“This is not a museum …

… it’s a conservation and storage facility.” The first words of our guide on a tour of the Hawking Building at the Science and Innovation Park at the former RAF Wroughton airfield. The Hawking Building is a vast purpose-built warehouse box that, along with a number of old aircraft hangars, holds the reserve collection of the Science Museum. Over 300,000 objects, large and small have been moved in from their old home in Earl’s Court, most of which are stored on pallets or open shelving in carefully controlled temperature and humidity settings.  The tour is focused on “the grid”, a large open space on the ground floor mainly occupied by a spectacular display of road vehicles from bicycles and milk floats to trucks and buses.  Collecting policy is not to collect an example of every known vehicle but to look for items that represent a technological step change or have a strong association with an individual of interest or an important historical event.

Conservation is aimed at the preservation of exhibits in the condition when acquired. Making them safe is a priority, removing hazardous materials - where vehicles are concerned this involves extracting batteries, draining oil and petrol, and degreasing components to protect against further deterioration. Restoration is never undertaken, partly because of the frequently inordinate expense, partly because, in many cases, restored examples already exist thanks to individual and group efforts and not least, the problem of finding agreement on the chronological point in the long life of the object to which it should be returned.

In the first image we see the balloon gondola used by Swiss physicist, Auguste Piccard on his altitude record-breaking ascent of 16,201 m (53,153 ft) using a hydrogen balloon becoming the first human to enter the upper atmosphere.  This gondola was presented to the Science Museum in 1935. In a triumph of adaptive re-use, Piccard went on to convert his gondola into a vehicle for deep sea exploration.

There’s a group of vintage cars from the first decade of the last century, an era of experimentation with three forms of motive power - steam, electricity and petrol - battling for supremacy. Steam power was the first to be eliminated despite surviving just into the 1950s for heavy haulage.  Electricity foundered quickly due the weight of the batteries although it clung on in the form of lightweight delivery vehicles where lower speeds were more acceptable. The race was easily won by petrol and diesel, greatly assisted by the predatory instincts of the American oil barons of the period. Lithium battery technology has brought the electric vehicle back into contention although it remains locked in mortal combat with the descendants of the oil baronetcy and their political enablers.

 

Motoring Celebrities

Glaswegian tea tycoon, Sir Thomas Lipton would have been in his fifties when the camera captured him here - he worked hard to cut a dashing figure in public, active in the sports of yachting and sailing. In his youth he spent several years in the US and the commercial spirit he absorbed enabled him to amass a great fortune in the grocery and tea trades.  Investment in publicity was the key to his success. The Lipton business has been featured here in 2007 and 2020.

The first 14 years of the 20th. century were golden times for both the motor car and the picture postcard. While the motor car was the province of the rich, the postcard was cheap enough to be affordable to almost everyone.  An embryonic consumer society expanded across the nation until the outbreak of war in 1914.  When peace returned in 1918 the postcard went into steady decline but motoring would go on to dominate the next hundred years as the favoured means of transport.  Celebrity culture was in its infancy, mostly populated by military heroes, cricketers, footballers and stars of the music hall and theatre.  Inevitably they came together on the postcard and celebrities self importantly posed at the wheel of an automobile made a popular subject.

The Dare sisters (Zena and Phyllis, born in Chelsea and daughters of a divorce clerk) were truly Made in SW3 Edwardian celebrities and though long forgotten today their maidenly faces peered coyly out of many a picture postcard in their day.  More than 1,500 examples of Zena alone are listed on eBay at the time of writing.  The two sisters were 12 and 9 respectively when they made their stage debuts in a Christmas pantomime in December 1899.  Under the guidance of the ultra-successful actor-manager, playwright, producer and impresario, Seymour Hicks, they would grace the London stage in a succession of dramas, comedies and musicals for decades.

Sybil Arundale was a child performer in the music hall and graduated to Shakespeare and Ibsen parts in the theatre. Cinema and TV followed - she died in 1965.  Gaynor Rowlands’s career as a dancer was curtailed at the age of 23 when she died in 1906 during an operation for appendicitis. 

Constance Collier made the transition from the London stage to Hollywood where she found work in silent movies and went on to become a leading voice coach in the late twenties with the advent of the talkies.  In 1948 she was cast in Hitchcock’s Rope as Mrs. Atwater and her star shines on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  Her companion, Lettice Fairfax was a stage actress specialising in musical comedy - her career seemed to stall in 1925 and she died in 1948.

 

Motoring Pioneers in Postcards

The early years of motoring coincided with the height of postcard frenzy – the decade leading up to the First World War. It made a popular subject for humorous novelty cards. The mechanical wonder of the age seized the public imagination and despite being only available to a privileged few, the motor car became an object of intense curiosity and fascination to many. For the pioneer motorists times were good – no requirement to be insured, no speed limits and no driving licences to obtain. Mechanical reliability could not be taken for granted and postcard publishers were quick to portray the potential for misfortune. The romance of the open road was born in these times and the motor car rapidly acquired a reputation as an enabler of another type of romance. There were few better ways for the male motorist to make a positive impression on the object of his affections than a road trip to Box Hill or the Thames at Maidenhead - the motor vehicle as an agent of seduction. The driving seat was all but monopolised by the male but there is one card where the females have taken control and relegated the uniformed chauffeur to the humiliation of the back seat. This is the world of adventure described in these postcards.