Interesting period photo received from Hillary Roach nee Porter (UK) who,
with a cousin, is working on their family tree and has found photos of
some of her Grandfather's cars including some glass slides. This is one of
his oldest cars and is posed beside the big stones of the Neolithic
Standing Stones at Stonehenge in Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, UK.
-- The car shown is an early British Daimler having the registration of
D972 which had been issued at Kent County Council in 1904. Our veterans
expert Ariejan Boss however believes the car is earlier and was built,
pre-registration, being probably a cca 1902 Daimler 12HP Rear Entrance
Tonneau.
Registrations in the United Kingdom started in January 1904, with
some Councils starting in December 1903. Cars already in use prior to
1904, but not registered, were normally registered during 1904, or they
would not have been allowed on the road. Hilary was also interested in
finding out the background to the Daimler name and history.
The background to 'Daimler' is quite complicated, as indeed is the
connection between the German Daimler and the British Daimler companies.
The history of 'Daimler' starts in Germany with Gottlieb Willhelm Daimler,
a trained gunsmith, who subsequently moved locations and professions to
work as the Factory Manager at Gasmotoren-Fabrik Deutz, previously known
as N A Otto & Cie in Cologne, and owned by Nicholaos Otto.
Nicholaos Otto had earned a place in automotive history by developing the
"Otto Cycle" which is the principle on which most of the world's
vehicle internal combustions engines operate. Otto's engine had been
copied from Frenchman Etienne Lenoir's Gas engine, but designed to run on
liquid fuel.
These atmospheric engines were designed entirely as
stationary engines and N A Otto & Cie in Cologne was the first company
anywhere to concentrate on manufacturing internal combustion engines. The
venture was very successful resulting in sales of many hundreds of
engines.
The company was renamed Gasmotoren-Fabrik Deutz, and employed Gottlieb
Daimler as factory Manager. Daimler brough with him a couple of other
engineers who further developed the 'four stroke engine with in-cylinder
compression'. In the 17 years since their introduction, over 50,000 Otto
fixed stationary engines had been produced.
Despite this success, Otto and Daimler had major fundamental disagreements
on how to develop the engines further. Daimler wanted to develop smaller
engines, with adjustable throttling, suitable for mobile and
transportation applications whereas Otto was against it. Great animosity
arose to a point where Daimler was given the option or resigning or going
to Deutz in Russia.
Daimler chose the former and together with his pal William Maybach moved
to the town of Bad Cannstatt where Gottlieb Daimler circumnavigated one of
Otto's patents and continued development of the smaller engine using
kerosene, commonly available as lamp fuel. Their 'factory' was a
glass-fronted summerhouse of a small cottage. In 1885 they placed their
engine into the world's first motorised vehicle, a two-wheeler bicycle
type 'Petroleum Reitwagen'.
Numerous carburettor and ignition developments followed and eventually,
together with Wilhelm Maybach, Daimler formed the 'Daimler Motoren
Gesellschaft " (DMG) in 1870, a company that was successfully selling
engines and complete automobiles from 1892. The DMG company grew and moved
to the nearby town of Stuttgart, where inevitable bigger company politics
started to develop. This led to financial problems where the financial
backers of the company formed a management committee to take over.
Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach left the company in 1893.
These financial problems introduced to the 'Daimler story' an Anglo-German
automobile engineering entrepreneur Frederick Simms, a long-time boating
friend of Gottlieb Daimler. Simms was appointed by the new DMG Management
in Stuttgart to assist in running the company by becoming a director of
DMG.
Being a wily operator, he managed to engineer the return of Gottlieb
Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach back into the DMG fold, and simultaneously to
look out for his own interests. One of Simms' first actions was to look
towards Britain and to purchase from DMG the rights to Daimler name and
patents, and to form a totally separate manufacturing company to be
located in Britain. This would look after Britain and British Empire and
would be called 'The Daimler Motor Syndicate'.
Simms had noted that a good part of DMG business in Germany was supplying
Daimler engines to power boats and launches. The Simms 'Daimler Motor
Syndicate's' followed suit by supplying Daimler engines to power boats and
launches at boat yards at Putney Bridge on the Thames in London. Thus the
first Daimler products sold in Britain and British colonies were Daimler
powered boats rather than cars. However, the automobile craze had started,
and Simms had noted that Daimler powered Peugeots and Panhard were
achieving notable successes in races in France, so he decided to make
cars.
This is where another very unlikely character enters the 'Daimler Story'.
At this time in 1895 Englishman Harry Lawson was attempting wholesale
takeover monopoly of all UK automobile manufacturing via the British Motor
Syndicate, by acquiring as many patents as possible related to motor
manufacture. This was being achieved by public flotation of the company,
so financing from the public.
The purpose was not to advance or
manufacture motorcars, but simply to make profits from the royalties from
other people having to use hia patents to make their cars. Not many
companies in Britain were making cars and he had the patents relating to
making most of them. The
BMS company was floated in 1896 and lasted only five years, ended by a
1901 court decision on monopolies, and by the natural rapid technological
development of automobile engineering at the turn of the century making
Lawson's early patents worthless.
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Lawson had bought from Simms the now renamed British 'Daimler Motor
Company' in 1895, with Simms as consulting engineer. Simms primary purpose
was to find premises with a view to manufacture. Promising premises were
found in Cheltenham, but Lawson went with a disused mill in Coventry.
