DE DION SURVIVOR
Built in 1911, this De Dion lorry is the world’s oldest survivor, and served in World War One. Mark Dixon tells how one man’s passion has seen it restored to pristine condition
Reviving the truck that lived through WW1
should you need a reminder of how unprepared Europe was for the horrors of trench warfare in World War One, take a look at the tyres on this 1911 De Dion lorry. They are solid rubber, narrow as razor blades and devoid of tread. Even on a good tarmac surface their grip is minimal; they would have been worse than useless in the muddy battlefields of the Western Front.
Yet this particular lorry must have seen some pretty dreadful conditions in 1914-1918. It was sold to the French Army and is believed to have been used as a supply truck between its home base of Troyes and the frontline at Verdun. Even if it didn’t venture as far as the Front itself – there was a staging post at Bar-le-Duc, about halfway between, which was used as a lorry park – it must have struggled on the greasy, unsurfaced roads of the period. And we’ve just got it stuck on the smooth grassy infield of Shuttleworth Aerodrome, its present-day home.
TODAY prESEnTS a learning curve not only for me but for the lorry’s owner and champion, nick pellett, who has just finished overseeing its three-year restoration. This is one of the very first times it has run since the 1920s, when it was laid up in a barn or workshop in rural France.
‘I first heard of the De Dion in 2016,’ says nick. ‘I’ve had a veteran De Dion car since 1983 and I’ve helped run the De Dion Club since 2006, so you could say the marque has taken over my life. This lorry is almost certainly the oldest De Dion commercial left, so when I heard it was coming up for auction, I thought “Let’s have a go”.’
Made in 1911 at De Dion’s puteaux factory, beside the river Seine in paris, this Model BY2 three-tonne truck was acquired by the French Army in 1912 – as recorded by a military order number brass plaque on the scuttle – and saw service in World War One, before being retired to the Troyes area. Back in civilian hands, it may have seen just a few more years’ use before it was retired, considered too old-fashioned to be worth repairing.
‘In those days, lorries tended to remain close to the place where they were registered,’ says nick. ‘While this one may not have served on the frontline – there is no sign of any battle damage – we’re convinced that it was a supply truck. It had a hard life, for sure, because the mechanical parts were badly worn, and it was probably pushed into a shed or workshop and just left there until the 1960s.
‘A Dutch collector then acquired it, but did nothing with it, and in 1998 it came to England and was later bought by an enthusiast called Keeley. In 2016, I purchased it at the Cheffin’s auction of his collection – so it’s had barely a handful of owners in the last 90-100 years.’
JUST STArTInG the De Dion is something of a ceremony, since electric starter motors had hardly been invented in 1911 – Cadillac is generally credited as introducing them in 1912. So there’s quite a procedure to follow when it’s time to fire up the De Dion’s 4.1-litre fourcylinder engine. And you really need two people to do it.
First you remove the louvred side panel that covers the engine, below the driving position. next, turn on the fuel tap and manually flood the carburettor. Its choke is held closed via a rod projecting up through the floorboards, the throttle pedal partly depressed using a piece of metal bar tucked behind the brake, and the ignition fully retarded using a knob on the steering column. next, the engine is turned on the crank handle four times, to suck mixture into the cylinders, after
which the choke is partially opened again and the ignition switch flicked on.
Then comes the fun part. Sort of.
Nick loops a length of rope around the handle and positions a block of wood beneath it. While I tension the rope so that the starting handle dog doesn’t slip out of engagement with the engine crank, Nick stands on the block with one foot and rests his other foot on the handle. Three, two, one, now! – and I yank the rope while Nick puts all his weight on the handle, and between us we spin the motor with as much energy as we can muster. After several attempts, the big four burbles into life with a suprisingly muted sound. We have ignition!
Now, imagine trying to do all that when the air is rent with shrapnel and you’re deafened by the thunderous roar of munitions… My admiration for the pioneering drivers and mechanics who had to work with these early lorries has increased exponentially.
At least the De Dion is fairly conventional to drive. Again: sort of. You hoist yourself into the driving compartment from the passenger side, using the front mudguard as a step. By now the piece of bar has been removed from the throttle and the engine is chuntering away to itself at an easy 400-450rpm. Next surprise – the single-plate clutch is quite docile, aided by the lowrevving torque of that four-litre engine. But that’s not something you can honestly say about the three-forwardspeeds-plus-reverse gearchange.
Imagine a lever moving back and forth in a narrow quadrant gate. So far, a conventional vintage gearchange. But, instead of sliding from side-to-side to engage one pair of ratios or the other, the lever has a button that you push down, which locks the lever into one of two mechanisms. These take the form of hollow tubes mounted concentrically on the same lateral shaft (like the shaft for foot pedals on an ordinary car), which translate the motion into push/pull selector rods to the gearbox.
