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The world’s first petrol-powered proper road trip …

Britain’s legislation did not help our nascent car industry to grow, but it also didn’t stop the rest of the world coming to a collective consensus about the fuel of the future. Karl Benz produced the first gasoline-engined car in 1885, and in August 1888, without his knowledge, his wife Bertha made the first ever car journey of significant length using an improved version of his design, to prove its worth to the less-than-confident Benz as well as the world.

Bertha and their two sons, Eugen (15) and Richard (14), travelled from Mannheim to Pforzheim, her place of birth, and although Bertha apparently used a hatpin to unblock a fuel line, she demonstrated the practicality of the gasoline motor vehicle to the entire world – and perhaps should have to put to bed any criticism of women drivers at the same time … Without her daring – and that of her sons – this book might have been about steam-powered police cars!

Left: Portrait of Bertha Benz. Right: Bertha Benz and her sons buy petrol during their long-distance journey in 1888.

Some UK pioneer motorists deliberately challenged the Red Flag Act, believing their new lightweight steam-, electric-or gasoline-powered vehicles should be classed as ‘horseless carriages’ and therefore be exempt from the need for a preceding pedestrian and could be operated using a carriage licence. A case was brought against motoring pioneer John Henry Knight in 1895; he lost and was convicted of using a locomotive without a licence and fined 2 shillings and 6d. However, he had neither a carriage nor a locomotive licence, so the law had two ways to turn, which meant that he was guilty of using a locomotive without a licence whichever decision was made!

Early editions of The Autocar (a weekly magazine, the first edition of which was published on 2 November 1895 and whose cover proclaimed: ‘A journal published in the interest of the mechanically propelled road carriage’) were full of lengthy reports of court proceedings being taken against motoring pioneers for a variety of reasons. Legislators caught up with the reality of mechanical development before the law created any real precedents, and the Red Flag Act was repealed on Saturday 14 November 1896, when the speed limit was raised to 14mph; a fact that was celebrated on the day by an Emancipation Day Run (in which our speeding friend Arnold took part in the very same car in which he had been done for speeding) and which today’s London to Brighton Veteran Car Run (often incorrectly called a race) celebrates.

Sadly, the first recorded automotive road fatality in the UK was also in 1896, when Bridget Driscoll, 44, was killed in the grounds of the Crystal Palace on 17 August. She was walking with her 16-year-old daughter, May, and a friend when she was run over by a Roger-Benz car being driven by Arthur Edsall. At the inquest, Florence Ashmore, a domestic servant, gave evidence that the car went at a ‘tremendous pace’, like a fire engine – ‘as fast as a good horse could gallop’.

The driver, working for the Anglo-French Motor Co., who were part of an automotive exhibition taking place at the Crystal Palace, said that he was doing 4mph when he killed Mrs Driscoll and that he had rung his bell and shouted ‘Stand Back!’ as he approached. However, it was suggested that Mrs Driscoll seemed bewildered in front of the car. She may not have interacted this closely with a motor vehicle before. Who knows? There were then fewer than twenty in the whole of the UK and the public were certainly not educated in how to cross roads safely. Edsall had been driving for only three weeks at the time, and as no licence was required, the fact that he apparently had not been told which side of the road he needed to travel on was overlooked … The case went to court, but with conflicting evidence about the speed and manner of Mr Edsall’s driving, the jury returned an accidental death verdict. Interestingly, there was no outrage in the newspapers at the time, just a sense that it was an unfortunate accident. It would be some years before the press became powerful enough to express outrage in the way that we take for granted today. It’s also worth noting that, although people had been killed by horses or carriages for many years, high-profile autocar accidents did start to bring up some public discussion of these dangerous new machines, which were loved by those who had them and often feared by those unfamiliar with them. For that reason accidents were reported perhaps a trifle more vociferously than they would have been if someone had simply fallen off a horse and broken their neck. It was, after all, the start of the unknown.

