V-E-V Miscellany, October 1980, October 1980

We hear that the 1907 17-litre Itala which Major (later Sir) H.O.D. Segrave ran during the first World War and which was probably the car referred to recently in “The War-Time Diaries of a RFC Officer” is now in America. Another reference in this series was to Archie de Pass, whom a reader informs us was the brother of Lady Madge Kitson, mother of General Kitson, the expert on urban-guerilla warfare. Our informant says he was given de Pass’ RFC cigarette-case (“then for Turkish only”, when he joined the RAF and that he came from a family of wealthy plantation-owners and was in the Royal Navy during WW2. This reader, the Rev. A. ffrench-Mullen, would like to know what became of the 3-litre Austro-Daimler he once owned, which he gave to a friend and which was last heard of as in the possession of a Swansea ice-cream manufacture, in about 1960.

L. Robinson & Co. (Gillingham) Limited, makers of the celebrated “Jubilee” hose-clips (and one of our more staunch advertisers, incidentally, in years gone by) recently acquired one of these clips that had lain under, water, on a WW2 Halifax aeroplane, since 1942 and another from a 1935 Pegasus engine that had been buried for 38 years in the Hebrides. Both these clips were in serviceable condition and still operate freely. These “Jubilee” clips were first made in 1922 and Robinson’s would like to know of any others that have withstood similar rough treatment, to hear of any which have survived longer, perhaps in normal conditions, or to trace any of their original 1922 clips. Letters can be forwarded. The Romford Observer has been publishing local memories of the First World War. One of these articles included an account of how Capt. William Leefe Robinson took off from Suttons Farm, Hornchurch, and shot down a zeppelin. It included a picture of the pilot in his Prince Henry Vauxhall, from which we are reminded that its Reg. No. was LP-6803. The Packard Cormorant, the American Packard magazine, has been publishing articles by Gwilym G. Griffiths about Packard artists, that in the Spring 1910 issue being about John Held, Junr., the dramatic cartoonist of the F. Scott Fitzgerald period.