At the end of Patrick Hamilton’s novel Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, there is an extraordinary passage in which he depicts the rise of the motorcar as a plague of black beetles spreading out all over England. The beetles have taken over and made human beings their slaves and attendants. The novel was published in 1953 but set in 1928.
Hamilton had his own reasons for disliking cars. He had been badly injured in a hit-and-run incident in the 1930s. To ram the point home, he gave his villainous anti-hero, Gorse, an association with cars and the motor trade. There is something of this idea that cars may not altogether be a good thing in Nicholas Blake’s 1938 novel The Beast Must Die. The hit-and-run driver who kills a young boy and tries to cover it up is a garage owner. This novel was inspired by a “near miss” incident involving the author’s own young son.
In 1927, H V Morton had published an account of his travels round the country, In Search of England. In his foreword, he was much more enthusiastic about the rise of the petrol engine than Hamilton or Blake. He sees the provision of coach services and “the popularity of the cheap motor car” as reviving road travel and making remote areas of the countryside more accessible than they were in the railway age. He laments the “vulgar” behaviour of some visitors, but thinks that in general, the age of the car will lead to a greater understanding and love of the countryside, which will therefore help preserve it. The seaside holiday will go out of fashion, he suggests, to be replaced by the country holiday.
Compare this to a report in the “I” newspaper of 16 November 2019. It is headed “Pay As You Go”, and continues “As UK resorts clog up with traffic, Dean Kirby reports on a plan to charge tourists a congestion fee in the Lake District.” There is now a conflict in many areas between tourist traffic and local road use.
Things have been heading this way for a long time. Some years ago, I went to Lyme Regis in Dorset. From the top of a double-decker bus, I could see the “park and ride” car park, necessary to prevent the town’s high street seizing up completely in the summer. A little further off, was the disused viaduct of the now closed railway line to the town.
We tend to think now of the inter-war years as a “golden age of motoring”, bringing to mind the image of a uniformed AA patrolman saluting a passing sportscar, the only vehicle on an otherwise empty road. We can’t really blame H V Morton for not having a crystal ball, but it’s interesting that he did not seem to have thought out the implications of increased car use.
We see the 1930s as the Shell Guide era of motoring. Paul Nash took the photographs for the Dorset volume. But these detailed descriptions of rural England were sponsored by a petrol company. The original editions were spiral bound so they could be opened flat on a car seat. Admittedly Hamilton was writing with the benefit of hindsight, but he seems to be one of the only writers who saw that Britain would have to change to accommodate the motor revolution.
Of course, it was a fictional character who appeared as early as 1908, who caught the deep appeal of this new form of personal transport. I am thinking of Mr Toad, staring after the speeding car with a gleam in his eye. Despite his string of accidents and fines, Toad could not resist getting into a car again. “Toot Toot!”
The Good Reader 