Successful operation depends on precise adjustment of all the interlocking parts, and the hapless mechanic tasked with keeping everything set just-so while in the field may well have cursed the engineer who designed the system, if our experience today is anything to go by. The De Dion has run barely a few hundred yards since restoration, and its gearchange sometimes requires much cajoling and manipulating to prevent it locking up. It’s a minor irritation today; rather more vexing when the enemy is lobbing shells at you.
Progress is best described as ‘stately’. The De Dion’s narrow front tyres like to follow camber changes, so a safe cruising speed is 8-10mph, which feels plenty fast enough from your elevated perch right at the front of the vehicle – you couldn’t, as the saying goes, get much closer to the impending accident. But you feel like king of the road behind the almost-vertical steering column, nothing but a steel scuttle and a thin, snub-nosed radiator between you and the open highway.
As is often the way with big-wheeled, solid-tyred vehicles, the ride quality is better than you’d imagine. And there are brakes, after a fashion: a drum with internally expanding shoes on the transmission behind the centrally mounted gearbox, and externally contracting bands on drums for each rear wheel. How effective they would be when descending a steep, slippery hill with a full load of munitions, field rations or, indeed, Poilus (the French equivalent of ‘Tommies’) is another question, and one that I’m rather glad I don’t have to answer.
‘We’ve reBuIlT the lorry as it might have been delivered in 1911, not to World War One military specification,’ says Nick later, as we warm up over coffee in the Shuttleworth Collection café. ‘We did think about putting a military body on it, which would have been lower and taller, but that’s what everyone does with WW1-era commercials – and the height would have caused potential problems with storage and transport. We even thought about fitting a bus body, and I was offered one from the late Michael Banfield’s collection, much of which went to film director Peter Jackson’s collection in New Zealand. Peter did send me a note while I was restoring the De Dion, because of course he directed the documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old and has a particular interest in World War One.’
‘8-10mph feels plenty fast enough from your elevated perch; you couldn’t get much closer to the impending accident’
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. When Nick bought the De Dion at that Cheffins sale in 2016, it was a rolling chassis that had not moved under its own power for 90 years, with a temporary flatbed stuck on top. At least the running gear was intact with engine, radiator and complete drivetrain; all that was missing was the magneto. Even so, the restoration would prove a massive undertaking. Nick entrusted the work to Richard Peskett in Surrey (‘He’s very good at vintage commercials, and has a great network of proper old-school engineers’), with an army of sub-contractors employed to tackle more specialist jobs, such as rebuilding the wooden wheels.
‘Absolutely everything was dismantled, including the chassis,’ continues Nick. ‘This was because it has wooden side-rails sandwiched between steel flitches to allow a degree of flexibility, and the wood had rotted. I took my race trailer to a timber yard to collect £3500-worth of cut-to-size ash, not just for the chassis but for the crossmembers, rear body and cab. It was loaded into my trailer with a forklift and I was rather nervous in case its tines went through the trailer’s alloy sides!
‘Curiously, the original chassis was six inches shorter than it should be, probably cut down by an early owner so that it would fit his shed. With these solid wheels, the lorry could only have operated on metalled roads, so it was likely used by an owner-driver after the war until it stopped working. I’m convinced that’s the story.’
Three of the De Dion’s wood-spoked wheels could be rebuilt, but a fourth had to be made from scratch. Fitting solid tyres isn’t a job for your local garage, as Nick explains: ‘The tyres are made from polyurethane rather than rubber, bonded to a steel band that is then heated and shrunk onto the wheel rim. First you have to remove the old band and tyre; a chap called Barry Weatherhead has an original Dunlop hydraulic press in his back yard, and we successfully pushed off one of the old tyres with this – but the others had to be cut off with a grinder.’
SmootH tyRES and wet grass do not a happy combination make, as we proved the first time we ventured off-piste during our photoshoot. Fortunately, Shuttleworth’s curator Stuart Gray was on hand with his Fergie tractor to tow us onto firmer ground.
Such incidents just go to show how, if looked at in terms of cold, hard cash, Nick Pellett has spent an inordinate amount restoring a vehicle that’s impractical both to own and to use. yet as a survivor and a reminder of the ‘war to end all wars’, this De Dion’s value is priceless. The old vehicle world needs more people like Nick.
Thanks To Stuart Gray at the Shuttleworth Collection for his help: see shuttleworth.org for details of events and opening times at this classic grass-strip aerodrome, which has a large collection of WW1 and WW2 aircraft.