Perhaps ironically, the first death in an autocar accident was during an incident with an International Co. electric vehicle on 12 February 1898, when Mr Henry Lindfield of Brighton tried to stop his vehicle in order that his passenger, his 19-year-old son Bernard, could retrieve his bag, which had fallen off as they descended the hill off Purley Corner, in Croydon. When the brakes were applied the vehicle began to weave, before eventually hitting a post and then a tree, sandwiching poor Henry between the carriage and the tree. Son Bernard was thrown over his father and survived with relatively minor injuries, but, sadly, his father died in hospital the following day. Just over a year later the first fatal accident involving the driver of a petrol motor vehicle was recorded; 31-year-old engineer Edwin Sewell’s 6HP Daimler Wagonette crashed into a wall after a rear wheel collapsed following a rim breakage when the brakes were applied too harshly while descending a steep hill at speed. He died almost instantaneously. At the time he was demonstrating the vehicle to three passengers who were assessing it for possible purchase by their company, the Army and Navy Stores, then a well-known department store. The front-seat passenger, 63-year-old Major James Stanley Richer, was thrown clear of the vehicle with Sewell and suffered such serious injuries that he died three days later in hospital. The other two passengers were injured but survived.

The roadside plaque (unveiled on 25 February 1969) records the site of Britain’s first fatal road accident, on 25 February 1899.

As a result, the UK police started to take cars seriously, and the weight of public pressure – and in some cases outrage – meant that they had to. As far as research can prove, it was the Met that led the way, acquiring a Léon Bollée Voiturette in 1896, or possibly early 1897. The arrival of the Bollée, as it was usually called, is important because it represented the moment when the British police moved from enforcing legislation on motorists to becoming motorists themselves. Quite what those early Met police pioneer drivers would think of today’s high-speed chases on the M25 we shall never know, but to modern eyes the pioneering car does seem almost laughably poor in both performance and engineering terms. At that time the template for what makes an acceptable usable car, as opposed to an experiment down a dead-end avenue of design, was yet to be set, and the Mercedes-badged Daimler that made every other autocar old-fashioned overnight, and so set the car on its course to dominate transportation in developed nations by the early 1920s, would not appear until 1901.

1896 Léon Bollée Voiturette

The birth of the Léon-Bollée Voiturette light autocar goes back to the 1870s, when Amédée Bollée, son of a foundry owner specialising in bells, started making steam vehicles in Le Mans, France, way before the town became part of motor-racing folklore after Renault’s victory in the 1906 French Grand Prix there.

Although Amédée Bollée was a steam enthusiast, he could see the potential in gasoline-engined cars and helped both his sons, Amédée Junior and Léon, design and build them. Léon’s design was immediately successful, although I suspect anyone who ever crashed into anything while sitting on that front-mounted chair may have disagreed! The vehicle was considered fast in its day; even in their early days the police bought the fastest car they could afford, kicking off the arms race between the good and the bad guys earlier than most of us had realised!

Bollée’s design for a very short-wheelbased, 3-seater motor-tricycle, the Voiturette, weighed only 264lbs, used a tubular frame and featured a single back wheel, making it far more stable than having the single wheel at the front. The engine was an air-cooled, horizontal, single-cylinder unit of 650cc that was hung beside the back wheel on the near-side and used a large, heavy flywheel. It featured suction-opened inlet valves and mechanical exhaust valves with plain bronze bearings, hand-lubricated by grease for the main bearings and a splash-lubricated big-end. A tubular con-rod kept the weight down, while hot-tube ignition and a single-jet carburettor were so close to the float chamber that fires were common. The 3-speed transmission was by three virtually unlubricated gears on the end of the crank, which could be meshed with the three layshaft gears. The drive was by flat belt, a mechanism that was commonly used then to drive lathes and other machines in workshops. There was no actual clutch; the mechanical movement of the back wheel tightened or loosened the driving belt so that drive was achieved or neutral was obtained. Full-forward movement of the back wheel applied the belt rim to a stationary brake block. In some ways it was an elegantly simple solution; one fore and aft movement of the rear wheel achieved one of three outcomes. However, the Bollée was apparently quite tricky to actually drive, partly because it featured a small steering wheel on the driver’s right with a handle familiar to traction-engine drivers, which actuated an early rack-and-pinion steering system. Meanwhile, the left hand had to ease the gear stick gingerly back and forth to engage the drive or free it. Turning the spade grip at the top of this lever engaged a gear, and, in order to stop, the lever had to be hastily pulled backwards. I can’t imagine many of my former police colleagues (or myself, for that matter) taking it easily, but perhaps sheer fear would have engendered that on this device …

