THERE was an 1897 Daimler, next to a 1916 Jowett. Someone had brought along his pride and joy, a 1904 De Dion Bouton. Also lining up were a 1904 Talbot, a 1911 Rover, and a 1913 Minerva.
This was the first Scottish Veteran Car Rally, a three-day-event in 1959, organised by the Veteran Car Club of Great Britain and the Royal Scottish Automobile Club.
Naturally, it being summer, incessant rain marked the final leg, a 60-mile journey that began in Glasgow’s Blythswood Square (right) and ended in Turnberry, Ayrshire. (The photograph shows the De Dion Bouton.) One of the few non-starters, regrettably, was the only steam car present, the French-manufactured 1904 Gardner-Serpollet, which had been brought all the way from Norfolk but which had developed a fault 10 miles from Glasgow at the end of the previous leg.
On this final day, wrote our Motoring Correspondent, the downpour proved too much for the “primitive” 1898 Beeston tricycle, which belonged to a man from Inverness; it managed a mile before its engine began to suck in more rain than petrol.
The great old cars kept on going on the road to Turnberry, even if the deluge did test brakes and road-holding to the utmost. Many cars did not have windscreen wipers. Some had gone one step further and did not even have the benefit of windscreens.
Read more: Herald Diary
At Turnberry Aerodrome, the cars were put through three tests, including a novelty round in which they tried to burst four balloons against the clock. In this test, our writer sat in the passenger seat of a 1910 Standard which, he said, had once been the property of Sylvia Pankhurst, the pioneering suffragette (she died in 1960, the year after the rally). The car had taken part in the famous Indian Durbar in 1912.
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