When filling up came with helping hand

The way we put fuel in our cars has changed beyond recognition over the years. David Behrens examines pictures from the archive.

THE modern petrol station, with its bays of self- service pumps, racks of sweets and windowed cash booths, has become so ubiquitous in Britain that it’s easy to forget that filling up the car was not always done this way.

As these pictures remind us, small garages with a single pump and a member of staff to operate it were still very much the norm until the 1960s and, in rural areas, later still.

The first filling station in England was opened in November 1919 at Aldermaston, Berkshire, by the AA, which at the time was trying to promote the sale of benzole- blended petrol

– a by- product of burning coal

– as a British- made alternative to imported Russian fuel. This was in itself a relatively new development, for during the first two decades of British motoring, petrol had to be bought in twogallon cans, over the counter at chemists, hardware shops and hotels, as well as garages.

AA men in uniform served drivers at the Aldermaston station, from a single, handoperated pump. Seven more stations were opened under the same management and by 1923 there were some 7,000 pumps in use.

None of the earliest filling stations survive in their original form, but Historic England lists the 98- year- old West End Garage at Turnastone, on the Herefordshire side of the Welsh border, as the best preserved. Its twin tall pumps, painted in Castrol green and with onefinger clock gauges on the front, are Grade II listed.

Petrol is still sold from these machines, positioned at either side of the gateway to a 19th century cottage and behind a low front wall. It is an arcane sight today but filling stations like this were common in this part of the country long after bigger conurbations had entered the era of quadruple Green Shield Stamps every time the car was topped up.

PICTURES: FOX PHOTOS/ TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/ GEORGE FRESTON / EVENING STANDARD/ GETTY IMAGES. ON FULL BEAM: From top, a woman serving petrol from a home- made pump in the shape of a lighthouse in Glamorgan in 1939; Don Valley MP Tom Williams fills up the first car with petrol from British coal at a service station in London in 1935; a cashier checks the amount of petrol and resets the pumps by remote control at London’s first self- service filling station, in Southgate; Turnbull’s self- fill station in Plymouth.

NOT ENOUGH TO GO ROUND: PIC TURES: FOX PHOTOS/ TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/ GETTY IMAGES. Top, a motorist handing in her ration card for petrol supplies after stopping off at a filling station in Wandsworth, south London, in 1939; above, a garage owner in Doncaster using an old wheel house from a boat as his office in 1935.

PICTURE: TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/ GETTY IMAGES. NO QUICK PIT STOP: Refuelling a car was a time- consuming business at the Shell Mex filling station in Clapham, south London, in August 1921.