Wheels in motion

The Otago Witness declared that the motor car was superseding rail and drag when it ran this...
The Otago Witness declared that the motor car was superseding rail and drag when it ran this photograph in 1910. The Otago Bowling Club's team were in hired motor cars, ready to journey to Outram to play against the local club.
Cars competing in a Dunedin to Christchurch reliability run prepare to leave from outside Cooke...
Cars competing in a Dunedin to Christchurch reliability run prepare to leave from outside Cooke Howlison's garage in 1908. PHOTO: OTAGO WITNESS
Dragging a large stone behind the car saved the brakes on steep downhill slopes when this car...
Dragging a large stone behind the car saved the brakes on steep downhill slopes when this car became the first to cross the Carrick Range in Central Otago in 1914. PHOTO: OTAGO WITNESS
Electric trams, cars, bicycles and pedestrians share Princes St in the Exchange.
Electric trams, cars, bicycles and pedestrians share Princes St in the Exchange.

Motorcars came to dominate Dunedin streets during the early decades of last century, in a process that quietly sidelined other road users, writes Otago University Associate Professor Alex Trapeznik.

A century ago, those reading this story would have been respectable, upstanding citizens. Today, however, a good many will be petty criminals ... since the great majority of us are motorists. Is there anyone among us who can say they have not received a parking ticket or a speeding ticket, who has not been tempted when the lights turn orange to speed up a little rather than slow down? Motoring has made minor law-breakers of us all, but how did it get to be this way?

W.L. Kempthorne and the locomotive he imported in 1901. PHOTO: SUPPLIED
W.L. Kempthorne and the locomotive he imported in 1901. PHOTO: SUPPLIED

In only a couple of decades from about 1910 to about 1930 New Zealand quickly became accustomed to there being cars everywhere. It rapidly became one of the most motorised societies on Earth, which it remains today. By the mid-1930s the world average was one car to every 66 people; here, it was one to 11. We were not far behind Australia, Canada, or even the United States, which had one car to every 5.4 of its citizens. (France had 1:25, Britain 1:31.) Cars then were in many ways much more dangerous than their modern counterparts. They may not have been all that fast, but that speed was well in excess of their ability to stop or manoeuvre safely. Their drivers had little or no training, yet they held firmly to the idea that it was everyone else's responsibility to get out of their way, an attitude that has not entirely vanished.

Who were these people? Here in Dunedin, the sort of people who ran a car in the early days were still more varied than you might think. Owners and managing directors of large firms often had a car, usually driven and maintained for them by a professional chauffeur. Sir James Mills, for instance, managing director of the Union Steam Ship Company, owned one of the first cars in Dunedin, a Gardiner-Serpollet steamer. He replaced this with an Oldsmobile and then in 1906 with a large Daimler limousine (These were the days when the Royal Family had Daimlers, not those frightful jumped-up nouveaux-riche Rolls-Royces.) Mills had a succession of chauffeurs, at least four of them from 1905 to 1909. One of them was, appropriately enough, named Carr.

Businessmen who ran engineering firms were particularly prominent among early car owners. The technical challenge and their interest in modern technology made them a natural market for cars: in the early days, men often had a car for its own sake rather than depending on it for transport. After all, the railway, tram and cable-car network could get you pretty much anywhere you needed to go, and you could always hire a horse for the places in between.

When you look at individual professions, actual practical need begins to become a more obvious motive for running a car. Doctors quickly took to motoring in Dunedin, as they did elsewhere in the world. They believed it would be more convenient, and calculated it would be cheaper, to perform their rounds on a car than by horse. (And it was"on'' a car in those days, not"in'', on: you sat high up and exposed to the weather. People did not expect to be particularly comfortable when travelling.) One Dunedin doctor, Bertrand de Lautour, bought a Stuart car in 1907. He said it replaced the three horses a day he had previously needed to carry out his rounds. His groom was not made redundant, but instead was trained to become a chauffeur. Other professionals who did not need to move about so much did not take to cars early on, though many of them would have been well able to afford to. Lawyers, for instance, are under-represented in the lists of early motorists.

