A Good Idea

Sir,

An addition to your always interesting “Cars in Books” series might be “Cars in Photographs of Historic Occasions”. This thought is prompted by finding the enclosed photograph of the arrival at Euston Station, London, of Captain John Alcock and Lt. Arthur Whitten Brown after they had made the first non-stop Atlantic flight on June 14/15 1919. The Rolls-Royce appears to have been the official car, as is shown in the second photograph of their departure from the station.

The photograph might have been taken on the morning of June 20 1919. On that day Alcock and Brown were handed the £10,000 Daily Mail prize by the Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for War, at a lunch at the Savoy Hotel. On the following day they were knighted by HM King George V at Windsor.

Alcock was killed in December 1919 while flying from London to Paris. Brown never flew again after the Atlantic crossing and remained an Engineer until his death in 1948.

P. E. Gordon-Marshall.

London, SW7

[We shall be very pleased to see other such photographs. Surely the car in front of the official Rolls-Royce is Harry Hawker’s aero-engined Mercedes-Sunbeam which has featured in these pages recently ?—ED]