Keep calm and publish: Autocar in times of crisis

At the beginning of both world wars, not much changed. The first was famously anticipated to be over by Christmas and the second began as the ‘phoney war’. Eventually both became terrifically serious and impinged on all aspects of life, including motoring.

There are comparisons to be made between wartime life and the current coronavirus crisis. Many aren’t relevant to a motoring magazine, but the one thing that we who write for Autocar share with our forebears is a dwindling bank of new car features, whether it be first drives or group tests. All the UK importers have locked up their fleets of cars and all launch events have been cancelled. Soon we will have covered all the new cars that we have driven in the past months. What will we write about then? And about what did the staff at The Autocar write when they were in a similar position?

Just before the lockdown, I spent a very enjoyable afternoon in the Haymarket basement, looking through the company’s complete collection of the magazine from 1895 to the present. There’s some great stuff in there. Not just entertaining pieces but also thought-provoking and provocative articles on subjects not entirely irrelevant today.

There’s a great editorial that was published on 6 May 1916. It starts with the brave statement that Germany could have staved off the war and instead beaten us commercially and industrially by simply continuing down the path on which it was already travelling.

The editor bemoans that the fact that we had become too reliant on imported and foreign parts for our cars, mentioning magnetos in particular. He goes on to suggest that, after the war is over, we in Britain should make our own fuel from the by-products of agriculture so that we will no longer be beholden to foreign suppliers, and equally boldly points out that Germany is already doing just such a thing.

The Autocar also played its part in the war effort, as a short news piece in the 10 November 1917 issue shows. The week before, we had run an article on The Red Cross School of Motor Mechanics that had been set up in Vevey, Switzerland, for prisoners of war interned in the country. The editor had pointed out the great work the school was doing to help the servicemen learn skills that would be useful to them in peacetime. He had also asked readers to contribute to the running of the school and a week later had received several hundred pounds. It’s good to note that the then publishers of The Autocar, Iliffe & Sons, had themselves put in £105.

By the time the country was at war again, the motoring world had changed dramatically, even though just 20 years had passed. Private car ownership was far more common and there had been two decades of fantastic motorsport. There were more cars and there were better and more exciting cars.

But, as announced in an editorial in the front of the issue dated 26 July 1940, right in the middle of the Battle of Britain, there were no new cars. “Since last Saturday,” wrote the editor, “it has been impossible to buy a new car without a licence.” Below this piece, we noted that 10 times more people were killed on the roads in June than were killed by air raids. That ratio would be modified that autumn by the start of the Blitz.

While buying a new car was out of the question, there was a plentiful supply of used cars available. The Autocar’s classified pages, certainly in the early part of the war, were far better populated than petrol rationing would have you expect.

My nose would have been firmly pressed against the window of Brooklands of Bond Street in London, whose September 1940 advertisement contained such mouthwatering machines as a nearly new Lagonda V12 coupé for £1050 (roughly a seventh of the price of a new Supermarine Spitfire) and, if its country of birth didn’t bother you, a 1937 Mercedes-Benz 540K for £595. For the RAF fighter pilot, it surely would have had to be an SS Jaguar 100 two-seater at £295.

The Autocar didn’t seem to have much trouble sourcing writers for its wartime articles. Here’s a name that may well be familiar to you (no, not Steve Cropley): Denis Jenkinson. The legendary Jenks was working as an engineer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough alongside the equally legendary Motor Sport editor Bill Boddy, who was busy writing flight manuals.

Jenkinson contributed to the 28 March 1941 issue a fascinating four-pager on the relative performance of well-known competition machines – a feature that is timeless and would be fascinating to replicate in 2020.

As for racing itself, there of course wasn’t any in Europe. The Indianapolis 500 was run in 1940 and 1941 but then stopped after the US entered the war. The Autocar didn’t forget about motorsport for the duration and instead ran many articles that looked back at some of the great races from the past decades.

Prince Chula of Thailand, cousin of the famous racing driver Prince Bira, wrote several such emotive pieces, including a history of The British Empire Trophy for 4 April 1941.

There was never a shortage of readers’ views, either. Here’s a cracker from John Bartlett of North London, which begins in the fashion that many of your letters still do.

“Having been a reader of The Autocar since 1925, when I was 11 years of age, I have written at different periods in your correspondence columns. However, due to the Dunkirk business, I have returned to civil life minus my right leg but am managing on a metal one.”