British cyclecars: the minor makers

The first issue of The Cyclecar came out on 27 November 1912 and surveyed the cyclecars at the Motor Cycle and Cycle Car Show at Olympia. Its first editorial was titled “Rapid but sound progress”, and its list of the cyclecars at the show ran to about 33 makers, from Mead and Deakin, Rudge and Duo to Humberette, G.W.K., Singer, Morgan, the French Bédélia and the AC Sociable.source 1 Most of the engines were V-twins, with a few singles and a few water-cooled fours; the drive went by belt, chain, shaft or friction; and the driver steered by wheel, tiller or cable and bobbin. Prices ran from the single-seat Rollo at 70 guineas and the three-speed New Hudson sociable at 80 to the Singer at 185 guineas, or 240 with a coupé body.source 1 The claim, often repeated, that Britain had more than a hundred cyclecar makers by 1914 has not been verified; the Olympia list counts about a third of that.source 1

The Cyclecar Club was formed in 1912 too. It became the Junior Car Club in 1919 and, through the Brooklands Automobile Racing Club, the British Automobile Racing Club of today.source 2 It held its first open hill climb at South Harting on 28 June 1913,source 3 and one of its officials, the inventor Dr A. M. Low, took delivery of a single-seater that year.source 4 The best-known British makers have their own pages: the GN cyclecar, the Morgan Three-Wheeler, the Carden, the Tamplin and the Scott Sociable. Ten smaller ones follow, in the order they began.

Humber, of Beeston and Coventry, used the name twice. The first Humberette of 1903 was a 5 hp two-seater of 613 cc, a copy of a De Dion-Bouton single on a tubular chassis with wire wheels, two speeds and reverse, and shaft drive; the 6½ hp Royal Humberette of 773 cc and a 7½ hp of 1,419 cc followed. Grace’s Guide calls them the first volume-produced British motor cars, and lists about 20 registration numbers; many run to Brighton.source 5 Ten years later the name came back on a cyclecar. The 1913 Humberette shown at Olympia in 1912 had an air-cooled Humber twin of 84 × 90 mm, a cone clutch, three speeds and shaft drive, rack-and-pinion steering and a transverse front spring. It weighed 7 cwt (356 kg) and cost £115, or £125 with hood, screen and full equipment.source 1

Arthur Grice, J. Talfourd Wood and C. M. Keiller, two of whom had worked at the Swindon railway works, built their prototype in a stable at Beckenham, then moved to Datchet in 1912 and to Maidenhead in 1914. Their car drove by friction. A transverse Coventry-Simplex twin of 1,045 cc, at the back, turned a disc; a wheel moved across its face from the rim towards the centre, and past the centre it gave reverse.source 6 At Olympia it was a two-seat torpedo at £135, with four forward ratios, “also reverse”, and a clutch that worked “by separating the friction discs”.source 1 GWK built 1,069 before the war and 82 Type Es from leftover parts. In 1919 a new company was floated with £300,000 and orders claimed for more than 5,000 cars, but its front-engined Types F and H, about 1,700 of them, were light cars rather than cyclecars. It went into temporary liquidation in 1922, built a last rear-engined car, the Type G, in 1930, and closed in 1931.source 6

Duo Cyclecars of Deptford, run in 1913 by J. C. McArthur and L. F. de Peyrecave, used Aster engines.source 7 At the Cyclecar Grand Prix at Amiens in July 1913 de Peyrecave drove the water-cooled Duo in place of the injured Messervy and finished fifth, in 4 h 12 min 24 s, running the last three laps on one belt after a fastener broke; the air-cooled Duo broke a magneto chain and ran out of time.source 8 The firm passed to the “Depford Co” around 1913.source 7

Slack and Harrison of Kegworth, Leicestershire, built a cyclecar with an 8 hp Precision V-twin. Nothing more about it has been found.source 9

Harold Ewin Dew’s D. E. W. Engineering Co., of Eynsford in Kent, built the Dewcar, which became the Victor in 1915.source 10 At Amiens it ran as “a monocar to which a passenger’s seat had been attached”, and went out with tyre trouble.source 8 The British field there also included Samuelson’s Marlborough, carrying “a lady as his passenger”, and a GN that blew its cylinder heads off; the Bolton-Precision was withdrawn.source 8

After the war a second wave came, often from motorcycle and aircraft firms, and the Austin Seven undercut it from 1922.source 11source 12 John Wooler’s motorcycle firm announced the Mule in February 1919: a 1,022 cc air-cooled twin with rotary valves, its cylinders sticking out of the sides of the bonnet, a round dummy radiator, and two rear wheels so close together that it looked like a three-wheeler. The price was put at about £130 and had risen to £185 by December. Only a few prototypes were built, and it was dropped in 1920.source 12

Black Prince Motors of Barnard Castle, County Durham, had its runabout described in December 1919: it had two Union two-stroke engines side by side, 584 cc between them, an epicyclic two-speed gear and a single belt, coil springs, and frame and body in one, weighing under 3 cwt (152 kg).source 13

Grace’s Guide also puts a cyclecar built by H. G. Wright and five colleagues in 1919–⁠24, and a three-wheeled runabout by A. G. Cocks, lost when the motorcycle designer E. W. Cameron died in 1920, under the same heading; which vehicle was which is not clear.source 13

The Air Navigation and Engineering Co. built it at Addlestone, Surrey, in the former Blériot aircraft works, one of the cars made by aircraft makers after the war. It began as the Jones-Marchant, after its designers Herbert Jones and W. D. Marchant, and had no connection with the French Blériot cyclecar.source 11source 14 A 1-litre Blackburne V-twin of 14 bhp drove through a Zenith-Gradua belt, whose expanding pulleys gave an infinitely variable ratio; the bodies were plywood covered in leathercloth. A three-speed gearbox and chain came in 1922 and shaft drive in 1923, while the price fell from £300 at launch to £115 in 1924. Several hundred are thought to have been built, and Alec Issigonis owned one. ANEC failed in 1927.source 11source 14

Cuthbert Clarke’s Xtra, from Chertsey, Surrey, was shown at Olympia in November 1921.source 15source 16 It was a three-wheeler shaped like a three-wheeled sidecar, with no front axle. A 270 cc Villiers two-stroke drove the single rear wheel by friction: two cork-covered wheels inside a drum gave two speeds, and there was no reverse. The first was a monocar with an occasional seat over the engine, good for more than 30 mph (48 km/h) by its maker’s claim; a two-seat Sociable followed in November 1922, with an 8 hp JAP twin as an option.source 16 The company went into voluntary liquidation in May 1924, and how many were made is not known.source 16

The Jappic was a racer, not a road car: a 350 cc single-seater designed and raced by H. M. Waters, as Grace’s Guide spells the name, with a body by Jarvis and Sons. At Easter 1925 it was billed as the world’s smallest racing car and did 70 mph (113 km/h) in practice, and it set several records at Brooklands.source 17

The Humberettes of 1903–⁠05 survive in numbers and are regulars on the annual veteran run from London to Brighton.source 5 Grace’s Guide photographs a GWK registered HO 7192, and only one Blériot-Whippet is known to survive.source 6source 11 No survivor of the Duo, the Dewcar, the Bantam, the Wooler, the Black Prince or the Xtra has been found.