Loading ...‘Carriage Folk’ was a label with a clear social message in 1900. It was an easily understood way of depicting the upper class and the privileged status of those who owned, or controlled, their own personal transport. A hundred years later ‘car folk’ or ‘motorist’ had no social meaning whatever. It seemed as if everyone had a car, or soon would have, and notwithstanding that there was no such thing as society ‘the great car society’ embraced by Margaret Thatcher was perceived as socially inclusive.
Status might attach to particular kinds of car; one might be able to read social class or aspiration into a Rolls or Mercedes, for example. But a car as such had become classless. None of this might be altogether true, for there remained a large, and largely invisible, group of people without wheels, who one way or another were deprived of full participation in modern social life. Yet the spread of mass car ownership was a great economic and social fact of the late-twentieth century. It changed the physical no less than the social landscape, and was both agent and consequence of the phenomenal increase in the affluence of western industrialised societies. The huge impact of the internal combustion engine – on freight and public as much as on personal transport – has engaged the attention of governments, journalists, planners, environmentalists, sociologists, geographers, and social and economic historians, and has influenced radio and television producers, film directors, and novelists. All agree that the motor has been enormously important. Opinions differ as to whether it has created a classless society, or at least caused an upheaval in the social structure; whether it has been the main instrument of change; and, baldly, whether it has been a good thing or a bad thing.
Inevitably the motor has generated a considerable historical literature. Much of this has been concerned with the production of automobiles, and alongside a veritable library of antiquarian books about specific marques there are a handful of excellent scholarly histories of individual manufacturers. A select minority of the car books, however, has considered them from the consumers’ angle, as objects of both desire and utility providing the focus for their treatment as social history.
This stream originated with Harold Perkin’s Age of the Automobile (1976) and J.J. Flink’s Car Culture (1975), and most recently included Sean O’Connell’s excellent The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896-1939 (1998). These two new books under review announce themselves as part of this enterprise of cars as social history. On the whole this is a plausible claim by the amateur historian, Thorold, and a misleading one by the professional writer, Setright.
Peter Thorold is a retired insurance broker whose first venture into social history, London’s Rich, while largely anecdotal in its method revealed an impressive acquaintance with a great sweep of the literature, from the mainstream scholarly to the crooks and crannies of contemporary gossip and scandal. The Motoring Age adopts much the same technique and delivers an equally polished and eminently readable if rather romanticised account of the first fifty years of motoring in Britain. Thorold does not do footnotes or a formal bibliography, but sixteen pages of ’sources’ at the end of the book display the astonishing breadth and depth of his reading, and would seem to be enough to keep someone occupied for several years. It does not look as if he came across Ling’s article in History Today in 1989, on ‘Sex and the automobile in the Jazz age’, although this is very much one of the subjects of his chapters on ‘The Roaring Twenties’ and, especially, on ‘The Open Road to Brighton’ in which much is made of the identification of Brighton with sex and the contemporary view that the first thought of a newly-rich man was to get a car, and the second to arrange a ‘fixture’ in Brighton.
Thorold takes the years up to 1939 as being the golden age of motoring, when driving was an adventure and a pleasure, and there were all sorts of new, liberating, experiences on offer in excursions, holidays, roadhouses, women’s independence, comfortable clothes (once the weatherproof and dustproof disguises and goggles of early motoring could be abandoned)–most of which could even be enjoyed, in charabancs or on motor bikes, by those unfortunate enough not to be among the two million car-owners of 1939. This idealised picture is offset by quotations from C.E.M. Joad on the unspeakable nastiness of the sprawling ribbon development encouraged by motor-accessibility, and the blot-on-the-landscape horror of Peacehaven.
Even so this hardly does justice to the nasty side of pre-1939 motoring, to the congestion of town centres and the hazards of narrow single carriageway roads, above all to the appalling level of road casualties. The arrogance and condescension of the 1934 speech by Moore-Brabazon (later to become Minister of Transport) opposing the reintroduction of speed limits is worth recalling. Acknowledging that more than 7,000 people were killed every year in road accidents, he claimed it would not always be so. In the old days we killed masses of chickens, he said; ‘we used to come back with the radiators stuffed with feathers. It was the same with dogs. Dogs get out of the way of cars nowadays and you never kill one. There is education even in the lower animals. These things will right themselves.’ Setright would approve of these opinions, since he is vehemently opposed to all speed limits. Thorold, on the other hand, would have to argue that Moore-Brabazon was no more than a minor blemish on the golden age in which, until 1939, motoring was a liberating, exciting, beneficial, and rather glamorous social force and cars were a good thing. It is no more than a stylistic device, but for him an age of innocence ended in 1939 and disillusion set in in the second half of the twentieth century. The proliferation of cars spread personal mobility but also created problems of pollution, congestion, and environmental damage; this is a dark side of the social history of motoring which he prefers not to examine in detail.
