If you are a lover of Classic (rather than Veteran) cars, you probably remember a Humber as a large, ponderous but well equipped member of the Rootes Group. If you are a vintage enthusiast, you will no doubt remember the famous 8/18s, 12/25s and 14/40s of the 1920s. But this is to forget the origins of Humber, which are in the 1890s, in Beeston, Nottingham.
Humber (like many other marques) evolved from a company which had originally made pedal cycles (for Nottingham had a thriving bicycle industry for much of the century). Although Beeston originally dabbled with the abortive Pennington car project, the first engine-driven, Humber-badged, machines from Beeston were motor tricycles and quadricycles, followed by tricars. The first cars had two- or four-cylinder engines, but they were succeeded by the tiny single-cylinder-engined Humberette (literally, ‘small Humber’), a sturdy and well made machine with only a little power, yet the miracle was that it could carry a useful payload.
By comparison with previous Humbers, this was an ambitious project, for it featured a De Dion style of front-mounted water-cooled engine, with a leather-covered cone clutch, a two-speed gearbox controlled by levers under the steering wheel, as well as drive shaft to the rear wheels – the last being a real novelty in the early 1900s. |
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The steering wheel, by the way, had only a single spoke, a characteristic of early Humbers, and quite 50 years ahead of the time when Citroen ‘re-invented’ it. Braking, always a chancy business on cars of this period, was by externally contracting elements which were exposed to the weather. Even so, it was well made and (like other Beeston-Humbers) it was more substantially built and more expensive than equivalent cars from Humber’s Coventry factory.
The original Humberette, while respected, was soon seen to be under-powered, so within a year the engine had been enlarged to 762 cc from 611 cc, though few cars were sold, and Humber rather dropped the idea of a ‘small car’ when the business was concentrated in Coventry in 1908. ‘Humberette’, though, was a intriguing name to use, so the company tried again in 1914, with an entirely different, larger, V-twin-engined car. In the 1920s Humber turned to building larger, more conventional cars, eventually merging with Hillman in 1928, and becoming a founder member of the Rootes Group.
The original Humberette was probably the British car industry’s first successful attempt to produce a popular light car, though as new-fangled motor cars still appealed mainly to the rich, it was difficult to get buyers interested. |
