as it should we were happy—happier, perhaps, than we have ever been since. There were no 'limousines, no Saloons, no coupes. I have a very vague recollection of a vehicle called, I think, a cab, a tall, narrow _box one entered__ through a door in the back, having a seat in either corner. On that door was a folding flap, called a strapontin, and it is remarkable that many were found willing to sit on it, suspended over the abyss, as it were, by a frail door-fastening. It was not until 1904 or so that the ," side-entrance phaeton " burst upon a gaping world accustomed to crawling in at the back, the ponderous and voluminous hood having to be lifted for the purpose. Five years later real doors, instead of pieces of patent leather buttoned on, were being fitted to the front seats, and one had no longer to drive swathed in spats, puttees and rugs, still frozen to insensibility.
Between the crowning of Edward VII and George V car design progressed very swiftly ; 1905-7-8 and 1909 saw real speed achieved, and although it was not until 1912 that a car was driven one hundred miles in one hour, a maximum of a mile a minute in large touring cars was quite normal. Most cars were fairly big as we would consider them today, of between 16 and 6o horse-power, with nothing much under 14. Live-axle drive was quickly displacing the chain at the end of Edward VII's reign, and by the time George V came to the throne there was no maker left to build the old type. Low-tension magneto had given way to the high-tension type, bodies had high doors and a reasonable degree of protection from the weather ; comfort, appearance and equipment were assuming importance in the eyes of the sophisticated customer. Electric lighting and, occasionally, friction- aurting, became general in expensive cars and speed-indi- cators and clocks were expected, as well as lamps, in the specification.
The third year of the reign of George V was marked, for motorists, by the first appearance of the really small English car that has, from those timid beginnings, maintained so great a name for itself ever since. There had been one or two 6-h.p. and 8-h.p., with single-cylinder engines, since the earliest days of all, but it was not until about 1912 that a baby Four of about ro-h.p. was put on the market. One I remem- ber well, the Singer, was driven through the Austrian Alpine Trials of 1914, a test to destruction, and, in spite of having to straighten a bent front axle on the road in the middle of 1112 night, arrived at the finish of the ten-days' run over the stiffest passes, and was given a special award. In 1912 came such famous cars as the first 12-h.p. Rovers, the 11.9 Arrol- Johnstons, the Oxford-Morris, the Swift, Austrian Daimler, and others.
Then came the War and an almost complete. standstill in production, followed- by the disastrous boom of bad cars in 1919 and 192o. Prices went to the skies in those days, for anything that could be called a, car, and it is doubtful if any industry anyWhere at any time produced worse stuff than the motor industry during the first years of the peace. After 1921 or so sanity was re-established, and for the next fifteen yea.r s progress in every direction was as steady as it was re- markable. Engines increased almost miraculously in effici- ency, new, sorts of gears were introduced,- the_ free-wheel was invented, tyres were designed to last 20,000 Miles instead of 6,000, springing was enormously improved, independent suspension_ introduced, .8„-: and J2-cylinder engines adopted. The Coronation of George VI -sees -the r o ier, speed and utility, of the car doubled, its. price, for the majority, halved ; itself established as an indispensable unit of national life. . Nineteen thirty-seven sees a transformation in the whole business of motoring such as could not haie been conceived by. the most imaginative prophet of the days of Edward VII, from dustless, specially built roads to pump-delivered fuel every five miles, service stations, and the freedom of the
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