Britain still has one weekly motoring magazine of true stature and authority, Autocar. The slightly odd name is a hang over from it’s birth 125 years ago; it’s proud to have been launched (as The Autocar) when there were just six cars in the country.
The magazine and the magazine market have both changed a lot in that time. It swallowed its long tine rival Motor in 1988, and was published for six years as Autocar and Motor, before reverting to Autocar. It is now the only weekly aimed at enthusiasts rather those purely choosing a car.
The content, and crucially the impartiality, of the magazine is much better than it was when I bought it in the way home from school on a Thursday afternoon, although there is a discernible patriotic basis in the amount of content around Jaguar Land Rover, if not in the actual subjective assessments. But in general, it’s not a bad read, and the news and video content on the website is pretty good too.
The front cover was usually, until the early 1960s, a full colour advertisement – the only colour in the whole magazine of course. This was niornally taken by one of the major manufacturers or sometimes by a tyre or brake manufacturer. The magazine has now made available online an archive of the last 125 years, and while you may not want to read every test of the Hillman Minx or Austin Cambridge, you cannot deny that the traditional covers with their full colour advertising artwork are attractive, and perhaps more attractive than another a shot of VW Golf or an over-excited headline on a new Corolla. Here’s a few I picked out, but you could choose many others.
A Morris advertisement from 1924, when Morris was emerging as the dominant UK manufacturer, taking market leadership around this time.
But Ford was not taking this laying down – the response to Morris was to build the Dagenham plant east of London.
A nice pair of Wolseleys from 1935, or
a Humber? this is a 1934 cover.
And this is why Jaguar Cars as a company name was needed.
Some advertising locations seem to have changed little, apart from the subject, at least in advertising.
Lockheed Brakes were a regular advertiser – this is from 1940, when lights, except search lights, were dimmed.
May 1945, and colour was back in our lives.
1948 was the year Britain’s industry really got going again with new product. Austin was proud to be exporting the A40 to the USA, and using artwork to add a lot to a pretty ordinary car.
This one puzzled me a little, until I read the small print – he’s a manufacturer trained mechanic.
1952, and Jaguar were now established as the leading affordable luxury and craftsmanship brand.
1957, and advertising brakes is still on the cover of magazines.
1962, and one of the last artwork covers was taken by Daimler for the Majestic Major – by then competing with in-house with the large Jaguar and gently fading away.
Plenty more here, and not just the covers, here www.themotoringarchive.com/autocar/
The German magazine, auto motor und sport, has digitised each and every issue as well as special editions since its relaunched issue in 1946. However, we have to pay for each issue if we want to access them.
That’s why it is a huge pity when more and more libraries have ditched the physical copies and when more and more digitised magazines are behind the paywall nowadays.
Agree wholeheartedly on that paywall, Oliver. Often I’ll follow up a link only to find the original story is hidden behind a paywall. Not so bad if it’s local, but I’m not going to pay to access a foreign newspaper’s site I might never visit again.
There’s something contradictory, living in an age when information is in principle freely available but in practice restricted to those prepared to pay for it.
Your last sentence sums up the evolution of the World Wide Web up until today. We might as well be living in the stone age if information is back under lock and key (paywall) instead of in the open like the early WWW.
Information is not free nor was it ever free. There is a cost involved in writing, publishing and storing info. I pay subs to newspaper and magazines otherwise they mightn’t be here.
Early Brit paywall
It’s interesting how sometimes the early trade journals would publish a tiny seemingly meaningless blurb.
I can’t think of a specific actual example, but things such as:
“Let it be known that July 7, Yosef Blowe of Hamburg visited our Acme Motorcar Engineering Department at Detroit, and there observed in operation our new improved Antikythera Mechanism transmission
drive system.”
About the only thing that makes sense is that it was a bit of maneuvering to protect intellectual property rights?
For Christmas, 1967, my parents got eleven year old Dman a one year subscription to Road & Track. My aunt, in hindsight one-upping my mom, her “baby sister”, got me a three year subscription to Autocar. Shipped from the UK, arriving once a week but a month after publication, often tattered. For an American kid, even one as import-savvy as me, it was an eye opener … the technical detail, the racing news, the classified ads. All of those 150-odd issues are long gone, but if I remember correctly the first issue featured the then-new RWD Ford Escort, which replaced the Anglia and was big news. The last issue, which arrived when I was in high school, featured equally big news: the new Range Rover. All of the R&T’s are long gone, but not before I acquired hundreds more issues of CD, SCI, Motorsport etc, dating between 1950 and 1982 or so, and created an index card directory of contents.
