Motoring Mary
Roger Guttridge recalls Dorset’s first woman driver
Published in October ’17
The year was 1902. Motoring was in its infancy, cars were strictly for the rich and all the drivers were men. Except one. At Eastbury House, Tarrant Gunville, the village squire’s wife was striking a blow for ‘women’s lib’ in a very real sense. ‘I believe my mother was the first woman driver not only in Dorset but in the south of England and possibly in the whole country,’ Mary Farquharson’s son, Peter, told me many years ago.
Mary Farquharson and family in the 1901 Panhard-Levassor
Motoring Mary, as I like to call her, was a pioneer. She not only drove a ten-horsepower Panhard-Levassor but described her journeys in a diary, took photographs and even processed them herself. During her first year of motoring, she travelled as far afield as Oxford, London, Lincoln and Dublin, and every journey was punctuated by breakdowns and punctures. Mary’s mechanic, whom she refers to only as ‘Black’, was expected to follow on his motorcycle to deal with the problems as they arose.
Mary’s first diary entry, on 1 July 1902, describes a journey to Oxford for a wedding at Barton Abbey the following day. ‘Marcia and I were ready to start at 10 o’clock,’ she writes. ‘We waited an hour and then found out the pump would not work, so Black was wired for. We eventually started at 2 o’clock and met Black on his bicycle. We then stopped for the pump to be done.’
Mary and Marcia had not even reached Shaftesbury before the next problem arose. Approaching Melbury Abbas, they realised the brakes were not working and wisely decided not to proceed down the steep hill into the village. After a two-hour wait, five men arrived and lowered the car to the foot of the hill on a rope. At Shaftesbury it took an hour to get the brakes repaired. ‘It was 7 o’clock when we left there, we having been five hours doing ten miles,’ wrote Mary.
At Salisbury the 1901 Panhard had a puncture and the novel sight of a car undergoing roadside repairs attracted a large crowd. By the time the roofless vehicle left Salisbury at 9 pm, it was ‘quite dark and pouring with rain’. Mary continued: ‘Andover was reached at 10.45. We halted to have some supper and dry our clothes but at 11 o’clock we were turned out (closing time) having only had a few mouthfuls.
‘Andover to Newbury in pitch darkness, and we did not know the way, was not a very enjoyable ride. The brakes are again not acting and we came to some steep hills and once the car got quite out of control.’
The motorists must have made themselves very popular when they ‘occasionally woke up a cottage to inquire the way’. They reached Newbury at 2.30am only to be stopped by a policeman, who was intent on booking them because one of the car’s lamps was not working. When he entered a hotel to write down their names, they drove off, only to run into two more constables. They were ‘very nice’, however, and took them to another hotel, where they managed to grab a couple of hours’ sleep before setting off again at 6 am.
Two miles from Oxford, the car’s countershaft bracket broke and the travellers abandoned the vehicle in a barn and completed their journey in a hansom cab, arriving an hour before the wedding.
A week later, Mary, husband Henry and Black the mechanic left for Maidenhead, calling at Blandford station en route to collect new chains for the car, then fitting them in the Crown Hotel yard. After more puncture repairs near Romsey, the brakes failed on a steep hill and the Farquharsons deliberately crashed into a grass bank to avoid a worse accident.
Some haymakers lent a horse in a bid to pull the car out of the bank but the creature proved ‘utterly useless and did more harm than good, as it only proceeded to kick’. With great difficulty, the farmworkers managed to extract the car from the bank and it continued to Romsey with both rear tyres punctured.
The Lincoln trip began on 4 January 1903, when troubles included a puncture at Ringwood, problems with the burners, difficulty in finding petrol at Winchester because it was a Sunday, torrential rain at Staines and a sticking carburettor at Uxbridge. On the return journey the Panhard collided with a horse and dogcart driven by a small boy. The hub cap was bent but Mary fails to tell us what happened to the boy and cart.
Her most ambitious trip took her to the legendary Gordon Bennett motor races near Dublin in the summer of 1903. Her party travelled via Snowdonia and Anglesey, with Black leaving earlier in a slower 1898 Daimler that served as a luggage car. After surviving the usual catalogue of punctures and mechanical problems, they reached Holyhead and boarded what must have been one of the world’s first car ferries.
Mary, whose husband holds the dubious honour of being the first driver to crash a racing car at Brooklands, describes the scene as fifty cars waited on Holyhead quay and at least eighty more poured across the Menai Bridge from all parts of the country. Of the motor racing, she wrote: ‘To see the cars thunder by was most thrilling, the speed being terrific. The course was about 93 miles round, in a figure of eight, and the cars had to traverse it several times as the distance of the Gordon Bennett Cup Race must be 380 miles.’
