Crossley Back from the Brink

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The years following the Great War were not an easy time to be selling large, expensive touring cars, but a few manufacturers prospered. One was Crossley, whose first new postwar model was the handsome 19.6hp, demand for which was high enough to keep it going into the mid-1920s.

This 1924 tourer is an especially fine example, having survived in such a wonderful preserved state. With little history to go on, the story of how it fared through the first 35 years of its life is sadly unknown. All that has been recorded is that it was sold new to a Belfast doctor, requisitioned by the army for a period, and later sold out of the Sword Collection in 1962, ending up in a Belgian museum.

Of course,the question of how it survived is of secondary importance to the fact that it does survive. Having seemingly been off the road since the 1950s, its present owner expected its body to be fit mainly for firewood so he had a rakish new design planned but then thankfully had a change of heart. Now, the car is being enthusiastically driven, not just as a delightful Oily Rag period piece but also as a bona fide racing car following a rather slow star turn in the VSCC Long Car Race.

The closer you look at it, the better it gets, as Toby Bruce finds out in the June issue of The Automobile, available now.

Text by Zack Stiling, Photographs by Stefan Marjoram

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