Cars in books, March 1977

There are some motoring items in “Jug Within the Law” by Henry Cecil (Hutchinson, 1975) but the author, although admitting that he used to write legal articles for The Autocar, The Motor, and The Light Car & Cyclecar, for £3 per piece, in the 1920s, does not disclose the make of car, which he was using to drive to Brighton County Court with such a load of books in its dickey that, when a rear tyre burst, he thought these prevented it from overturning, and probably saved his life. Another publication this author wrote for, again in the 1920s, was The Great Highway, the Clyno house-hournal; I wonder whether any present-day Clyno owners have seen a copy? Another motoring item is a reference to the 1929 Armstrong Siddeley sun-roof saloon that Judge Leon (as this author was) bought for his parents in 1930, driven at first by a chauffeuse. The dealer who supplied it said it was in perfect working order but a rebore was soon required.

The only motoring reference I discovered in “Oxford In The Twenties” by Christopher Hollis (Heinemann, 1976) was of Alastair Graham owning a two-seater car that accommodated a third passenger in its dickey, wherein Claud Cockburn often used to ride, with the lid shut on his curled-up female protect him from the rain. To identify that one you must perhaps find a car with a spacious dickey-seat; but as Graham was a cousin and friend of Evelyn Waugh’s I find myself wondering whether the car might not have been a Frazer Nash, with the seat in its boat-like stern mistaken for a dickey?

The only motoring reference of note in the new biography about John Galsworthy, stud life of the famous author of the “Forsyte Saga”, by Catherine Dupre (Collins, 1976), apart from the fact that Galsworthy gave dinners at the (Royal) Automobile Club during the First World War, is that, in the 1920s, Arnold Bennett used to turn up at Busy House, where the Galsworthys were then living, in a great Rolls-Royce, although he apparently realised that he ought not to be seen dead in it.

I wonder what became of the “shabby Rolls-Royce” in which Ethel Mannin rode when she was in Moscow in 1935—her travel books I find bearable, unlike her novels-as referred to in her “South To Samakand” (Jarrolds, 1936)? Later, on this adventurous journey, the authoress travelled in small open charabancs, of which one would like to know the makes. They were probably Fords, hut whatever they were they had running-boards, whirl dates them, and when a Ford car wan hired it is described as “shabby and old”, though possibly a Model-A; it took the travellers into the mountains of Caucasus. No doubt aviation followers would have liked to know the kind of aeroplane in which Ws Mannin and her Russian-speaking girl-friend Hen on an internal flight in the Soviet zone and in what machine she returned from Moccow to Croydon, via Sadie, in 1935—presumably a Junkers?—W.B.