True motoring for the masses: out on a jolly with two Fords and a Dodge

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We all know that Henry Ford intended that his Model T should be a car for everyone, and that message seems to have been received loud and clear by the various parties in this photograph, because it looks the world and his wife are going for a drive. Well, why shouldn't they? The sun is shining and they've got the countryside all to themselves.

The picture illustrates just what a godsend the Model T Ford was to ordinary working families as it introduced them to freedom of movement like they'd never known it before. From the way people are dressed, we don't think anybody in the picture was particularly rich. Wealth is relative, of course, and certainly the occupants of these cars would have held 'respectable' professions and been comfortably middle-class, but there's certainly a huge contrast between them and the motorists of 10 years previously, all of whom would have been uncommonly wealthy.

There is, of course, another car in the picture, and it's a Dodge Brothers tourer. We can tell from the fully-enclosed bodywork of the Model Ts that they were built between 1912 and 1916, and we'd guess that the Dodge is of a similar vintage. Strangely, the Model T in the centre appears to have its suspension raised much higher than its sister car, and it doesn't look like it has anything to do with the distribution of the passengers. We can see the advantage of having softer suspension, though, because the road surface looks pretty unforgiving.

For a long time, we thought this was an American photograph because the cars are all American and the people and landscape could conceivably be, too. It seemed a likely conclusion to draw, but then we noticed that the T on the left has a very British-looking number plate, with an 'O' prefix denoting a Birmingham registration. The Dodge could be on an 'O' plate, too. This makes for rather a surprising picture because, while English production of Model Ts had started at Trafford Park in 1912, there was no English Dodge production until much later, so it would have to have been imported.

Are we right about that, do you think, or is somebody about to tell us that we've got it all wrong and the faint outline of peaks in the background are, in fact, the Longfellow Mountains of Quebec?

Words: Zack Stiling; photograph: Stiling Collection
 

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