This photograph truly merits description as a ‘Snapshot’. The interloper distantly getting in on the act these days would be photo-shopped out, no doubt. One aspect of interest here is that this photograph, taken in 1966, dates from the beginnings of popular colour print photography. The car is a 1909 10hp Alldays & Onions which then was 57 years old, and a further 51 years now have elapsed since this occasion. So this moment was one roughly half way though the car’s existence.
The other observation, and a slightly uncomfortable one, is that the older man standing proudly by the front mudguard is one Cyril Comock, then a retired baker, and he had owned the Alldays since 1920 using it to deliver bread twice weekly, until the pinion in the rear axle broke in 1938. For quite a number of years now it has no longer been possible for the present day owner of any Edwardian car to meet up with a person who had such early, almost first-hand, ownership.
The setting is Badminton, Gloucestershire, one imagines Mr Comock’s home village, and the other man with his young son is the then-owner of the Alldays, Tony Sherriff of Feock near Truro in Cornwall. It seems that up to that time, the Somerset-registered car had been in the West Country throughout: in a recent VCC list, it appears in Irish ownership.
Very typical of a light-to-medium sized touring car of its day, and conventional in specification, the 10hp Alldays had a twin cylinder engine of 95 x 115mm bore and stroke (1631cc), and a little unexpectedly, a four-speed gearbox, this with gate change. Tony Sherriff claimed 25 mpg and a modest 25 mph ‘on the flat’.
I recently put into book form what remained of the Alldays & Onions car production records, and although I have sent copies out to Australia and New Zealand, I do not know anyone interested in the UK.
I published a book in 2002 “Alldays & Onions A Brief History”.
I used to own an Alldays & Onions delivery box-tricycle in the 1960s. It was the first time that I had come across the somewhat strange combination of names. I have often mused that a vehicle like this will always outlive its custodians, but what will be the useability of cars like this on the open road in another 50 years’ time?
Great to see my car that I’ve owned for the past twenty years..