1895 Britain's First Imported Car by Malcolm Jeal
Britain's First Imported Car by Malcolm Jeal
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Britain’s First Imported Motorcar by Malcolm Jeal
Until October 1903 it was accepted among the motoring fraternity that the first petrol-engined motorcar that was imported into Britain and used regularly on the county’s roads was the Panhard-Levassor of the Honourable Evelyn Ellis. It was the only Panhard-Levassor of the period that was left-hand drive, built in this way to Ellis’ specification as he would be driving on the left-hand side of the road and it was considered to be safer for the driver to be able to follow the road edge – the same reason why most French cars of the period were right-hand drive – white lines down the middle of roads were way in the future.
The car was powered by a front-mounted 15? V-twin petrol engine of 75mm by 146mm bore & stroke, 1290cc (the Imperial sizes given by Claude Johnson are incorrect) rated at 3¾hp, it being Engine Number 394. The engines were made by Panhard-Levassor under the licence that it had obtained from the from the German Daimler Company in 1889. The P-L Engine Number also served as the ‘Car Number’, the latter being similar to a modern VIN number. P-L engines were also sold to Peugeot for use in their own cars until mid-1896.
‘Evy’, as his family called him, bought this tiller-steered car, which ran on wheels with iron-shod tyres, from the Paris factory on the 29th of June 1895 – as the Panhard-Levassor Works Records show (see image):
Both the Panhard-Levassor and Peugeot Works Records from the 1880s onwards are at the Terre Blanche Archive Centre, Hérimoncourt, Doubs. The P-L records used to be easy to consult (and copy) when they were at the Mulhouse Museum but that is no longer the case.
The surviving Benz Works Records are limited in extent, covering from car No 67 (Apr 94) to No 706 (Dec 97). The years 1895/6/7 are all but complete. A different book covers cars No 72 (20.09.94) to No 244 (22.09.95) in considerable detail. Annual production is known from 1885-93 then for each year to 1902, a cumulative total of 2963 cars. Although Benz engines are numbered, and the newer the car it is higher, no separate records of these figures are known to survive.
Evy’s activities with the car on British roads are fairly well known, starting with his drive from Micheldever Station, north of Winchester, to his home at Datchet, near Windsor on the 5th July 1895, in the company of Frederick Simms who recorded the journey. The car was used extensively in England, and in 1896 Evy drove it from Paris to the Cote d’Azure and back with few problems. However, the original wheels had been replaced in September by a set with solid rubber tyres before the car had appeared at the Tunbridge Wells Show organised by Sir David Salomons in October 1895. Half a dozen other European-made cars were imported by British residents before the end of 1895, Evy’s car being the first of these.
Then in October 1903 came something of a bombshell when Henry Hewetson had an article published in The Autocar (17.10.1903 p482) in which he stated that he had imported a Benz Velo (the smallest Benz model) from Germany in November 1894 thus his car being the first import. It was accompanied by the photo below with Hewetson and his daughter aboard.
The article raised no response in following issues of The Autocar, but in the book The History of Ten Years of Automobilism 1896-1906, edited by Lord Montagu and published by The Car-Illustrated, Hewetson enlarged on his story of acquiring the car and repeated the date as being “the end of the year 1894”. This reported 1894 date then entered the folklore, and Claude Johnson (of Rolls-Royce fame) wrote on page 17 of his book The Early History of Motoring that was published soon after his death in 1926: “Mr Henry Hewetson gave an order to Benz & Co, in August 1894, for one of their cars, which was delivered in the following November. Mr Hewetson believes this was the first car introduced into Great Britain.”
There the matter rested until the 1940s when despite the cataclysmic events affecting most of the world, discussions began about when the 50th anniversary of the founding of the British Motor Industry should be celebrated.
In The Motor magazine of February 2nd 1944 there appeared an article by the early motorist Montague Grahame-White in which he set out the case for the anniversary occurring in 1946 (which duly happened). In his dealing with the pioneers he credited Ellis as heading the list of those who first imported a motorcar into Britain. He also debunked Hewetson’s claim to have imported a Benz in 1894 with the comment: “There are alive approximately 140 pioneer motorists who were driving prior to 1900 … and not one of them is able to confirm that Hewetson appeared on the scene until the close of 1895”.
On the 1st March 1944 The Motor published a letter in response to Grahame-White’s comments from St. John Nixon, who since Hewetson was dead, chose to “defend a man I knew intimately”. Nixon refers to the 1903 article in The Autocar and the accompanying photograph of the Benz, and continues: “I have another photo of the actual Invoice for this car from Benz & Co of Mannheim dated November 30th 1894”, (below):
Significant points are underlined in red, including the November 1894 date, Messrs Hewetson & Co, 59 Mark Lane, London (Hewetson’s original business address as the Benz agent from Germany to Britain which he became in 1896). The car is described as a Velocipede, No 309 (260); plus, Benz & Co being the AG is the German abbreviation for ‘Aktiengesellschaft’ roughly the equivalent of a British Limited Company.
Much correspondence continued about the matter in The Motor, and although Grahame-White did not believe the validity of either the Hewetson claim or the Invoice, he could not disprove it. Mention should be made of the fact that MGW had no confidence in Nixon as a motoring historian, having noticed, for instance, the numerous falsifications and sheer fantasy that occurred in S F Edge’s autobiography My Motoring Reminiscences published in 1933 that was actually ghost-written by Nixon (I have period correspondence that confirms Nixon as the author). Just one example of the book’s numerous inaccuracies are in the description of the 1902 Gordon Bennett race that Edge won. As described by Nixon, when many of his statements are cross-checked against period reports, fiction and absurdities abound. I am by no means alone in characterising Nixon as the type of writer who did not let the facts get in the way of the telling a good yarn.
