Cordingley’s 1904 Automobile Exhibition Catalogue

The Richard Roberts Archive has an opportunity to purchase the catalogue for Cordingley’s 1904 ‘Automobile Exhibition’, or what we’d now call the motor show. This is a particularly rare item and would make a wonderful addition to our collection.

Why is this important for us? In 1904 the motor industry was just starting out, and source material for what was happening then is always difficult to find and expensive to buy. All manufacturers and associated businesses would seek to exhibit at the annual London motor show, and if they couldn’t afford that, would want at least to place an advert in the catalogue. This gives us a good idea of who was trading at the time and what they were selling. As a source of advertising, then, for the fledgling motoring industry, this catalogue is excellent – the 200-page catalogue is full of whole-page and half-page adverts for motor manufacturers, component makers,

dealers and much more. We have started to collect advertising for this industry but this catalogue alone will bring a real breadth and richness to what we have.

Many of the manufacturers are now long gone, and it is often only because they advertised that we know about them now. In the photos, we can see The North British Rubber Company advertised their ‘Clincher’ tyres (‘reliable, speedy, resilient, durable’), while the Electromobile Company promote over a four-page spread their

electric cars and associated services. Indeed, a scan of the Index to Advertisers shows that almost all of the ninety companies have long disappeared.

At the time, there were competing annual motor shows in London: the one organised by the newly-created Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) at Crystal Palace, and Cordingley’s, which had itself evolved from a bicycle show in the 1890s. Charles Cordingley (1872–1914) was the owner of one of the weekly motoring magazines at the time, the Motor-Car Journal, and his ‘Automobile Exhibition’ didn’t survive for much longer before the SMMT squeezed him out.

The catalogue will join our growing collection: we currently have scattered catalogues for both Cordingley and the SMMT motor shows, starting with Cordingley’s 1902 show.