“It’s more Jeremy Paxman than Jeremy Clarkson. My background is as a news journalist, not a petrolhead.” For the ‘automobilist’, it is a case of plus ça change gear, plus c’est la même chose. “The appalling state of our potholed roads,” he says, “unfair persecution of drivers by the police and politicians, and the future of electric cars amid concern over their range and a shortage of charging points. These were also the very issues being vigorously debated at the height of the Victorian era more than a century ago in these pages.” One way in which the concerns of the 1899 columnist did differ from those of today’s is the assertion that “It is not the province of the ‘Daily Mail’ to give advice to the purchasers of motor carriages,” which one would have thought should come pretty high on the need-to-know list for readers.


Instead, if you must faff around with that sort of fiddly detail, “Good advice can be obtained by writing to the editors of the excellent publication, the ‘Autocar’.” However, the paper “will not hesitate to expose by name the carriages that are causing these accidents” (ie running backwards and falling over). In 1896, three years before the motoring


column proper had the key turned in its ignition, the very first issue of the paper had featured a report on the International Horse Drawn and Horseless Carriage and Roads Locomotion exhibition at Crystal Palace. This featured the original ‘steam tricycle’ made in 1881, which was so terrifying that it had led to the temporary banning from public roads of all ‘automatically propelled road carriages’. There was also a stately procession of four ‘auto- motor’ four-wheeled vehicles that “seemed to be thoroughly under the control of their drivers” or, to put it another way, didn’t blow up.


Autocar, Britain’s first motoring


weekly, had hit the streets in November 1895 and is still hitting them. Its first issue would not win any prizes for ease of comprehension these days, as the prose of its opening article was purple to the point of impenetrability: “The enthusiastic, if at times erratic, wheelman” – I think he means the cyclist – “has in his own vile body, and at first for his own amusement only, proved to a steady- going and conservative nation the immense advantages of and economic gain obtained by the application of self-contained power as a means for the propulsion of rolling bodies upon ordinary roads…” (The sentence continues for a further half-column.) Among understandable bits is a prediction


that horses would never be driven from our roads – who would say neigh to that? An October issue found another wrong tree or arbre to bark up, opposing as it did any adoption in England of the ‘petty’ French scheme of enforcing number plates on cars: “The fact that an autocar has to carry a numbered plaque like a common cab prowling for hire would be quite enough to prevent many people from using such vehicles.” Sadly, this campaign failed on both counts. Britain did adopt number plaques and no one seems to have stopped driving their voitures as a consequence. Autocar was in something of a niche


market, as its staff might well have outnumbered the cars on the road, of which there were probably fewer than a


Top: Mail columnist Malcolm Campbell (right), land speed record holder, with fellow competitors Frank Lockhart (centre) and Ray Keech; steam vehicle, 1897 Above: Today’s Mail Motoring Editor Ray Massey


dozen. Yet, by the end of the century, the number of motorist-friendly mags had reached double figures and, by the start of the Second World War, it was approaching three figures, giving employment to a new class of hacks: motoring journalists. Incredibly, there were two attempts at


daily newspapers for motorists. Daily Motoring Illustrated was launched in November 1905 but succeeded in providing pictures to its petrol-headed readers for a mere eight issues. To be fair, this was seven issues more than a car-crash of a publication, the one-off Daily Auto, managed.


Also launched in 1908 was The Non-Motorist,


which, since most of us are walkers, ought to have been a runaway success. Sadly, it never caught on. Must have been too pedestrian.


theJournalist | 21


Looking back to:


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