miscellany, August 1997

Further news about the mystery aero-engined car referred to recently: a reader recalls that, when a GP in Hartlepool in the 1960s, he had a patient who had run the local scrap yard. He remembered scrapping a chain-drive `Chitty’ in the 1930s, which had an enormous German or French engine. So it does look as if the car we described was broken up in Yorkshire.

Not only has the RACMSA issued a most interesting book of all world and UK records (price £5) and a very useful 1997 list of all motor sporting fixtures and organisers addresses, (£3) but it has now published a Guide To Motor Sport, priced at £3.00, all available from Motor Sports House, Riverside Park, Colnbrook, Slough, SL3 0NG.

Nice to see that a third generation of the Delaney family is into vintage motorsport. Geoffrey Delaney competes with his Hyper LeaFrancis, and his daughter Lucy drove her grandfather Tom Delaney’s well-known 1928 TT-winning Lea-Francis at VSCC Coleme.

I received recently a very clear photograph, circa 1913, of a Belsize tourer, most likely the same one that I had gone to see over 50 years ago at a garage in Driffield, near Brough, when I was stationed in Yorkshire during the war. It is shown outside Swindlehurst’s Garage in Elloughton (not far from where I encountered it) in the company of two motorcycles, a Lincoln Elk and a Royal Enfield, with adverts for cycles, Sturmey-Archer gears, ‘Motor For Hire’ and `electric bells inserted and orders taken for plumbers work’. A fine period piece.