Cars In Books, October 1973

Reading “The Rise and Fall of Horatio Bottomley” by Alan Hyman (Cassell, 1972) one would dearly like to know what makes of cars the vain millionaire swindler indulged in when all was going well with his financial and publishing empire. But the book gives not so much as a clue, nor are we told the make of the “expensive car bought in Wales” by a winner of a John Bull Grand National sweepstake in 1914. The only car named is the “old Ford” in which Reuben Bigland, the man who eventually brought ruin and a prison sentence to Bottomley, drove to the West Country to distribute his pamphlets exposing the swindler. As this was in 1921 it was presumably a brass-radiator Model-T.

Crossley Tenders, Douglas motorcycle combinations and Model-T Ford ambulances feature in “One Spring In Picardy” by William Stanley (Angus & Robertson, 1973), a novel about an FE2b Squadron during the First World War which, so detailed and accurate is it, that my faith in fiction has been largely restored apart from the grisly ending!