Setright, on the other hand, takes the view that the car can do no wrong. He presents the car as the great liberator which ended feudalism and made individual freedom possible. He speaks of ‘the lack of mobility, the lack of curiosity, and the hopelessness of the Dark Ages from which the motor cat plucked us’, and apparently believes that ‘the Dark Ages lasted a long time and it took the car to free us front them.’ There is a certain fascination about this kind of extremist automobilism: it has the sheer exuberance of Mr Toad in spades.
Alas, Setright is a complete stranger to social history. He is a well-respected motor correspondent and motor cycle enthusiast, and Drive On is in fact a kind of potted engineering history which some may find an amusing substitute for resort to an automotive encyclopaedia should they desire to find out about the origins and antecedents of synchromesh or front-wheel drive. There is also some entertainment value in outrageous condemnation of speed limits, taxation of motors, and regulations to control exhaust emissions or to compel manufacturers to introduce safety features. One almost expects to see the argument that the way to reduce fatal accidents is to raise or abolish speed limits on the grounds that the alertness and responsiveness of drivers increases with the speed at which they are going. As for the social history of the motor car, this consists mainly of the ‘fancy that’ technique of airing redundant knowledge, along the lines of Brahms at last producing his first symphony in the very year, 1876, that Otto produced his four-stroke engine; or that Brave New World and the Ford V8 both appeared in 1932.
It would be a mistake, however, to take Drive On too seriously. It is better to sit back and enjoy purple prose which can rise to the lyrical: ’so Porsche and VW together went wagging their tails into the rosy dollar-rich sunset.’
‘Carriage Folk’ was a label with a clear social message in 1900. It was an easily understood way of depicting the upper class and the privileged status of those who owned, or controlled, their own personal transport. A hundred years later ‘car folk’ or ‘motorist’ had no social meaning whatever. It seemed as if everyone had a car, or soon would have, and notwithstanding that there was no such thing as society ‘the great car society’ embraced by Margaret Thatcher was perceived as socially inclusive.
Status might attach to particular kinds of car; one might be able to read social class or aspiration into a Rolls or Mercedes, for example. But a car as such had become classless. None of this might be altogether true, for there remained a large, and largely invisible, group of people without wheels, who one way or another were deprived of full participation in modern social life. Yet the spread of mass car ownership was a great economic and social fact of the late-twentieth century. It changed the physical no less than the social landscape, and was both agent and consequence of the phenomenal increase in the affluence of western industrialised societies. The huge impact of the internal combustion engine – on freight and public as much as on personal transport – has engaged the attention of governments, journalists, planners, environmentalists, sociologists, geographers, and social and economic historians, and has influenced radio and television producers, film directors, and novelists. All agree that the motor has been enormously important. Opinions differ as to whether it has created a classless society, or at least caused an upheaval in the social structure; whether it has been the main instrument of change; and, baldly, whether it has been a good thing or a bad thing.
Inevitably the motor has generated a considerable historical literature. Much of this has been concerned with the production of automobiles, and alongside a veritable library of antiquarian books about specific marques there are a handful of excellent scholarly histories of individual manufacturers. A select minority of the car books, however, has considered them from the consumers’ angle, as objects of both desire and utility providing the focus for their treatment as social history.
This stream originated with Harold Perkin’s Age of the Automobile (1976) and J.J. Flink’s Car Culture (1975), and most recently included Sean O’Connell’s excellent The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896-1939 (1998). These two new books under review announce themselves as part of this enterprise of cars as social history. On the whole this is a plausible claim by the amateur historian, Thorold, and a misleading one by the professional writer, Setright.