The Voiturette was powerful for its size and weight, and its low build made it stable, but the short wheelbase made spinning on slippery cobbled roads quite common, and comfort was not a priority because they had no suspension, relying on pneumatic tyres and a C-sprung seat to provide a modicum of relief. However, driven by what we must assume were men made of granite, they dominated their class in early motor races, famously occupying the top four places in the 1896 Paris-Mantes-Paris race, and winning their class in the 1897 Paris-Dieppe race with a time that was 0.6mph faster than the best four-wheeled car. Legendary English racing driver and Le Mans winner S.C.H. Sammy Davis bought an example in 1929 to use in the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run (a Léon Bollée Voiturette was apparently the first car across the line on the original Emancipation Run in 1896) and was pleased to achieve a maximum speed of 19mph when testing it at Brooklands! This would have been impressive in 1896; the first Land Speed Record was recorded in 1898 at 39mph. Amazing to think now how far we have come.

After being developed in the family’s Le Mans workshop, the car was produced in Paris, at 163 Avenue Victor Hugo, and at Le Harve by Diligent et Cie. It’s believed that around 750 units were made; Michelin ordered 200 and the Hon Charles Rolls (we all know who he was) was a customer in 1897. By 1899 new four-wheeled Bollées were being produced, some with much larger 4.6-litre engines, but the marque was bought by UK maker Morris in 1924, who produced the Morris-Léon Bollée until 1931. It finally faded away for good in 1933.

What’s in a name?

Léon Bollée’s tricycle may have been short-lived, but the word he appears to have invented to name it, Voiturette, lived on and became the generally accepted term for a small lightweight car. It comes from the French word for automobile, voiture, and became so ubiquitous that it was used to name a specific Voiturette racing class for lightweight cars with engines of 1.5 litres or smaller. The supercharged Alfa Romeo 158/159 Alfetta that so dominated F1 on its inception was, in fact, originally designed as a Voiturette class racer.

CHAPTER THREE
ADAPT AND ARREST

Or, ignore and watch them flee …

The police force had started policing roads prior to the advancement of the car, and complaints had been made about congestion in cities, especially London, in the first half of the nineteenth century, almost 100 years before cars caught on. Horses had a will of their own and were not always as well trained as they should have been … Indeed, the Great Exhibition of 1851 had taken traffic congestion at Hyde Park Corner as a theme, with various solutions being hypothesised. The passing of the Metropolitan Public Carriage Act 1869 vested many responsibilities into the hands of the police with regard to both Hackney and Public Carriages. By 1895, horseless carriages were appearing and major cities were getting motorised omnibuses or trams.

However, it’s easy to forget that in the 1890s it was by no means clear what cars were going to be. They were obviously going to be something, and that something was going to be important, but what that was, no one was quite sure. Some saw them as a miracle cure for congestion (they took up less space than a horse-drawn wagon) and some saw them as evil machines likely to kill everyone who came into contact with them. Most people, of course, held opinions that were between these two extremes. Petrol eventually came to the fore as the way forward for powering cars, but prior to that, steam, electric (which it now seems was 120 years or so ahead of its time, because battery technology and electronic control have only recently made this viable and it is now very obviously the future) and even coal dust and various other strange ideas were explored.

However, by 1901 the Maybach/Daimler-designed Mercedes had built upon the 1891 ‘Système Panhard’ (a mechanical layout which set the front-engine transmission then rear-wheel-drive layout on most cars until the 1960s) and basically set the template for the twentieth-century car: a petrol engine, a gearbox, and brakes on a separate pedal. Everything else that appeared – from disc brakes to fuel injection and rain-sensing wipers – is a refinement of that original concept.

So the government had to act, and in 1903 came the Motor Car Act, which was the first parliamentary legislation pertaining specifically to the internal combustion engine. The original intention appears to have been to abolish speed restrictions on open roads, but ultimately that did not happen and a blanket 20mph limit was imposed instead, which lasted, officially at least, until 1 January 1931. The fact that it displaced legislation known as the Locomotives on Highways Act tells us much about the rapid rate of technological change and the British government’s typically measured approach to this. Only in the last ten years have the basic principles laid down by this been seriously challenged by technology, and as self-driving cars become a reality the legislators will have an ever-greater role in managing traffic and perhaps they will even control traffic flow through a central computer system.

