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?