V-E-V odds & ends, March 1983
A reader seeks data on Galloway light cars, as his father had one in the 1920s, when he was about three years old. Letters can be forwarded. The second national Motor Museum Archive Special film showing will take place at the National Film Theatre in London on February 5th starting at 8 p.m. Admission to this three-hour showing of historic motoring films will cost £3 a head, from the box office of the National Film Theatre, South Bank, Waterloo, London, SE1 8XT, sending an s.a.e.
A recent stage play by “Pierre the Clown” involves a Model-T Ford claimed to be “one of the original Keystone Cop stunt cars”. A reader of long-standing, Mr. C. Lobb, has sent us the 104-Page ”Westcountry Bygones”, a souvenir supplement to the Western Evening Herald, which among the many automobiles photographed in the last 100 years, includes one of two Milnes-Daimler ‘buses and a circa-1903 Humberette car at The Lizard, another of a circa-1900 Peugeot and another early tourer at a china-clay pit in St. Austell, and Plymouth is seen in the 1930s, with Austin and Morris saloons adding to the congestion in Old Town Street. Randolph Churchill is seen electioneering in 1950 in a Napier tourer of about 1913 vintage. Dr. Speight of Porthleven is seen on his 1910 Triumph, with basketwork sidecar (Reg. No. AF419) and there are tram and ‘bus pictures for commercial-vehicle followers, including the solid-tyred Lacre operated by Penryn & Falmouth Motors in 1912, the Redruth Rugby Club in a Thornycroft coach in 1920 on their way to play at Truro, etc.
Our recent coverage of MCC trials has caused a reader, Guy Ashenden, of Stoke Mandeville, to ask if anyone remembers his late uncle, F. J. Hyam, who was a Director of Smith & Milroy of Orpington, Kent, who assembled the Orpington light-car largely from Model-T Ford components, and who took part in these trials before the war in one of these cars, partnered by Jack Milroy, a hefty individual who could hold up one wheel of the car while it was changed, following a puncture. Mr. Ashenden’s aunt made a maroon velvet-covered holder for the medals won on these MCC trials, which was kept on the mantelpiece of the drawing room in their house near Downe, Kent. Incidentally, the original owner of Mr. Ashenden’s first motorcycle, a 1924 Zenith with 350 c.c. o.h.v. racing JAP engine, was H. W. Inderwick, later of ”Chain-Gang” Frazer Nash and Batten Special fame, after a lady driver had collided with his last Zenith, at a crossroads near Truro during a London–Land’s End, resulting in a broken leg which ended his motorcycling career. In 1963 Mr. Ashenden rode his Ariel Square-Four combination down to Inderwick’s farm near Coolham, his last meeting with his friend, who was polishing a cylinder head from one of his Batten Specials. — W.B.