Bodied by Lacy: Discovering Dewsbury's Lost Coachbuilder

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Every curious mind has at some point been saddened to think of the wealth of material which, never being recorded, shall forever remain lost in the bottomless void of history. There is nothing to be done about it except to take solace in the knowledge that, somewhere, there are still odd scraps of information waiting to be discovered.

We are profoundly grateful to Lillian Lacy, daughter of George, who stashed away a collection of photographs of her father’s Edwardian coachbuilding business, and to the late Tim Harding, who added them to his vast archive of motoring photographs so that they might one day be more widely seen and appreciated.

George Lacy is one of those coachbuilders – there were doubtless many – whose name has never graced the pages of any encyclopaedia or journal, as far as we are aware, until now. Hailing from North Yorkshire, he learnt carriage-building at the Anchor Works in Dewsbury from 1894, and is said to have bodied the first car registered in his area. The photographs show his bodies to have been of a very high quality and he appears to have enjoyed steady trade until the Great War after which, for reasons unknown, Lacy abandoned coachbuilding and concentrated instead on car sales.

The story of Lacy, along with 20 never-before-seen photographs of his work on chassis including Talbot, Austin, de Dion-Bouton and Brasier, can be read in the November issue of The Automobile, available now.

Words by Zack Stiling
 

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