One PreWarCar, two ladies and three bags with potatoes

Albert A. Bodman’s Garage in Trowbridge was perhaps the nearest and claimed themselves to be the largest Humberette agents in the area in 1913.

The style of “BP Motor Spirit” can on this Humberette’s running board started appearing in adverts c.1921 and their advertising illustrations, in the Tatler and Sphere Magazines then, featured many women drivers, including one wearing that style of hat having her very Humberette-like car refuelled and in another a lady chauffeur is pointing a garage mechanic carrying a can of BP towards her right rear running board, saying: I carry the Khaki Can, it’s the ‘Best Possible’. Targeted advertising worked even then!

Thank-you readers for your enlightening comments. The Salisbury registration is highly probable, as my family lived at Zeals north-west of Salisbury at the time.

The registration looks to be Salisbury, Wiltshire from 1912.

The air-cooled, 40 m.p.g., 1913 Humberette, “Cycle Car of the Year”, was advertised as providing “the cheapest form of comfortable motoring, and so simply controlled that the veriest novice can drive it after a few minutes instruction. With hood, screen, horn, headlights and tail lamp, all complete: £125”. It could be had on hire-purchase, at £31 down and £8 for twelve months.

Adverts were aimed at “Commercial Gentlemen” but in those non-PC days, “veriest novice” probably meant lady drivers. By the mid 1920s, these ladies could have picked up a runner for under £5.

And it’s four bags of potatoes, if that’s what they were; there’s another stowed on the hood.

The registration HO would suggest it was originally in the Bournemouth area of Hampshire UK.

Yes a Humberette! I had one 20 years ago.

The absence of a radiator cap would suggest air cooled.

circa 1914 humberette v-twin cycle car

1914 Humberette

Mike

Look like an Air-cooled Humberette c.1913

That's a Humberette.

Humberette c.1914

It is a 1913 or 1914 water cooled, as apposed to an earlier air cooled , Humberette.