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| Gianni Marin, The Motor Car, London House and Maxwell 1963 |
In 1913 Standard Motor Company introduced a light two seater car named the Rhyl. Sporting a 9 1/2 hp engine, it was in production for 3 years before the company shut down car production for the war effort. More on the car here.
What do you make of the photograph? The car, looking quite sporty, is posed before what looks to be the abandoned ruin of a mansion in probably mid-spring. A couple of black-clad men lurk ominously at mid distance...
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The twins, Giles and Vivian, were surprised to find themselves feeling at ease and at home after just a month or so at the Royal Morticians' College. They excelled in their studies, thrived on the campus social scene, joined the Young Communists ("chiefly to meet girls," Vivian would recall), and were beginning to envisage a life not dominated by their father Hector's petty tyrannies. Etheridge-Giblett Sr., it must be said, was of a domineering, irascible, pugnacious, even bellicose habit of mind; fitfully generous to his family, he squeezed his tenants hard, and seemed ever on the brink of (as Aunt Bertwinnie named it) "a peasant revolution, with hay forks and firebrands. Alone among her brothers and sisters, Bertwinnie did not fear Hector; she was forever calling him out for his cruelties, maintaining that he had "bought the boys off" allowing them to learn morticianry in distant Dorset, and giving them a handsome "two-seater" motor car in which to travel there. "Hector wanted his young pantywaists out of the way while he drove their mother mad." (Indeed, Mrs. Etheridge-Giblett was forcibly committed to the Black Country Repository for Insane Females at about the time of the twins' departure for school; she would die there, reportedly of chilblains, eleven years later.)
Both boys were worried by a new tone in their father's letters as winter turned to spring. His relations with his tenant farmers had found a new low, and the contempt with which he typically spoke of them yielded to a bitter hatred of a proactive nature. On 2 March 1914 came what would be Hector's final letter; in it he spoke of forcing his refractory tenants to work the fields by threat of machine-gunning "all the rebels and skivers, the Fenians and country scum." Two days later, the twins received a note from the local Sheriff: "You had better come home," it read, without explanation.
The photograph (Fig.XVII) shows Giles and Viv shortly after their hasty return to Flabstroke Hall. They can be seen, in their neat suits of morticianary cut, in the middle distance, regarding the wreckage of their ancestral property. A controversy of many years' duration ensued: Did the tenants "sack" the Hall, or did it explode and burn on account of an accidental ignition within, a premature discharge caused by Hector Etheridge-Giblett's scant familiarity with the array of cannonry and engines of destruction he had covertly brought into the dining room?
Hector Etheridge-Giblett, never a nice man, was perhaps affected by his memories of the ill-fated military action he commanded in WW1, resulting in the almost total decimation of his regiment, a surviving member of which we previously met, Captain Doakes...
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