Cars and motorcycles assemble outside Dunedin Railway Station for the opening run of the Otago Motor Club in 1912. PHOTO: OTAGO WITNESS
Cars and motorcycles assemble outside Dunedin Railway Station for the opening run of the Otago Motor Club in 1912. PHOTO: OTAGO WITNESS
 

Professional drivers were an entirely new breed, and only a few of them had formerly been coachmen or grooms. Most came from a mechanical trade, usually bicycles. By World War 1, some of them already had a decade's experience in the motor business. When the Dunedin City Council advertised for an inspector of motors in 1915 it received several applications from men who already had an international career facilitated by the new technology. One of them, R.J. Knight, had begun work as a"chauffeur valet'' in Folkestone, Kent, in 1906, moving after two years to London where he worked for the Mexican embassy. He emigrated to New Zealand in 1909 to become chauffeur to the honorary consul for Italy, Sir James Mills, of the Union Steam Ship Company, at that time one of the largest shipping firms in the world, who met the Mexican ambassador when in London and as a result of his recommendation took on the 21-year-old Knight as his chauffeur and returned with him to Dunedin. Though Knight stayed with Sir James for at least six years, his predecessors had lasted only a year or two at best: he had gone through three chauffeurs in the years 1905-1909 alone.

Charles Hope was another Dunedin chauffeur with an international career. For nine years from 1906 he was chauffeur to James A. Johnstone, manager of the stock and station agency Wright Stephenson & Co. Like many chauffeurs, Hope emphasised that he was"a strict abstainer from drink''. He was"fully acquainted with the mechanism of motors'' and carried out all running repairs to his employer's car. The position paid well enough for him to support a family of eight children; they lived, appropriately enough, in Drivers Rd, close to his employer's house so he could be on call.

Wealthy men with an engineering background were prominent among early motoring enthusiasts. Some of them even had a go at making their own cars. George Methven showed his skills ran to more than plumbing fixtures by building a car for himself in 1903. 

George Methven showed his skills ran to more than plumbing fixtures by building a petrol-powered four horsepower car for himself in 1903.
George Methven showed his skills ran to more than plumbing fixtures by building a petrol-powered four horsepower car for himself in 1903.

You could not run an early motor car without understanding how it worked and knowing how to keep it running, or without employing someone who did know what they were doing. Cars needed regular maintenance, vital parts needed oiling and greasing, some of which tasks needing to be carried out after each run.

And you could not just switch off the engine and leave the thing until the next time you wanted to go out. The paintwork would not last long if you did not wash off the road dust after each run and dry it off before putting it away in your newly built garage. Cars were too valuable to leave outside and would in any case suffer badly if left exposed to the weather.

Most of the early private garages you see around Dunedin date from the 1920s, and the earliest ones are surprisingly hard to track down. The earliest known one is in Park St and was built in 1912. Amazingly, it retains its original doors. It was built by Angus Marshall, the principal of King Edward Technical College, another case of a man with an interest in modern technology and the skills to maintain a car himself. He is a very rare example of a teacher with a car before the 1920s; no other teacher, lecturer or professor had a car at this time, let alone a student. One way you can spot a seriously old garage is that they were built as far from the house as was practical. This was not just because no-one wanted to stare at the back of a large brick outhouse, but mainly because they were smelly and potential fire dangers.

Motorists kept petrol, oil and lots of spare parts in their garages."Motor spirit'' came in four-gallon (15 litre) tins made of metal so thin they were called"flimsies''. You don't need to be very old to remember all sorts of things that were made from, or patched with, flattened Big Tree or Plume petrol tins. They came from the refinery in wooden boxes, which were also very useful for other purposes for years afterward. Petrol tins were a nuisance to transport in bulk because they were easily punctured, so leaks were common. To fill up your car, you would park outside a motor garage in town and the attendant would puncture a petrol tin and put it in a sort of hopper on a tripod; the petrol would run down a hose into the tank.

You couldn't tell how clean the petrol was, which is one reason why, when bowsers were introduced, there were glass tanks that let the customer see what they were getting. In the mid-1920s the oil companies changed to deliveries by bulk tanker to underground storage tanks, so tins were phased out. It was still the motor garages that supplied the customer, now from pumps permanently fixed on the kerbside. There was usually a range of them, as they supplied rival brands of petrol. Dedicated service stations that sold only one brand of fuel did not appear until the 1930s, and are mainly a development of the years after World War 2.

Motor garages were a sort of all-in-one facility in the early decades. A livery stable would feed, house and clean your horse, hire you a hack, or provide a carriage and driver for a special occasion. The early motor garages did the same. In many cases, they were at first the same business. Well into the 1920s livery stables and motor garages could co-exist. For example, the Empire Motor Garage was next to the railway station in Palmerston. It had started as a livery stables in 1863 catering for traffic to the gold fields. By 1916 it was advertising its new fireproof brick building; it hired motor cars but also still operated as a livery stables.