Peter Thorold is a retired insurance broker whose first venture into social history, London’s Rich, while largely anecdotal in its method revealed an impressive acquaintance with a great sweep of the literature, from the mainstream scholarly to the crooks and crannies of contemporary gossip and scandal. The Motoring Age adopts much the same technique and delivers an equally polished and eminently readable if rather romanticised account of the first fifty years of motoring in Britain. Thorold does not do footnotes or a formal bibliography, but sixteen pages of ’sources’ at the end of the book display the astonishing breadth and depth of his reading, and would seem to be enough to keep someone occupied for several years. It does not look as if he came across Ling’s article in History Today in 1989, on ‘Sex and the automobile in the Jazz age’, although this is very much one of the subjects of his chapters on ‘The Roaring Twenties’ and, especially, on ‘The Open Road to Brighton’ in which much is made of the identification of Brighton with sex and the contemporary view that the first thought of a newly-rich man was to get a car, and the second to arrange a ‘fixture’ in Brighton.
Thorold takes the years up to 1939 as being the golden age of motoring, when driving was an adventure and a pleasure, and there were all sorts of new, liberating, experiences on offer in excursions, holidays, roadhouses, women’s independence, comfortable clothes (once the weatherproof and dustproof disguises and goggles of early motoring could be abandoned)–most of which could even be enjoyed, in charabancs or on motor bikes, by those unfortunate enough not to be among the two million car-owners of 1939. This idealised picture is offset by quotations from C.E.M. Joad on the unspeakable nastiness of the sprawling ribbon development encouraged by motor-accessibility, and the blot-on-the-landscape horror of Peacehaven.
Even so this hardly does justice to the nasty side of pre-1939 motoring, to the congestion of town centres and the hazards of narrow single carriageway roads, above all to the appalling level of road casualties. The arrogance and condescension of the 1934 speech by Moore-Brabazon (later to become Minister of Transport) opposing the reintroduction of speed limits is worth recalling. Acknowledging that more than 7,000 people were killed every year in road accidents, he claimed it would not always be so. In the old days we killed masses of chickens, he said; ‘we used to come back with the radiators stuffed with feathers. It was the same with dogs. Dogs get out of the way of cars nowadays and you never kill one. There is education even in the lower animals. These things will right themselves.’ Setright would approve of these opinions, since he is vehemently opposed to all speed limits. Thorold, on the other hand, would have to argue that Moore-Brabazon was no more than a minor blemish on the golden age in which, until 1939, motoring was a liberating, exciting, beneficial, and rather glamorous social force and cars were a good thing. It is no more than a stylistic device, but for him an age of innocence ended in 1939 and disillusion set in in the second half of the twentieth century. The proliferation of cars spread personal mobility but also created problems of pollution, congestion, and environmental damage; this is a dark side of the social history of motoring which he prefers not to examine in detail.
Setright, on the other hand, takes the view that the car can do no wrong. He presents the car as the great liberator which ended feudalism and made individual freedom possible. He speaks of ‘the lack of mobility, the lack of curiosity, and the hopelessness of the Dark Ages from which the motor cat plucked us’, and apparently believes that ‘the Dark Ages lasted a long time and it took the car to free us front them.’ There is a certain fascination about this kind of extremist automobilism: it has the sheer exuberance of Mr Toad in spades.
Alas, Setright is a complete stranger to social history. He is a well-respected motor correspondent and motor cycle enthusiast, and Drive On is in fact a kind of potted engineering history which some may find an amusing substitute for resort to an automotive encyclopaedia should they desire to find out about the origins and antecedents of synchromesh or front-wheel drive. There is also some entertainment value in outrageous condemnation of speed limits, taxation of motors, and regulations to control exhaust emissions or to compel manufacturers to introduce safety features. One almost expects to see the argument that the way to reduce fatal accidents is to raise or abolish speed limits on the grounds that the alertness and responsiveness of drivers increases with the speed at which they are going. As for the social history of the motor car, this consists mainly of the ‘fancy that’ technique of airing redundant knowledge, along the lines of Brahms at last producing his first symphony in the very year, 1876, that Otto produced his four-stroke engine; or that Brave New World and the Ford V8 both appeared in 1932.
It would be a mistake, however, to take Drive On too seriously. It is better to sit back and enjoy purple prose which can rise to the lyrical: ’so Porsche and VW together went wagging their tails into the rosy dollar-rich sunset.’