Further delays, lasting over two years, in machinery and drawings meant
that Lawson had to use the Daimler Company to sell other cars for which he
had patents. The first British Daimler left the works in January 1897
fitted with a Panhard engine. First Daimler engined Daimler left the
factory in March 1897, by which time Daimler was having yet more financial
difficulties. Creditors were calling on other Lawson companies for funds.
Lawson eventually resigned from Daimler in October 1897, - and Simms had
also resigned as the consulting engineer. Coincidentally Simms and
Gottlieb Daimler took part in Lawson's inaugural 'Red Flag' London to
Brighton Run in November 1896, and Simms also in the meantime founded the
Automobile Club of Great Britain (later the RAC) in 1897. Gottlieb Daimler
remains sporadically in the UK Daimler picture as consultant or Director,
but never as a principal shareholder.
So Daimler Motor Co was one of the first and UK's oldest car makers. In
1898 Scott Montague of Beaulieu had introduced the then Prince of Wales to
his own Daimler and the Prince had subsequently purchased one for himself.
Later, as King, he purchased more, so Daimler were awarded the Royal
Warrant in 1902 to supply cars to the Monarchy. Daimler's London Depot was
specifically tasked with looking after the Royal vehicles. The Royal
Warrant resulted in number of other European Royal families purchasing
Daimlers. The Warrant was subsequently lost later to Rolls Royce in
the 1950s.
1902 was also the year that the Daimler in the above photograph was manufactured.
Many early cars were 'work in progress' and design and appearance changes
were constantly being made. Daimler Motor Co had established a manufacturing facility in Coventry and
had a myriad of models available, some which were quite difficult to tell
apart. The famous 'fluted' radiator was introduced in 1904, the flutes
representing the previous cooling coils of the radiator. 1904 was also the
time that the Daimler company had to be liquidated due to further
financial problems, and a new company formed from out of the ashes.
The
new company bought the rights to the 'Silent Knight' sleeve valve engine
and asked Fredrick Lanchester to secretly develop a vehicle using it. The
result in 1908 proved a sensation and the vehicles were put through strict
rigorous public tests by the RAC. Passing with flying colours, the Knight
engine remained in use by Daimler until 1933.
This however did not stop Daimler's financial problems and it was
eventually decided by the Daimler board in 1910 to 'merge' Daimler with
the Birmingham Small Arms company. BSA, of the guns and motorcycle fame,
was also famous for Lady Docker, wife of the Chaiman, who rode around in a
fleet extravagantly expensive Docker Daimler limousines. The Dockers had
eventually to settke in Jersey and BSA in turn sold Daimler to Jaguar in
1960. Jaguar merged with British Leyland 1966 when production of real
Daimlers ceased. Although Jaguar died make 'badge engineered' Daimlers on
Jaguar chassis. Ford bought Jaguar in 1990 and sold it to Tata in 2008.
Daimler is currently marked as 'not trading'.
In the meantime, DMG Stuttgart in Germany in 1890s was doing well and
Gottlieb Daimler and William Maybach were building specific automobile
type vehicles, not relying on old coach technology. Business was booming.
They had also built several race cars to the specific designs of an
Austrian businessman/diplomat Emil Jellinek who was the DMG representative
on the Cote d'Azur, in France. Jellinek named the cars after his daughter
Mercedes. First cars ordered by him so named left the works in 1901.
Following many successes with these cars, DMG adopted the trademark of
"Mercedes" in 1902 for all their cars. DMG and Mercedes grew
rapidly and expanded all over the world but, like most of Germany, was
heavily held back by the outcome of 1914-18 World War.
While not directly relevant to the 'Daimler Story' in the UK, Daimler
DMG's main competitor from the very beginning in Germany and worldwide,
was the Karl Benz organisation. Karl Benz has been credited as the
co-inventor of the modern motor car with Gottlieb Daimler. It is believed
that while geographically not too far apart, the two never met. Benz had
been developing his own cars and vehicles and was growing the Benz &
Cie companies at some rate into major competition to Daimler DMG, being of
a similar value and having similar reputation for high quality.
By the 1920s the German Benz & Cie organisation and the Daimler DMG
organisation were of similar size and were in similar trouble, making just
over a thousand cars annually. Their earlier discussions on joint
co-operation in 'mutual interest' were accelerated, and in 1926 Benz &
Cie. and DMG finally merged as one company, the "Daimler-Benz"
organisation, calling all of their automobiles Mercedes-Benz.
Post Script: Just to slightly confuse the Daimler Story, in 1904 both
Daimler organisations DMG in Germany and The Daimler Motor Co in the UK,
were making commercial vehicles. In 1902 a company was formed in London,
called the Milnes Daimler Company, which made double decker busses. Over
400 of these quite advanced busses had been sold in London by 1907. It
should be noted that this was not part of the British Daimler Motor Co but
a result of Daimer DMG of Germany take-over of a British tram and track
manufacturer G.F. Milnes & Co. Ltd. These 28HP 31 seat double deck
busses had a Cannstatt engine and chassis and British Milnes bodywork and
were exported throughout the world. The partnership did not survive the
First World War.
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