Monday mystery: an elegant limousine for a London engineer

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We are particularly delighted with these two further acquisitions to our archive. At first we thought that, like so many ancient photographs, they would have to remain more or less bereft of context. However, the owner of these photographs was thoughtful enough to scribble his name across the back, and from that we've managed to uncover a little bit of their backstory.

The first photograph, we might mention, was taken in June, 1910, and the second in December, 1911. It looks like the car was pretty well looked-after, and in the space of 18 months it had acquired a cover for the spare wheel, an A.A. badge and a little flag to adorn the radiator. The photographer's inscription appears on the frame of the second photograph; he was Frank Wells of 190, Ebury Street, London, S.W. Anyone who has regularly trodden the path between Victoria station and the Chelsea Embankment will associate the Ebury name with a characteristically affluent part of Belgravia. It runs almost from the Royal Hospital to Buckingham Palace and past residents, at different times, have included Mozart, Tennyson, Noël Coward and Ian Fleming—obviously the Edwardian age was a good time to be a photographer...

We can glean a little from all that, but it's the signature on the back which really provides the most useful information. The owner of this vehicle was a gentleman by the name of J. F. Haskins. If we look him up, we find that in 1882, he was in work as a consulting mechanical engineer and was proposed for membership of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. His address at the time was 114a, Queen Victoria Street, a busy thoroughfare running across the City of London from Blackfriars Bridge to the Bank of England. Of course, J. F. Haskins is not an unusual name and our man could be somebody else altogether, but we're inclined to believe they're the same. It would make sense for a prospering young engineer in London in 1882 to progress through his job, amass a comfortable fortune and take an interest in the emergence of the motor car. Supposing him to have been about 60 years old in 1910, it's quite plausible that he would have settled in a comfortable townhouse in Belgravia and been able to afford a sumptious limousine such as we see here.

Now then, the limousine—that's the real crux of this article. Unfortunately, Mr. Haskins didn't see fit to make a note of what it was. We'd like to have a guess, and say that it looks to us like a Wolseley-Siddeley, but we might be wide of the mark. It's over to you...

Words: Zack Stiling
Photograph: Stiling Collection

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