----- Original Message -----
From: "Geoff Winnington-Ball" <gwball@sympatico.ca>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Monday, October 02, 2000 9:26 PM
Subject: Re: [MV] Driving Skills (was Morris Minor)
>
> I got my first driver's license on a 1957 Morris Minor, and the back seat
is/was
> truly familiar to me ... er ... so I sort of know what you mean... :-)
>
So did I.
However the driving school instructor took it away again after the lesson so
I never got to become familiar with the back seat, however it likely wasn't
too much different from a Series E Morris 8.
> <Mandatory MV Content>
> Does anyone have any firm figures on the proportion of licensed drivers
who went
> into the western armies in WW2, vs that of those who had never previously
> driven? I'm constantly uncovering comments regarding an innate lack of
skills in
> this general area at that time, which strikes me as strange considering
it's
> taken for granted now.
>
Certainly isn't strange for the UK, I have been struggling with no result to
find some statistical figures but car ownership pre-war was tiny, you have
to remember that not only were vehicles exceedingly expensive here with a
small saloon representing something like 5 - 10 years average pay but the
govt system of taxing the vehicle on RAC engine horsepower gave you an
overhead of typically 1 months average pay on the smallest car as a
repeating annual road tax charge for your licence disc. Up to WWII all
vehicles, military too, which had to have civvy licence plates by law, would
pay 1 pound per annum for each RAC rated HP of the engine.
Now we've been here before, if you look at the Ford CMP manual you find your
90HP V8 flathead is also defined as 32HP RAC Rating for taxation, I know
this confuses the hell out of our New World chums.
It is based on an _assumption_ of 1000ft/min piston speed and a mean
effective pressure of 90psi with a mechanical efficiency of 75% using the
formula:
HP = D squared x n, all over 2.5
where D is the bore in inches and n the number of cylinders. Stroke as you
see doesn't come into it, so long stroke small bore engines were favoured.
(Out of idle interest this makes a Merlin 203 HP RAC rating and the Stalwart
B 81 45 HP Rated.)
Hence the reason you see virtually all of our pre-war cars being titled with
a number (denoting the rating) for a model designation, such was the
importance of the RAC HP rating and the tax thus levied, also why we have a
legacy of tiny car engines. Today its like saying the cheapest car on the
market is a BMW 850i and the annual road tax is two months gross wages.
The country is small, the rail system then was good, as was public
transport, and allowances were made for travel time, car ownership was
likely around 1 in 50 at the best, as these would necessarily be the very
much better off people probably with professional qualifications and they
would not be placed as MT Drivers after call-up for WWII, very few of the
average working Joes would have ever driven anything or even have a driving
licence.
Richard
Southampton - England
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 01 2000 - 21:37:36 PST