Montauban et Marchandier: a lost veteran marque?

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One of occasional joys of living in a state of disorder is the discovery of things you never knew existed. While rifling through some papers the other day, I discovered that I had somehow acquired a catalogue for a motor car sale on May 25th, 2005, by a minor Kentish auction house named Lambert & Foster, which still exists as a property auctioneer and has not been involved with cars for many years. You can imagine the sort of machines they specialised in—Austin 10s, Morris Eights and the like—but there in the middle of the catalogue was something quite remarkable: a c.1900 Montauban et Marchandier 5hp double phaeton, registration BS 8394, with a hand-written note that it had sold for £18,000. Does that ring any bells?

The catalogue entry makes for interesting reading, but tells us little about Montauban et Marchandier itself: "A huge history file accompanies this surely unique veteran, which formerly was in the ownership of the Schlumpf Collection. Previously ascribed to Auge, it is now believed that the car was a Montauban et Marchandier product, which were fitted with engines by Daniel Auge.

"Auge built cars in their own right, but also supplied engines to other manufacturers including Amiot-Peneau and Farman-Micot, both French car builders at the turn of the last century. The Science Museum have given a certificate stating that in their view the age of the car is no later than 1901, and the D.V.L.A. have registered it on that basis.

"The company of Montauban & Marchandier, although active for some years in producing motoring components, are listed in Guide de l'automobile française as having built cars at their Saint-Quentin works in northern France from 1897 to 1900, so it is possible that this is a 1900 model.

"It is fitted with the Auge Cyclope 5hp engine, so-called because the earlier models used hot-tube ignition, with the platinum tubes being heated with one lamp."

It's enough to make anyone want to enquire further, but my first port of call is always Georgano's encyclopædia, and that yielded no fruit. Luckily, the internet has come to our aid. It turns out that the factory building is still in existence—quite a modest structure with a broad façade and some lovely decorative brickwork, very suggestive of vernacular industry—and is now listed for conservation by the Ministry of Culture. As an important remnant of the industrial heritage of Saint-Quentin, it is described in the General Inventory of the Cultural Heritage of Hauts-de-France as follows: "In 1883, Antoine Montauban and Ernest Marchandier founded the company Montauban et Marchandier for the operation of mechanical workshops, which were built with employers' housing on the edge of Avenue Faidherbe, as well as Boulevard Victor-Hugo. As manufacturers of internal combustion engines, they created the Vautour engine, a marque they registered in 1904, and operated under the name of Société Anonyme des Moteurs Vautour. In 1908, the company was dissolved. In 1910, Ernest Marchandier and Émile Colliard, liquidators of the company, created a new limited company, the Ateliers de Construction de Saint-Quentin.

"At the end of the First World War, the factory did not restart. The workshops, which were hard-hit, were acquired by Fernand Moret's nearby mechanical engineering factory. The latter restored the employers' housing, and rebuilt the workshops on Boulevard Victor-Hugo around 1923. On the edge of Avenue Faidherbe, alongside the housing, the company's offices were built under the direction of the architectural firm Malgras-Delmas, enlarged in 1951 according to the plans of the architect Jules Arduin. Around 1970, the Moret company left this site to set up shop on Chemin des Ponts-et-Chaussées.

"On the eve of the First World War, the workshops were equipped with two gas engines. The number of workers in the workshops was 11 in 1885, 25 in 1891, 35 in 1901, 48 in 1907, then only 22 in 1914."

That is as much as we might hope to find out about this wonderful provincial marque, but perhaps there are readers who know a little more. As for the car itself, we wonder what's become of it. It appears to still be in Britain and it was sold in 2005 with a full 12-month M.O.T., but we have no knowledge of it ever being on the road or attending a rally. Has it done the Brighton Run, we wonder? And has anyone ever seen anything like the strange double-tillered steering?

Words: Zack Stiling
Photographs: Lambert & Foster / Ministère de la Culture

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