Fire was a major worry: cautionary tales of fires in motor garages started by careless smokers were widely reported in the press. Even chauffeurs were known to have wandered into garages smoking shortly before the inevitable explosion. At least part of one of these motor garages converted from stables survives unrecognised in central Dunedin, opposite the City Library. Wimpenny Brothers took over the former Rink Stables in Moray Pl in 1912 and proclaimed: "The fact of our building being Absolutely Fire-Proof will be appreciated by those motorists who garage with us''. It could hold at least 100 cars, and one of the bluestone walls is still visible in the alley to its side.

The earliest known private garage in Dunedin is in Park St, built in 1912. Amazingly, it retains its original doors. PHOTO: SUPPLIED
The earliest known private garage in Dunedin is in Park St, built in 1912. Amazingly, it retains its original doors. PHOTO: SUPPLIED

Stabling was needed for a horseless carriage just as much as it was for a horse-drawn one because you could not just leave your car in the street. It is tempting to think in the good old days you could park your car wherever you liked without having to worry about the city council's notoriously efficient parking wardens buzzing about on their motor scooters. But in the early days you weren't in theory allowed to park your car anywhere. Legally, the king's highways were public thoroughfares and could not be used for storing vehicles, commercial or private.  

As a Chicago city official put it in 1923, "A city thoroughfare is not a parking or storage yard. It is a public highway.''

Apart from five minutes or so for picking up or setting down passengers and goods, cars had to be stored off the streets. This is where the motor garages' stabling service came in handy. Alternatively, you could employ a chauffeur who would stay with the car and move it when necessary.

As a temporary stopgap, the council allowed longer-stay parking in a few designated streets. Modern cities such as Dunedin were lucky to have wide streets, so some of these areas were in the middle of the road. Property owners were entitled to object if a car was left blocking their frontage. Shop owners thought parked cars were bad for business because passers-by on the other side of the road, and passengers in passing trams, could not see their window displays. Over the course of the 1920s the number of streets where you could leave a car grew, and a map was printed showing them all. It was still intended to be only temporary, and off-street parking was the ultimate goal. (The large-scale demolitions of the 1960s and 1970s finally provided the off-street parking, but did not clear the streets of parked cars.)

Parked cars were vulnerable to petty thieves, not just of things left in the car but of accessories that could be unbolted easily from the car itself. The Otago Motor Club organised a parking attendant for Moray Pl in 1927: they didn't pay him, so he relied on tips from motorists.

Theft of the car itself was a much rarer event. In the early days, cars were rare and conspicuous, and in any case most people would have had no idea how to make one work, rather like trying to steal a helicopter today. Only it wasn't a car theft, the crime didn't exist. A specific offence of "car conversion'' was introduced to deal with the new problem, but not until 1923. Until that point, if a car was taken without the owner's permission and returned, no offence had been committed. Sometimes the joy-rider was prosecuted with the theft of the petrol instead.

One of the first instances of someone taking a car was in 1914 when George Stewart walked into a motor garage next to the Knox pharmacy and drove off in one of the cars. He was described in court as"an idle and disorderly person, having insufficient means of support'', who had been found a few nights earlier sleeping in an outhouse. A policeman caught up with him and"made him take the car back''. He"was not charged with the theft of the car because he was on his way back with it''; how he knew how to drive the car was not explained.

Early motoring enthusiasts sometimes went into the motor business on their own account, importing a few cars for friends or business connections. Other motor traders came to the business by way of bicycles. Some cycle dealers, such as Cooke Howlison, also sold motorised bicycles, which look to modern eyes more like a bike with a motor attached than an actual motorbike. Several well-established bicycle manufacturers, such as Rover, diversified into car production, so Cooke Howlison began to stock them, too.

Early parking in Dunedin was often in the middle of the road, so as not to obscure shop window displays. PHOTO: SUPPLIED
Early parking in Dunedin was often in the middle of the road, so as not to obscure shop window displays. PHOTO: SUPPLIED
 

As in many places overseas, the major changes to city streets to accommodate motor traffic came after World War 2. Before then, it was typically the arterial routes on the fringes of cities that received attention.

In Dunedin, the main roads north and south were resurfaced and had their worst corners improved. Macadamised roads made from graded gravel that were perfectly adequate for horse-drawn vehicles with metal wheels were quickly damaged by the action of pneumatic tyres, which sucked up the dust. That dust was largely dried, powdered horse manure, so people were naturally worried by the health implications as much as the sheer nuisance of the dust.

Because the early motorists' jaunts into the country were clearly not essential, there were attempts to restrict the damage they were causing by closing roads (such as Portobello Rd on Otago Peninsula) or regulating traffic (by installing a toll bar at Green Island to help pay for road repairs). The Otago Motor Club lobbied relentlessly to have these impediments removed, and unofficially issued a map to its members that showed how to take side roads to bypass the toll bar. None of this made it particularly popular, but unlike in Britain and Europe there were few signs of overt hostility towards motorists on class grounds. There were a few cases of children throwing stones at passing cars which could be put down to the natural inclination of bored young men for the sound of breaking glass. On at least one occasion, bent nails were deliberately strewn on Andersons Bay Rd in 1914 to discourage motorists.

