No inkling of subsequent financial disasters clouded Motor-car Day, and as at almost the last moment the Press had come to the conclusion that it was an occasion to be written up and enlarged upon, a very great public interest was aroused in the Motor-car Club’s proposed celebration of the event by a great procession of the newly-enfranchised “light locomotives” from Whitehall to Brighton, on November 14th.
The Motor-car Club is dead. It was not a club in the proper sense of the word, but an organisation promoted and financed by the company-promoters who were interested in advertising their schemes. The run to Brighton was itself intended as a huge advertisement, but the unprepared condition of many of the cars entered, together with the miserable weather prevailing on that day, resulted in turning the whole thing into ridicule.
The newspapers had done their best to advertise the event; but no one anticipated the immense crowds that assembled at the starting-point, Whitehall Place, by nine o’clock on that wet and foggy morning. By half-past ten, the hour fixed for the start, there was a maddening chaos of hundreds of thousands of sightseers such as no Lord Mayor’s Show or Royal Procession had ever attracted. Everybody in the crowd wanted a front place, and those who got one, being both unable and unwilling to “parse away,” were nearly scragged by the police, who on the Embankment set upon individuals like footballers on the ball; while snap-shotters wasted plates on them from the secure altitudes of omnibuses or other vehicles.
Those whose journalistic duties took them to see the start had to fight their way down from Charing Cross, up from Westminster, or along from the Embankment; contesting inch by inch, and wondering if the starting-point would ever be gained.
At length the Metropole hove in sight, but the motor-cars had yet to be found. To accomplish this feat it was necessary to hurl oneself into a surging tide of humanity, and surge with it. The tide carried the explorer away and eventually washed him ashore on the neck of a policeman. Rumour got around that an organised massacre of cab-horses was contemplated, and myriads of mounted police appeared and had their photographs taken from the tops of cabs and other envied positions occupied by amateur photographers, who paid dearly to take pictures of the fog, which they could have done elsewhere for nothing.
THE “COMET,” 1890.
From a painting by Alfred S. Bishop.
Time went on, the crowd grew bigger, the mud was churned into slush, and everybody was treading upon everybody else.