V-E-V Odds & Ends, March 1979

The Historic Commercial Vehicle Club has announced the date of this year’s London-Brighton Commercial Vehicle Run as May 6th. Its current magazine contains much ‘bus material and an article on restoring a Bradford Jowett. An item in the Railton OC Bulletin caught our eye, namely a reminder that when the late R. G. J. Nash sought to build a motor museum in Surrey he was refused planning permission on the grounds that no-one would want to visit it. The Bulletin’s correspondent calls this “pompous bureaucratic impertinence” and the Council concerned certainly seems to have been singularly shortsighted. This caused Dick Nash to break up his collection, his aeroplanes going to the Royal Aeronautical Society and many are now in the RAF Museum at Hendon. Of his cars, an 1898 Benz Victoria which was apparently driven by its original MP owner from Poole to Westminster, is thought to be in the Lips Collection in Holland. The story is that when it was restored again, some years ago, the original BF registration letters were refused, as likely to offend the public, and the Benz had to be re-registered FX 46 – more bureaucratic nonsense, especially as Radnorshire was permitted to use the letters FO. John Miles in Autocar is the latest person to perpetuate that stupid myth about Ernest Henry having been a cheap thief who stole the drawings of the first twin-cam racing engine from Marc Birkigt of Hispano Suiza, in spite of this having been convincingly disproved by Griffith Borgeson in Automobile Quarterly, in a long article in Motor Sport, and never having been subscribed to by Kent Karslake, the authority on Hispano Suiza. – W. B.