Motor caravans celebrating their centenary

There was one made in 1902, for £3,000 by Panhard et Levassor of Paris for Dr EE Lehwess. Powered by a 25hp petrol engine, it was painted canary yellow. It was called Passe-Partout, and Dr Lehwess hoped to travel around the world in it.

With an Argyll car as pathfinder, he set off from the Agricultural Hall Motor Exhibition, but only got as far as Gorki before the cylinders cracked and it was abandoned in a snowdrift.

It was 1903 before motor caravans got moving, as it were, when Marshall of Manchester, who made Belsize cars, produced the first British motor caravan. Based on a 20hp engine, it had five bunks, but was derided for its sloth. The Motor magazine thought it suitable only for "misguided folk who imagine motoring has something to do with carrying your home about with you".

Marshall made a more ambitious one in 1908 on a 40hp forward control truck for JW Mallalieu of Liverpool. It was 6.7m long and 3.2m tall.

The following year, Austin showed a caravan at Olympia, on a 40hp chassis, for £2,000. It was designed for two, touring with their chef and chauffeur, whose sleeping accommodation comprised bunks on the roof under a canvas canopy.

Motor caravans prospered in America on Model T Fords. The Automobile Telescope with expanding bodywork, the work of Gustav de Bretteville, had a roof-level water tank that could be connected to the car’s cooling system, providing campers with a hot shower.

A big demand came from American travelling evangelists, from whose services the eccentric de Bretteville might have benefited. His Automobile Telescope seems to have been used as a ménage à trois by the inventor and two lady friends.

In 1923, a former naval architect, Melville Hart, built a double-decker motor caravan on a Renault military chassis. The upper storey was wound up on a ratchet. He also made a motor caravan and trailer for the Maharajah of Givalior, and one designed for hunting.

But the prototype of today’s motor caravan was probably the creation of monocled Noel Pemberton-Billing, motoring and aviation adventurer.

Stoker, tram driver, chauffeur, garage owner and a horse trader in South Africa, he learned to fly in a morning at Brooklands and designed and built his own flying boats. His Pemberton-Billing Aircraft Company used the telegraphic address "Supermarine", which was adopted by the company as its new name when he left to become an MP.

Joining the Royal Naval Air Service, encouraged by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, he planned the first-ever bombing raid on the Zeppelin sheds at Friedrichshafen by four Avro 504s.

Pemberton-Billing went into parliament to protest at the conduct of the war. Supermarine prospered to make the Spitfire in the 1930s, and he went to Australia with his latest invention, long-playing gramophone records.

In Britain he published aeroplane magazines and a weekly called The Imperialist, and set up Pemberton-Billing Economic Homes for returning servicemen.

In 1927, according to Jeremy Bacon of the learned Society of Automotive Historians, Pemberton-Billing established the next milestone in the history of the motor caravan.

He called it the Road Yacht. Based on a 17hp American Erskine, stretched to a 3.66m wheelbase, its ovoid body had a galley, shower and lavatory, and was very properly divided into a gentleman’s cabin and a lady’s cabin, complete with dressing tables.

The gentleman’s had a wardrobe, the lady’s a three-panel mirror, and both had carpets, curtains, bedding and feather pillows. In the front was a chair for the driver, bench seats over the front wings and a table on top of the engine, which was inside the cabin. The Land Yacht was 5.49m long and 1.98m wide.

Pemberton-Billing described it as a portable hotel and put it on the market for 375 guineas (£393.75), complete with wine bins alongside the engine (not good for your Chardonnay perhaps), a bookcase with 50 books, an electric glow fire and dinner service for six.

Even with a radio and gramophone, however, the Road Yacht did not catch on. With an ice machine, oil gas cooker under a hinged white sink, hot and cold water, and electric lighting, it was cumbersome, with a top speed of 45mph.

Pemberton-Billing did take it to America in 1930 - where he was trying to sell another invention, a forerunner of the jukebox - but it was perhaps just as well he never got his Land Yacht to the West Coast. At 45mph he would have spent a lot of time looking in the mirror.

Posted by: Tenaki at 11:22 | link | comments

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