Either Ellis or Hewetson having been the first to import a motorcar into Britain did though remain an unresolved matter until the early 1990s when I was investigating the date of a mid-1890s Benz and found that our National Motor Museum at Beaulieu had a copy of 40 pages of early Benz Records, covering the period 20th September 1894 to the 5th September 1895, and almost all cars from Numbers 72 to 244, these being dealt with in considerable detail. The NMM kindly made copies of these records available to me and from them it clearly emerged that Benz numbered his cars sequentially, regardless of engine size or body type. Also that it was the Car and Chassis Numbers (each being different, sometimes both are noted) that was recorded, not the ‘Engine Number’. Where engines are listed as being sold separately (almost all to Emile Roger in Paris, who was the French Benz Agent), no number is noted against them. From these records it was then easy to see that if Hewetson had bought a Benz in Nov-Dec 1894, as he claimed, with Benz total output for 1895 having been 135 vehicles, its Car/Chassis number would have been somewhere around the 100-130 figure, not the 260 on the Invoice.
Page 1 of the 40-page detailed Benz records. The first car listed, No 118, was a Velo ordered on the 20th September 1894 and ex-Works on the 30th November. Note the mix of Model types and the engine horsepowers (Pf) of the larger cars. The Velo’s were all 1½ hp.
From further research it then emerged that the Number 309 shown on the Hewetson Invoice was not the Engine Number (in part from having individually physically checked over 20 surviving early Benz cars), rather it is the ‘Car Number’ which from some stage in 1895 began to be shown on a brass plate attached to the side of the cars, below the seat.
The image opposite shows a typical Benz ‘Car Number’ plate from an 1899 Velo. The earlier plates had been smaller and seem to have been fitted as the cars left the factory as they are not visible from photographs of the cars when they we are being built.
The figure shown on the Invoice as (260) is of the type that was stamped into the cross-piece on the steering column/gear change rods that rise centrally from the cars chassis. They form a discernible pattern, increasing in number as the cars progress through the years and are regarded as the ‘Chassis Number’. Such numbers sometimes also appear on other chassis components. This image is also from an 1899 Velo.
It later emerged that the 40 pages of detailed records had been given to the NMM by Nixon, and that he had obtained them when he was writing his book: The Invention of the Automobile – The Lives of Benz and Daimler, published in 1936. Therefore when in 1944 he was supporting the 1894 date, he had actually had the facts available to him that would have disproved Hewetson’s case, but he was either too inept to do so, or unwilling to make use of them and so spoil a good yarn.
A couple of years later the Mercedes-Benz Archives supplied me with copies of all the early Benz material that they had, and whilst it is not so greatly detailed, it does list the cars in ‘Chassis Number’ order, gives their date of dispatch from the Mannheim factory, and their destination. The first car ever sent to London was ‘Chassis Number’ 260, and its dispatch date was 29.11.1895. The ‘Car Numbers’ (the 309 figure in this case) do not appear on these less-detailed (but much broader sheets), and the fact that the names of the staff who carried out various tasks during the building of the vehicles are shown adds to my opinion that these records are the equivalent of ‘Work in progress Records’, whilst the much more comprehensive 40 pages previously referred to are ‘Sales Records’.
To leave no room for doubt, Chassis Number 260 was a Velocipede, dispatch destination was London, and the date of the vehicle leaving the Mannheim factory was the 29th of November 1895. There was no London or British-destined Benzes direct from the Mannheim factory in Germany prior to No 260.
With this Benz record material available it became a matter beyond doubt that Hewetson had not imported a Benz from Mannheim until late 1895, not in 1894 as he had claimed in 1903, then continued to do so, and after his death St John Nixon had supported this having been so. Had Montague Grahame-White studied the ’November 30th 1894’ Invoice somewhat more closely he might have questioned why the written details about the Velo are in English, but he overlooked this point. Had I been a bit more perceptive when I first received a copy back in the 1980s I should have had more doubts about the document. Looking at it again some 20 years later, something that is now patently obvious about it then struck me. When I mentioned previously that some of the printed information referred to in my comments about the Invoice actually read: ‘Rheinische Gasmotoren Fabrik AG’, the penny finally dropped.
The crucial element is the two letters ‘AG’, and are worth a quote from the book The Annals of Mercedes-Benz Motor Vehicles and Engines written for Daimler-Benz by Dr-Ing Friedrich-Schildbeger, published in 1961. On page 66 he notes: “The great expansion of the business necessitated a change in its constitution; on May 8 1899, it was converted to a joint stock company … called Benz & Co, Rheinische Gasmotoren Fabrik AG”. Prior to May 1899 the letters AG were inapplicable and so not used on either Benz catalogues or their paperwork.
Therefore, had the Hewetson Invoice been a genuine 1894 document – or from any period before May 1899 – the printed letters AG would not have been present. The cheating so-and-so had taken what would at the time have been current blank paperwork when he wanted to confirm his 1894 claim, and written in the entry himself to meet his requirements.
With the Benz archive material giving irrefutable evidence that Hewetson’s ‘1894’ claim was totally spurious, plus the fact that his Invoice was completely fraudulent, we can dismiss him from the story beyond there being a reasonable likelihood that he was a the 6th British resident to import a motorcar into this country in December 1895, and that he also established a successful business as a result of so doing for the next 9 or 10 years.
Without any doubt the first motorcar imported into Britain was the 1895 Panhard-Levassor of Evelyn Ellis and there is very sound documentary evidence and period reporting to support this contention. It is also pleasing to note that the car survives in the London Science Museum.
Malcolm Jeal 14th May 2016
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Sources of Information