In the same year, 1903, a Royal Commission on London’s traffic was set up, and after three years of investigation, having heard evidence from all interested parties, it made the following recommendations to the Home Secretary:

• Improved regulations for traffic.

• Street improvements.

• The regulation of street works.

• The regulation of costermongers.

• The removal of obstructions to traffic.

It also recommended that an advisory Traffic Board be set up for the Greater London area. In making this recommendation, the committee stated that it was of the opinion that the creation of such a board would enable traffic matters to be considered as a whole, and not in the parochial manner of existing local authorities. Apart from the phrase ‘costermongers’, whose meaning I confess I had to double-check (it’s a street trader, and I for one think we should try to bring it back into regular use! It’s so much more elegant than ‘street-trader’ or ‘pop-up shop’), that set of recommendations could have been written last week … It was a serious business, though, as London had reported around 10,000 traffic accidents a year alone in the preceding few years, and some other large cities had little better statistics.

However, as cars became more numerous on the roads, so motorists devised ways of warning each other of speed traps, which, in the early 1900s before World War I, were numerous. As early as 1901 the importers of Panhard et Levassor cars operated an official service for their customers to notify them of the location of speed traps. That’s the equivalent, in today’s terms, of Ferrari sending text messages to owners saying,‘Go on, we’ve checked the M54 is clear today, go and max out your 458, you know you want to!’ The Automobile Association (The AA) also warned of speed traps, having advised its members to stop if a patrolman failed to salute – the driver would then be given information about ‘road conditions’ ahead, which usually meant police speed traps in which officers used a stopwatch to calculate whether or not a car was going too fast over a measured distance. Oh, how times have changed … Amazingly, the AA continued this practice until 1961.

The police remained faithful to using foot patrols and horses during much of this period, especially in poorer and rural regions, and in some areas even bicycles were discouraged; for instance, Lancashire did not supply bicycles to their officers until 1908, although since 1903 they had paid a ‘cycle allowance’ to those constables wishing to use their own bike. Some forces’ hierarchy regarded the ever-faster rise of the motor car as a bad thing for society as a whole; humans have not changed much in the last 200 years, save getting a touch bigger on average, but I think we have got better at adapting to change, haven’t we? There is proof, too, that the police were often negative towards car owners simply because they had a car, and that may have as much to do with Britain’s long-standing class war as it does with the car. This is to some extent proved by the Inland Revenue, who, until at least 1906 (and maybe beyond), levied a tax of 15 shillings a year on ‘Automobilists who employ Male Servants as a motor-car driver’ … I assume female chauffeurs were tax-free?

Even after the advent of the 1903 Motor Vehicle Act, driving was still very much seen as a recreational activity, and, as this 1904 advert makes clear, the dress required to go any distance tended to confirm this.

As cars became the norm and horses the exception, this changed. However, that unenforceable 1903 law had pitched the police into conflict with the motorist, and the pages of The Autocar, The Motor and other publications throughout the early twentieth century are filled with tales of pioneer motorists battling what they considered to be overzealous police. As speed cameras and average speed zones proliferate today, you could argue that that’s never changed, but the British police like to police by consent and the media has now educated large sections of the public to the dangers of speeding, so it’s no longer socially acceptable to boast of speeds attained on the road in the way that it was up until the 1980s.

The first occasion on which a motor car was used by the police to apprehend a criminal was, as far as we know, on 15 August 1900, the very beginning of the twentieth century, at Moor Edge, Newcastle upon Tyne. A rider of a horse, who was drunk and causing havoc, was chased for a mile and arrested by a constable who had commandeered a Gladiator Voiturette from its owner, one F.R. Goodwin, who, perhaps unsurprisingly in this era when cars were few and far between, later achieved some fame as a racing driver. There are many subsequent incidents of private cars being commandeered by the police, so that fantasy of Clint Eastwood getting in your car and shouting ‘follow that car’ (or horse) may well have been more likely in 1904! Oh, and for the record I have, of course, commandeered a number of cars belonging to members of the public, and yes, of course I said the very same words. The Moor Edge incident demonstrates initiative and a grasp of then-current technology on the part of the arresting constable; both elements that were in shorter supply among the higher echelons of the police at this point. Much was made of this in the press and it certainly helped further the cause of the motor car over the horse in the general population’s mind, so it was a significant moment for the motoring ‘movement’ as a whole.