Reminiscing the Golden Age of British Motoring | Axon’s Automotive Anorak

For the princely sum of just £2.50 I found a pristine used copy of charmingly nostalgic 1995 book, The Golden Age of British Motoring, curated by motorcycle expert Roy Bacon. Containing 192 pages of top-quality black and white photographs, this is an endearing record of motoring as it used a be on Britain’s traffic-free roads 100 years ago, with superb car and landscape images taken by renowned motoring photographer of the inter-war year period, W J (Bill) Brunell.

Brunell was a professional photographer of the era and keen motoring enthusiast and rally driver. His images perfectly captured the mood and spirit of a ‘golden era of British motoring’ at the time, many taken along the quiet lanes of the English West Country, with the occasional trip further afield to Scotland and Monaco, for the Rallye de Monte Carlo. Some photos were taken in and around the charming Chiltern Hills/Thames Valley regions where I grew up, with fantastic scenes of familiar streets that thankfully haven’t really changed too much over the past Century, apart from the number of cars clogging the streets.

Being a child of the pre-internet age, I still tend to favour and trust books over the World Wide Web for more accurate facts rather than fiction, as is sadly all too often the case on the Internet. When curating the majority of the content at Goodwood events, be it the Cartier ‘Style et Luxe’, the Earls Court Motor Show at the Goodwood Revival, and the GRRC Club Open Days, I usually prepare my display board texts using the printed word as my reference and more reliable research sources, as I can’t always rely on websites for accurate facts.

Unbeknown to me when I first spotted my wonderful £2.50 charity shop find, it wasn’t until I got home and started to look at the book in more detail that I began to spot a quite a few photo caption errors. The inside flap of the book’s dust over boasted that the caption writer had been authoring transportation books since 1964, building up a reputation for ‘solid, accurate writing and attention to detail.’ This statement rather contradicted the face though, as many of the image captions inaccurately name the car make and model.

In the used book I bought this ambitious but misleading fact was challenged by the book’s previous mystery keeper, with plentiful and beautifully hand-written notes annotated under each incorrect caption in dark blue ink. This tome’s first buyer/reader carefully referred to a review of this title in period by the VSCC Bulletin Club newsletter. Seemingly in the August 1998 VSCC Bulletin Number 220, with a printed review given Page 53, pointing out the many inaccuracies of captioning the wonderful accompanying images. Photographer W.J. (Bill) Brunnel passed away in 1968 so never got to see this amazing compilation of his fine work in print, but I suspect that he would have not been too happy to have his evocative images incorrectly captioned.

I do have a degree of sympathy for caption author Bacon inaccurately getting the identity of some market and models wrong though. Were these images taken today, trying to correctly ascertain the identity of one modern SUV from another, when so many of them look the same, is not the work of a moment. Many might say that identifying cars of the 1920s and ‘30s is similarly tricky, as many of them looked quite similar, with the badge and grill often being the only real identifiers.

Captioning multiple pre-war Austin saloons as Ford Model As is unforgivable though; a common error in this book, whereas mistaking a Singer Le Mans in the 1937 Welsh Rally for a far more obscure Model B37 (one of only 12 built) or a delightful French Rally cyclecar for a similar-looking Stracker-Squire, or Standard Flying Twenty saloon as a Flying Six is more understandable, though still not right in print. Many years ago I contributed to the final two-volume edition of the incomparable Complete Encyclopedia of Motorcars 1885 to The Present by the acclaimed motoring historian G.N. (Nick) Georgano. He purposely included a fictious entry for a non-existent marque (and never revealed the ‘fake make’ to anyone) to see how long his ‘deliberate mistake’ would be repeated on the internet. Depressingly it did not take long!

Despite the basic school boy captioning mistakes, the excellent photographs in this highly-recommended book (there are usually a few second-hand examples available to buy on certain well-known internet-based buying websites for around a fiver), the quality, patience and accuracy of the delightful hand-written corrections in the copy I found make my considerable £2.50 investment one of my better recent buys (also being considerably less calorific than a cappuccino or croissant for the same price). Happy hunting!

Photograhpy by W. J. Brunell as published in The Golden Age Of British Motoring.