York Motor Club rallies for 110th anniversary celebration

This Sunday, July 14, has been chosen as the date for a motorsport reunion to celebrate the club’s founding – even though no one is quite sure what the actual founding date is, admits club member Jonathan Pulleyn.

Certainly, by the time of the wonderful picture of early members with their cars outside York Minster, the club was a going concern. The trouble is, there is some doubt over precisely when the photo was taken.

Motor club tradition has it that the picture was taken in 1903, the club’s founding year.

But a few years ago Hugh Murray, the peerless York historian who so sadly passed away recently, told Yesterday Once More that 1904 was a more realistic date, since it was not until January 1, 1904 that the registration of private cars using car number plates under the Motor Car Act became law.

The first car to be registered in York – with the now famous DN1 number plate which adorns the car of the city's Lord Mayor – is thought to have belonged to Mr Edwin Gray of Gray’s Court, York.

That car, sadly, is missing from the line-up pictured top right, but present in the picture is the second car registered in York, a yellow-and-black French-made De Dion Bouton Voiturette which was apparently owned by Alfred Dale Jackson of Clifford Street.

That may well be Mr Jackson himself sitting in the car in peaked cap and greatcoat next to the elegant lady in a fur collar and stylish hat.

The DN A3 car in the picture was an as-yet-unsold vehicle made by York firm Sheppee, bearing a temporary trade plate with an A inserted. AJ 100, meanwhile, may have been a North or East Riding number plate.

It is not known what the motorists pictured here had gathered for, though it may possibly have been for the beginning of a rally – a tradition later club members have enthusiastically continued.

The club thrived after this first photograph was taken. By the 1920s, time trials were becoming increasingly popular. In one, a record 4,000 spectators reportedly gathered to see the cars being put through their paces at Rosedale Chimney on the North York Moors.

The club effectively closed during the war years, before being revived in the early 1950s.

Many of today’s photographs come from rallies and other events club members took part in the 1970s and 1980s.

But the club’s more than 100 members remain active in motorsport today, Mr Pulleyn said.

On Sunday, from 2.30pm at Murton, they are hoping as many past club members as possible, and anyone else interested in cars, will turn up for an afternoon and evening of nostalgia and motorsport reminiscence, not to mention a classic car show.

You don’t need to bring you car, said Mr Pulleyn – but the more the merrier.

So if you have a classic car or rally car you'd like to show off to an admiring audience, this Sunday will be your chance.

York Motor Club’s 110th reunion event will be at the York Auction Centre, Murton, from 2.30pm on Sunday, July 14. Admission is free, and everyone is welcome.

Gerald Clark, from Easingwold, and navigator, Tony Viles, at the start of the York Motor Club Spring Rally in the 60s

Mike Jackson known as “Bilko” or “one armed Mike Jackson”, from Driffield,  taking part in the York Motor Club National Rally sponsored by Rodgers Carpets.