Hubert Dees's fantastic Ford empire

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One hundred years is a long time for any business to survive, and of all the hundreds of car showrooms which were trading in 1923, we can think of only a tiny handful of names which still exist today. In Britain, we can think of Caffyns and Henlys, which had both become huge national companies by the 1930s, and H. R. Owen and Jack Barclay which are, of course, revered for their connotations of prestige.

If we want to find any more than that, we have to start conducting our search at a more localised level, and that leads us to Hubert Dees Ltd. (now Dees of Croydon) which was founded in 1921. Hubert Dees (1888-1951) was the son of a solicitor, but instead of following in his father's footsteps, he set sail for Australia and had a go at farming, building, gold-prospecting and well-sinking before he returned to England following a stint with the Australian Light Horse in Africa during the war.

He settled in his home town of Croydon, on the main London-Brighton route, and bought a sizeable Victorian house at 17 Brighton Road which, in 1921, he turned into a general sales and repair garage. In 1923, he became a Ford main dealer and was employing 15 people, including two store workers and a salesman who travelled around on a sidecar combination.

"The foremost Ford Dealers in South London"

As the business expanded, Dees demolished his house and replaced it with a purpose built garage, while also finding time to dabble in politics as a local councillor and indulge his enthusiasm for various sports. By the mid-1930s, Hubert Dees Ltd. was big business indeed, with the main showroom at 15-19 Brighton Road and a body shop on nearby Carlton Road and an additional used-car showroom on Selsdon Road.

The body shop was primarily used for construcing commercial vehicles bodies, with Dees constructing its own van and dropside truck chassis for the 8hp Model Y and 10hp Model C chassis, a practice which was probably very lucrative until the Ford factory started investing in its own light commercial range from 1938. Dees also constructed bespoke bodies on much larger commercial chassis.

Driver training and motorsports: what could have been

Sadly, what might have been Dees's greatest achievement was killed off by the outbreak of war. He raised the huge sum of £25,000 to construct the Croydon Autodrome on 14 acres of waste ground adjoining his body shop. The Autodrome was a specially designed layout of sharp corners and steep hills - up to one-in-four - intended to help learner drivers perfect vehicle control, with capacity for 14 or 15 pupils at any time. Dees passed control of it to Autodromes School of Motoring (Ltd.) which planned similar layouts up and down the country. The Vintage Sports-Car Club staged a Speed Trial there in 1937 and, as stormy clouds gathered over Europe, it saw some use by the Mechanised Transport Training Corps., a women's voluntary civilian organisation, but it appears not to have received any use after the war and, after decades of abandonment, it was ripped up and replaced by a business park.

We see here a photograph of one of Dees's workshops taken either immediately before or immediately after the war, with the cars all being late pre-war models, a mix of early Anglias and Prefects with a few 1937-38 Ford 10s thrown in for good measure, all no doubt in sober blacks with the odd grey, dark green and burgundy. Let's not overlook that splendid American-style V8 recovery lorry, either. Ford may only have made cheap and cheerful cars, but they had a real charm back then.

Words: Zack Stiling; photograph: Stiling Collection
 

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