Relations between motorists and riders of horses were not always good. In one incident in 1906 two elderly, well-dressed riders deliberately blocked the path of several cars on a country road and jeered at their drivers when they tried to pass. Pedestrians, too, would not play ball, and continued to exercise their long-standing right to use the road. One Invercargill motorist complained that"pedestrians are allowed to stand and `yarn' in groups'' at intersections, and recounted an incident in which a driver approached three groups of people standing in the street and"gave three hoots on his horn with the result that the persons in the various groups looked up with looks of intense indignation on their faces and would not move, the driver having to carefully thread his way through.''

The Green Island toll gate in 1912. PHOTO: SUPPLIED
The Green Island toll gate in 1912. PHOTO: SUPPLIED
 

Pedestrians and other road users found their age-old right to use the public streets was being increasingly challenged by motorists who claimed first priority and then exclusivity for themselves. The danger their cars posed to other road users was neatly turned on its head by presenting cyclists and pedestrians as endangering themselves by their reckless or inattentive behaviour. Regimentation and re-education were presented as the answer.

The Otago Motor Club pioneered school crossing patrols in the late 1920s and promoted the indoctrination of children in the dangers of the roads. Historical writing on this topic has taken a change in recent years, from viewing road safety awareness as an inherently good thing to seeing it as another aspect of the dominance of the interests of the motorist over the non-motoring majority; of the people who created the danger transferring the responsibility for their own exposure to danger on to their victims. Low speeds, the safer design of cars, and the rigorous training of drivers, were all put in the too-hard basket.

Although it remains the case that the highest speed at which a pedestrian has a fighting chance of surviving being hit by a car is about 30kmh, motoring lobbyists have long campaigned to raise or abandon limits, especially in towns. They were hardly to blame if "suicidal'' pedestrians insisted on flinging themselves into the path of speeding vehicles. The Otago Daily Times told its mostly non-motorist readers in 1919 that"There is too great a tendency on the part of the public to wander more or less aimlessly upon the road, instead of keeping to the footpaths''. It was even claimed the same year by self-declared"motor experts'' that, counter-intuitively, lower speed limits would lead to more accidents. Notoriously in Britain they got their way in 1930, when the speed limit was abolished. The Government fell for the line that if you treated drivers like gentlemen, they would behave honourably. The entirely predictable spike in deaths and injuries meant the speed limit was reimposed a couple of years later.

For their part, motorists felt themselves the victims of a rapacious state and petty bureaucracy. Policemen, who ought to be out catching working-class burglars, were instead feeling the white collars of respectable middle-class motorists. An English cartoon had a child ask her mother,"Mummy, what did policemen do before there were any motors?''. It was widely felt that motoring offences were somehow not quite the same as breaches of the law committed when on foot. Yet sometimes a motor car could facilitate a descent into a life of crime.

Members of the Otago Motor Club blind sharp metal to improve the surface on Lookout Point Rd. PHOTO: OTAGO WITNESS
Members of the Otago Motor Club blind sharp metal to improve the surface on Lookout Point Rd. PHOTO: OTAGO WITNESS
 

One of the early members of the Otago Motor Club was a taxi driver, Ernest Ebzery. He and his wife had run the Strath-Taieri Hotel at Middlemarch for several years before moving to Dunedin in late 1915. She ran the Occidental Private Hotel in Manse St while he set himself up as a taxi driver.

Like many motorists, he was soon up before the beak charged with not having lights on his car after dark. Not long after, he was caught up in a case of theft, having been the driver for a motorised pub-crawl. Soon though, his car got him into much deeper trouble.

The scandal of 1917 was a white slavery case against Ebzery. He was keeping two teenage girls for immoral purposes in a house on the peninsula and running them into town to meet their clients at his wife's hotel. Ebzery's bolt-hole was described in the press as a den of iniquity, as bad as anything you might read about in Paris: the Evening Star's headline revealed"Nude Revels'' and"Drunken Orgies''; the police found 50 empty beer bottles there, as well as a telephone and other"modern conveniences''.

