Veteran salute to Victorian pioneers is a vintage day out
Ed Wiseman learns to pilot a 1904 Vauxhall 6HP to follow what may have been Britain’s first car journey, by Evelyn Ellis and Frederick Simms in 1895
At 9.26am on Friday, July 5 in 1895, the Hon Evelyn Ellis and his friend Frederick Simms set off from Micheldever Station in his freshly imported Panhard et Levassor motor car. Ellis was at the tiller, and Simms sat beside him, making meticulous notes about the journey and the reactions from people they met. As a result, we know Ellis’s exact route, through Hampshire to Basingstoke, then to Virginia Water and Englefield Green, all the way to his house in Datchet, Berkshire. The 56-mile journey took eight hours and 14 minutes.
This was probably Britain’s firstever car journey, and indeed Ellis’s may have been Britain’s first-ever car. Little did this pioneering duo know that by the turn of the century their machine would be one of several hundred on the road, and that within 30 years that number would have swelled to a million. Nor could they have had any idea that 124 years later, their journey would be the subject of a weekend-long rally in their honour.
The Ellis Journey is an annual veteran car run that roughly follows the route that Ellis and Simms took in 1895, or at least what’s left of it – the “well-made old London coaching road” as described by Simms is largely fast-flowing B-road, with roundabouts and traffic lights to navigate; a doddle in a modern car, but somewhat daunting in a contraption that predates the zebra crossing by 30 years.
My personal Ellis Journey begins in Luton, on the driveway of Luton Hoo Hotel, which has been kindly offered as a test track on which I can learn to drive a car made in 1904. The machine that I am familiarising myself with is a Vauxhall 6HP, borrowed from Vauxhall, and the man sitting next to me is Simon Hucknall, also on loan from Vauxhall.
“It’s about conservation of momentum,” he explains, as I fail to gather any in the first place. Hucknall’s beguiling competence at the helm of the 6HP on the short trip from Vauxhall’s Heritage Centre to the gates of Luton Hoo had left me feeling complacent; it’s actually quite complicated to relearn how to drive a car. Instead of a steering wheel there’s a charming wooden tiller, and instead of a clutch, brake and accelerator pedal, there’s, well, an altogether different arrangement.
On the floor are two pedals, one
the brake, the other a sort of first gear. Resting in my lap is the tiller, hinged from the top of a column mounted to my right, and from which a small round knob protrudes. This is the throttle, essentially, as well as the gearstick – the 6HP is fitted with an epicyclic gearbox, which the driver can ease in and out of “second” as required by swivelling the throttle stem.
To set off, I open the throttle by turning it clockwise, then gently depress the first gear pedal, causing the car to accelerate to around walking pace. When I reach a heady 5mph I engage second and settle into a cruise, the onecylinder engine seemingly dropping to about 60rpm on account of my overeagerness. On uphill sections I can adjust the spark for a little added oomph, but Hucknall warns against relying too heavily on this strategy.
“The London to Brighton [Veteran Car Run] is in November, which is a bit easier,” he says. “In summer we’ll overheat if we push it too hard.”
It’s a lesson in mechanical sympathy. I have driven all manner of vehicles over the years but never anything quite this old. It’s somewhat complex, and profoundly unergonomic by today’s standards, but hugely involving and surprisingly natural.
Come the morning of the run, I’m confident that Hucknall has imparted enough knowledge for me to drive the 6HP without embarrassing him. We line up on the driveway of Norton Park Hotel, a few miles from the original start point in Micheldever.
There are all sorts of cars here – a De Dion-Bouton, an early Peugeot, some sort of tricycle, a Darracq. The cacophony of crude internal combustion is an absolute delight on this bright summer morning, and as we set off I can only imagine how Ellis and Simms would have felt, lurching noisily into the unknown all those years ago.
It’s impossible to be anything other than cheerful while in the presence of a bulb horn. Merrily we parp past pedestrians, many of whom have stopped to observe the spectacle as they would have done in 1895. Each toot elicits a cheer or a wave – I’m always heartened by how much affection there is for these silly old cars, in a world now ruled by speed and efficiency.
I’m not sure how fast the Vauxhall can go, but it feels glacial compared with even the slowest of modern cars. At one point we’re passed by a Mk1 Cavalier, one of the 6HP’s modern descendants, born a mere 40 years ago. Another thumbs-up, another parp.
The going has been steady but Berkshire brings hazards. First a hill, which necessitates a step down into first gear, and then stationary traffic. The Vauxhall’s crude cooling system is susceptible to overheating, and switching it off is out of the question – to start it again is a time-consuming rigmarole liable to stretch the patience of drivers behind us. Hucknall tells me that the first sign of overheating is the smell, followed almost immediately by the presence of steam; veteran motorists must be prepared to utilise all of their senses.
Englefield Green to Windsor takes us a few miles west of Heathrow. Aircraft emerge from the horizon every couple of minutes, climbing lazily over Berkshire on their various journeys overseas. Today’s world would be practically unrecognisable to Ellis and Simms, whose journey predated the Wright Brothers’ seminal flight by more than eight years – just as the motor car wove itself into the fabric of our society, the rapid emergence of air travel permanently altered the geography of the world. We owe a great deal of what we now take for granted to a short, curious burst of ingenuity at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.
Clattering into Datchet, we and the other cars are met by a brass band and hundreds of dressed-up well-wishers. There’s a celebratory atmosphere as we bump our way on to the village green, which teems with people and gleaming machinery. Hucknall and I have navigated the route without stalling, which feels like a small victory, but perhaps more importantly we have helped keep some of Britain’s most important automotive heritage alive.