What a library you must have!
I love the period artwork and what was the peak of the advertising world at the time. I never knew that (the) Autocar’s covers were advertisements – That was seems to have been some shrewd marketing that placed revenue over the publication’s vanity.
I came across an Autocar issue from the 1950s in a secondhand store about 20 years ago, and soon began looking for more. An auto memorabilia store in Vancouver was the source for another half dozen, and I rooted through eBay on a regular basis for another decade or so. I ended up with about a linear foot-and-a-half of issues, and still leaf through them from time to time.
The cover artwork from the ’30s through the ’50s was the major attraction (I stuck to copies with the more ornate, pre-60s mastheads), but the density of the content – road tests of new (and sometimes used, in the postwar years) cars, ads, detailed technical articles – made the issues feel like time machines, and were always well written.
Accounts of travels, such as a motoring trip through Wales in the 1950’s in a pre-war Alvis, with wife, two daughters, and faithful hound (the roads were ‘good enough’, and the car boiled over ‘only once’) add to the pleasure.
As a teen I bought a few random issues. Pocket money wouldn’t stretch to buying a weekly magazine, and there were other titles that were more appealing. Notably I bought the opposition Motor’s Show Number, reporting on the Earl’s Court motor show for several years, and the issue which was devoted to the Mark 3 Cortina (funny, that!). Still have all of those somewhere.
Not only are the advertising covers fascinating, but the layout too. The front and back third or so were all ads. This meant when Lord Puddingpop sent his year’s worth off to his bookbinder to produce a bound volume for the castle library, he could easily strip out the dated ads and make a more manageable sized (but still large) book with a year’s worth of features and tests. The modern British classic car magazines seem to follow the same principle. Hence Volume 43, Number 8, or whatever.
And the information in those old road tests! Going back to the thirties issues here… Stopping distances illustrated with a drawing of the car a scale distance away from an errant pedestrian – much more informative than a mere number. Swept area of the windscreen wipers graphically illustrated by what appeared to be whitewash or shoe polish over the screen, clear only where the wipers have passed. Illustrations of the dashboard with all the controls labelled – and some of them were in strange places back in the thirties.
Thank you for the rabbit hole, Roger – sorry, link! 🙂 See you in a few weeks…..
Such a different world with most images being drawn or painted. Now most images are photographs or videos with a handful of computer generated images.
Just read the ad for Lockheed brakes on the ’57 cover. “8 out of 10 of the world’s cars fit Lockheed hydraulic brakes”.
What would the other 2 have been using then, other brand hydraulics? Surely only the Ford Pop would be using mechanicals by 1957, or some Eastern bloc makes, maybe. Ideas?
The Lockheed one from 1957 caught my eye.
Not sure if I have posted this picture before, but it seems appropriate here.
Its a jigsaw that my brother or sister had back in the 60s, Piccadilly Circus from around the same time period, I still have it with no pieces missing.
How wonderful, Sir Roger, and thankyou! Very enjoyable.
The A40 pic is a classic – and Austin should have employed whomever did that drawing of it in the first place, as the ill-proportioned little wheezer sure didn’t look nearly as slick in real life. Although, that said, the SS cover does show up the limitations of this approach, because adding about a yard to the bonnet makes it look rather silly.
There’s not a shadow of a doubt that Autocar’s nationalistic objectivity has moved on apace since days of yore. A read of even 1960’s testing is quite entertaining for the lack of it. “The Humber stops from 40mph with some degree of rotation, for which the company has provided a conveniently large back window, in only 700 feet. Whilst it is true that the BMW tested in this issue stops whilst needing only the vision available through its windscreen in 120ft, we feel that the Continental approach to driver responsibility may lead to an indifference to danger that the English car certainly does not. One drives the Humber alertly.” Or something a bit like that.
However Justy should your 1 1/2 ton Humber not stop in time it will demolish whatever it makes contact with while the BMWs will disolve into the box of parts it began as which is why Supersnipes were and remain demo derby weapon of choice.