Peter Tuthill

I spent a very entertaining evening not so long ago with Peter Tuthill, the motoring historian. He is a terrific enthusiast for anything and everything with wheels and engines and has a vast retentive memory. When Autocar magazine inaugurated the first ever Motormind contest (like Mastermind but with much more interesting subjects) Peter Tuthill was the first ever winner.

He's also a very good speaker so if you ever get the chance to see him in action - whether it's about cars, motorsport, local history or the Observer Corps - do go along.

Peter's interest began at an early age with an Ian Allan ABC. This featured the addresses of the motor manufacturers so he started to write off for brochures using the headed paper from the family business in Penzance in Cornwall. Soon he amassed an extraordinary collection as he worked his way through this book and then The Observer's Book of Automobiles.

The response was almost overwhelming. Peter's knowledgeable enquiries prompted a stream of sales literature and he even obtained some of the design drawings from the long-established coachbuilding firms of Park Ward and James Young.

I was particularly interested to hear this. I used to be an Industrial Designer and these drawings would have been used for presentations with prospective clients. They were effectively predecessors of the magic marker renderings that I was taught to produce as part of my degree course.

It wasn't long, however, before new cars began arriving at his parent's house - or his uncle's premises if Peter had used his headed note paper - with the generous intention of taking the enthusiastic Mr Tuthill for a test drive. The rest of the family became progressively more critical about Peter's activities and when a Daimler Conquest arrived, having spent most of the day driving down to Penzance from Plymouth, Peter's father said "Look, this really has to stop."

So Peter started writing to foreign firms.

Peter is a great linguist and he has put this to good effect in his global brochure hunting adventures. Among his many treasures are letters from manufacturers from the Eastern Bloc.

"Look at this," he said, showing me, "that's Cyrillic for Dear Sir, not Citizen. They obviously knew the correct way to write a business letter for the western market."

I looked at the date. "But this was at the height of the Cold War."

"Oh yes," he replied. "My parents soon became uneasy again when huge parcels from the USSR began arriving containing the technical specifications for MAZ eight wheel drive rocket launchers."

A few years ago he travelled with some friends on a tour of the Eastern Bloc factories, many of which had museums full of cars and trucks unheard of in the west. It gave him a great opportunity to practise his facility for languages in Russia, Serbia and Poland and they were very well received even if they were held at gun point on one occasion. They even tracked down Estonia's biggest racing car manufacturer - and it was pretty damn big!

"But the ZIL museum was a big disappointment."

"ZILs?" I asked. "Do you mean those vast black limousines for Polyp Bureau members?"

"Yes," he replied. "You’d think that they would have some really historic vehicles to show, wouldn't you? But no. All they had were fridges. The factory was also the principal source of Soviet Bloc fridges and every Soviet hero seemed to have received one at some stage."

Peter's car brochure resources are now immense. He tries not to think about the ones he had to sell to fund a house rebuild following the diagnosis of dry rot many years ago but what he still has remains a vast collection. It's still growing, too. And the more obscure the better.

"If ever I saw an advert for a Kit Car, I'd write off for some information. You've seen my Siva Llama brochure haven't you?"

"Yes thanks," I said, "you gave me a photocopy." As you probably know, I actually have an example of a Siva Llama in my old car collection and Peter is very keen to help fellow enthusiasts if he can.

When he began to dig a little deeper into some arcane avenues of automotive archaeology, his vast collection proved invaluable. He's written marque histories on Kieft and Turner racing and sports cars, Rowe Hillmaster lorries and the racing circuit at Davidstow on Bodmin Moor – areas of automotive history that no-one lese has touched.

In fact, it was when he gave a talk on the Davidstow circuit to the Camel Vale Motor Club in Launceston that I first met Peter. It was brilliant, delivered completely without notes and he absorbed his audience totally for nearly two hours. Peter tells the human story as well as that of the vehicles or circuit. My favourite bit was when Horace Gould misjudged the height of his racing car transporter and brought down the temporary foot bridge over the circuit made out of scaffolding. At the time of this talk he was working on a history of the Cornish Motor Industry and this was published in 2007 - see my blog entry for 9th January, 2008.

His publishing enterprises are temporarily on hold. He likes the more obscure marques that no-one has really chronicled and although the demand is often strong it’s also restricted in volume.

He's still collecting car brochures. His wife Hazel is a very tolerant woman. She made me feel very welcome and happily left Peter and me to delve into his library for even more wondrous historical documents.

“Look at this!” he said, positively glowing with pleasure. “It’s a mobile apiary.”

I had to think what he was talking about for a moment. “That’s a bee hive isn’t it?”

And it was, too, a two axle trailer of surprisingly generous proportions made by the UMZ factory in Russia.

"People offer me huge amounts of money for some brochures but I just tell them I'm not interested." His favourite is for the German Goliath. It contains drawings of a family enjoying the benefits of Goliath ownership but if you flick the pages it becomes animated!

But he doesn't have the MAZ rocket launcher brochure any more. "Look!" he said, handing me an enormous book in Greek. "I swapped it for this - a pictorial history of the Greek motor industry."

And although I could only look at the pictures, I found it absolutely fascinating, full of Vintage Things.

If any of you need a copy of Peter's books on Turners, Paramounts, Kiefts, Rowe Hillmasters or Cornwall's Motor Industry (it's much bigger than you think!) contact him direct - “Woodcott”, Trevanion Road, Wadebridge, Cornwall, PL27 7PA (01208 812358).