Ebzery was charged with"managing a house of ill-fame''. He had"been picking up young women night after night and taking them with men in a motor car to a house at North-east Harbour. Drunken orgies have taken place in the house. Young girls have been stripped naked, and altogether a very shocking state of affairs has been taking place.'' Ebzery's co-defendants were Mary and Olive Fowler (aged 20 and 17 respectively), described as"two half-caste girls, stunningly costumed in the latest style, and both of attractive appearance''. They were charged"with being idle and disorderly persons having insufficient lawful means of support''.

While criminals quickly adapted to the new motorised world, the city, too, needed to change. Apart from improvements to the road surfaces themselves, little was done to accommodate motor traffic before about 1930. Intersection domes, designed to prevent motorists cutting corners, were installed that year and were said to have"fully justified their existence''. Unfortunately, the sources didn't think to actually describe what these traffic domes actually looked like, and they don't seem to feature in photographs. We do know they were placed in the centre of intersections and were made of steel or concrete. Some councils painted them yellow, surrounded by a white line, so they were quickly nicknamed"poached eggs''. It seems they were something like the mini-roundabouts that a British road engineer came up with in the late 1960s, a classic case of reinventing the wheel. There were early speed humps, too. An early version of a judder bar was installed in Petone in 1913 to slow down motorists"scorching'' to and from the races at Trentham. It was called a"motor hurdle'' and was a foot high: drivers complained it damaged their suspension.

An accident at the Junction Hill, near Dunedin in 1911. Mr J. Mills' Buick is hung up in a tree at Hangman's Gully. PHOTO: OTAGO WITNESS
An accident at the Junction Hill, near Dunedin in 1911. Mr J. Mills' Buick is hung up in a tree at Hangman's Gully. PHOTO: OTAGO WITNESS
 

There were virtually no road markings in those days. Where you would find painted lines and instructions to keep left was on the footpaths. The major city councils got together in 1923 and decided to impose a keep-left rule on pedestrians. At first, policemen were stationed on the busiest footpaths to enforce the new rule. There were not just no lane markings on the roads, very few signs were provided to guide or direct motorists; those that did exist were fixed at a convenient height for coachmen. Traffic volumes had increased sufficiently by the 1920s to justify providing police traffic control at the busiest intersections. For three months from October 1922, two constables were engaged"for special traffic duty'' between 8am and 9.30pm in Anzac Square in front of the railway station. They directed traffic to follow the newly instituted and unfamiliar gyratory one-way system: few drivers anywhere would have encountered such an arrangement before, as roundabouts and one-way systems were very rare. The experiment was successful enough for the council in August 1923 to engage a police constable permanently for point duty during what were called"crush hours'' at the Exchange. A few years later another policeman was taken on to control the traffic at the intersection of Cumberland and Lower Stuart Sts.

This was getting expensive, so in 1930 the council tried out its first traffic lights. Most of the major cities in New Zealand and Australia and North America were trying out traffic lights in the late 1920s, so Dunedin was well up with the play. Wellington was the first with traffic lights by just a few weeks, then Dunedin. Christchurch continued to experiment, while Auckland decided not to bother. The difference is that Dunedin's traffic lights remained its only ones until the 1950s.

They were not universally welcomed. The pointsman, Constable Joseph Oswald, was well-liked, and went on to serve for many years at the Exchange. There is now a pavement plaque there to his memory that describes him as"Guide, Mentor and Friend to all who passed through the Exchange''. In 1930 many cars were still open-topped and the drivers sat high up, so encounters with policemen, cyclists and pedestrians were more face-to-face than they became later. Pointsmen could respond to changing traffic conditions in a way automatic lights could not. It was discovered within minutes of turning on the traffic lights that they could not cope with turning traffic and"no turning'' signs were hastily installed.

The Evening Star, which had a grandstand view of the entertainment, reported that some motorists setting off on the green light, would turn the corner only to be confronted with a red light for that direction, so stop in the middle of the intersection. The council, like many institutions when they introduced new, half-baked technology, insisted the problem was with the users, not the system. It claimed that "The apparatus has worked perfectly, none of the accidents which were confidently predicted by objectors have occurred, there is no confusion at the intersection as was suggested, nor is there any tendency for traffic to avoid the corner as some of the opponents of the apparatus strongly asserted.''

The Star, on the other hand, printed a photo of a small crowd that gathered at the corner to watch the fun:"The operation of the signal and the annoyance of commercial and private vehicle drivers has caused more merriment than a vaudeville show to the big crowds of pedestrians which have collected on the corner.'' The council peevishly blamed pedestrians for ignoring the new traffic lights when crossing the road; they assumed (as you would) that the signals related to vehicles only.

Alex Trapeznik is an associate professor in the University of Otago department of history and art history. He has research interests in the burgeoning field of public history and is particularly interested in historical and cultural heritage management issues in New Zealand.

 

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