New books for the New Year: S. F. Edge and Alvis

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If there's nothing on your car that needs fixing at the moment, and you need to find some way of indulging the automobile hobby while you wait for the days to get longer and the weather to improve, why not develop your motoring library? Some excellent specialist literature exploring previously uncovered topics has appeared in recent months. Here, we take a look at some of the best new releases.

S. F. Edge: Maker of Motoring History
Author: Simon Fisher
Publisher: Evro Publishing. www.evropublishing.com
Price: £45.00. Hardback. 192 pages with 155 pictures
ISBN: 978-1910505793

All of our readers will be familiar with S. F. Edge to a greater or lesser degree. He is best-known for his rôle in establishing the Napier marque and his victory in the 1902 Gordon Bennett Cup, and some will also be aware of his early years as a racing cyclist and his involvement with AC in the 1920s. Edge was a prolific writer, often for reasons of publicity, and published My Motoring Reminiscences in 1934, but its scope was as narrow as its title suggests. Not until now had a comprehensive biography of the man been written.

Napier owner Simon Fisher has laboured to create a beautifully written and well-researched work which removes Edge from the dusty pages of motoring academia and brings him to life in a comprehensive study in which we see him not only in his famous occupations as sportsman and businessman, but also as an enthusiast, 'gentleman farmer' and husband and father.

Any account of a personality such as Edge's, given the proper treatment, could hardly fail to be absorbing, and so it is that Fisher's work is not just extremely informative, but a genuine page-turner, from Edge's mischievous childhood (how we yearn for the days when detonating gunpowder outside your elderly neighbour's house was all just a harmless part of growing up) to his twilight years outside of the public eye, sadly suffering from failing health.

The text is greatly enhanced by a large number of evocative images, all reproduced to a very high standard. The subsequent design and production of the book is first-rate. From beginning to end, it has been beautifully put together and is a pleasure to handle. This is a delightfully warm, human portrayal of one of motoring's most important pioneers. It will inform and entertain equally, and deserves a place on every enthusiast's bookshelf.

Alvis Society: A Century of Drivers
Author: David Culshaw
Publisher: Veloce Publishing Ltd. 01305 260068 or www.veloce.co.uk
Price: £50.00, USD $80.00, CAD $105.00. Hardback. 224 pages with 215 pictures
ISBN: 978-1787114739

David Culshaw has already contributed much to the canon of Alvis literature, and he has just completed one more valuable work in the form of a chassis-by-chassis record of every Alvis ever made. One might perhaps instinctively compare it with Clare Hay's work on Bentleys and Richard Calver's on Jensens. It is not so ambitious or comprehensive as either of them, but it is a good step forward on the road towards such an endeavour.

Culshaw has listed every Alvis ever made by chassis number, citing original registration numbers where possible. He details notable owners and achievements, hence we learn which chassis were used for road tests, motor shows and motorsport. Naturally, many owners and drivers in the pre-war years were prominent motoring personalities: Malcolm Campbell, Betty Haig, Whitney Straight and Tim Birkin are some of the illustrious names. There are Indian sultans and rajahs, politicians famous and infamous, and the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band's Vernon Dudley Bowhay-Nowell, to name but a few.

All sorts of diverting trivia is to be picked up along the way. A pair of Silver Eagles are thought to have served as Black Marias with London's Metropolitan Police, and another Silver Eagle beat the Blue Train in a race more famously associated with Woolf Barnato's Bentley.

Some entries raise more questions than they answer. We'd like to learn more about the Silver Crest prepared for the 1938 RAC Rally with 'some 30 additional features including windscreen wipers on the inside', driven by the interestingly-named inventor M. Cave-Brown-Cave. And whatever compelled John Grocott to fit such a bizarre body to his Speed 20?

The text is peppered with pictures, some period and some contemporary, which are small but of good quality. The post-war years are covered, too. The subject matter is niche, but the serious Alvis enthusiast will enjoy dipping into it.

Words: Zack Stiling
 

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