The perils of the road: reflections on an early accident

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Photographs sometimes appear in the most unexpected places, and this one certainly came as a surprise when it was unearthed at a motorcycle autojumble in Europe by reader Luc Ryckaert. As with so many early motoring photographs, it raises a lot of questions.

It's probably pointless to ask what the car might be, as we're sure it must be beyond the identification of even our most expert readers, but we'll be pleased if anyone can prove us wrong. As for the location, we'd think it must be somewhere in Europe, possibly France or Belgium. A more pertinent question would be: how did this accident happen? What caused this terrible scene?

There are dozens of plausible answers to that question. The early days of automobile travel were fraught with hazards, especially on rough, unmade roads through rural regions. Accidents could be caused by potholes and other road defects, dust clouds, or wild animals and stray dogs in the road, to name some common dangers. It might have been that this particular one was the result of a mechanical failure, which could conceivably have stemmed from an earlier mishap. A collision with a stray dog, for instance, might not have been immediately catastrophic, but if the car's steering was damaged as a result then trouble might have occurred later on. Then again, it could well have been caused by a problem that certainly hasn't diminished as cars and roads have developed: that of driver error, whether through inattentiveness, over-exuberance or an innocent misjudgment.

What has been noted is the absence of any crowds attending to the car or its passengers, neither to help nor to gawp, although at least one of the occupants has received some attention. That doesn't tell us much, except that the accident probably did not occur during a race, and it must have happened a reasonable distance from the nearest village so as not to have attracted all the local gossips, for whom such a morbid scene might have provided a good week's worth of speculative chatter.

It would be our guess that a passing traveller, perhaps a farmer or agricultural labourer, chanced upon the accident and did the responsible thing in going as fast as possible to find the nearest police constable. Someone from the local constabulary probably took the photograph for official purposes and, 120 years later, it wound up at an autojumble.

Words: Zack Stiling; picture: Luc Ryckaert
 

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