Cars in books, June 1984
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
Knowing my love of the past, the good life as it were, one of the marshals on the VSCC Welsh Week-End gave me a soft-cover publication called “Good Times”, by V. C. Buckley. It consists of a wealth of photographs taken by this much-travelled Etonian to depict what life at home and abroad was like in the between-wars years. There is a chapter on motoring, from which we learn that Buckley’s first car was a 1924 Morris-Cowley two-seater bought for £250, after he had had a few driving lessons on his father’s Buick, which a photograph shows to have been a 1921 All-Weather tourer, looking much as any other American car of that period. The text of the motoring chapter is rather superficial, a Cubitt owned by an undergraduate in Buckley’s college at Cambridge being remembered and some space being devoted to the Riley he took to Ireland in 1936, a red-and-black Monaco saloon, wrongly captioned as of 8 hp. After the Morris the author had a dark blue Austin 12 two-seater, equipped rather unusually with aluminium disc wheels and bumpers, Buckley says the most beautiful car he ever saw was an all-white Rolls-Royce Park Ward sedanca de ville, parked outside the Berkeley Hotel in 1930. He includes a photograph of Mrs Manville’s fawn and white Rolls-Royce coupé-de-ville which she brought to Europe, usually on the SS Bremen each summer, her chauffeur Richardson wearing a uniform to match the car — it is said she made her money from asbestos. Other pictures show the Ford V8 “woodie” in which the author crossed the desert from Port Sudan to Suakin, a deserted town on the shores of the Red Sea, in 1936 and an early-1920s Daimler owned as a guests’ car by the Maharajah of Mysore, and a shot of the start of a Brooklands race in 1921, in which I recognise Cooper’s Mercedes, Duff’s Fiat, the Lorraine-Dietrich “Vieux Charles Trois” and Segrave’s GP Opel — alas, the caption says that the author enjoyed “watching the Bentleys, Sunbeams and Straker-Squires whirling around the track; today we would call them old Chitty Chitty Bang Bangs” — which I, for one, wouldn’t! His idea of the pace at which these cars “whirled round” is rather conservative; he suggests “the then fantastic speed of 90 mph” for Count Zborowski’s black Mercedes, but, of course, they went far faster. . . There are some shots of early air-liners, and the 197 pictures are certainly nostalgic — the book was published in 1979 by Thames & Hudson Ltd, 30 Bloomsbury, London, WC1B ,QP, so copies may still be available. — W.B.