The new car culture
At the point where the original turnpike meets the old A3, the coach road built in the 1820s, George, in the app trail, runs into a motorist, and here he gives us another sense of the changing character of Hindhead in the early twentieth century.
In the late 19th century, as the railways killed off the stage coach business, the vehicle you might have seen most often on the roads was a bicycle. This was not to last. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle drove his new 10 horse power Wolseley from Birmingham to Undershaw, his home in Hindhead, in 1902, there were fewer than 8,000 private cars in Britain. However, numbers were expanding exponentially. By the time George is speaking, in 1925, there were 580,000 private cars and roughly the same number of motorcyles. By 1930 this had doubled.
There was a corresponding upsurge of day-trippers and tourists. They were mostly middle class: the democratisation of automobility was still in the future for Britain (while there were seven people per car by 1924 in the US, in the UK it was 78 per car; seven per car was not reached until 1963). The new motor-powered day out is suggested by the image below, from the 1920s. Two cars have stopped in the Devil’s Punch Bowl so their occupants can take a look at the Sailor’s Stone – which was on the A3 at this point before it was returned to its original site in 1932.
The car in the foreground is rare, a Morris Cowley with airship tail body. One other thing that perhaps stands out is that there’s a woman at the wheel (as there is in the app trail at this site). The ratio of male to female drivers in the very early decades of motoring is not clear, but it’s been pointed out that many women saw driving as part of the pursuit of a properly modern life. The Guardian wrote in 1914 that “whatever the case for or against her, the woman driver has come to stay, and it seems probable that the motor will prove for her an instrument of emancipation almost comparable with the now despised bicycle”. The tone is of its time, but more recently historians have also argued that motoring, if not overtly feminist, was part of an everyday politics that challenged negative stereotypes of female capabilities.
The Hindhead photo was snapped by motor photographer Bill Brunell, whose daughter Kitty became the first woman to win a RAC rally, in 1933.
References
Georgine Clarson, Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2008)
National Infrastructure Commission, Historic Transport Dataset. Online, https://nic.org.uk/data/all-data/historic-transport-datasets/
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/25/women-drivers-wheel-motor-car-archive-1914