The Rushen Abbey mystery motor

My Grandfather Fred Press who ran a Motor Garage in Fore Street Chard up to 1910 told me that the Sprag Brake usually threw the car into the ditch !
A fairly drastic way to stop a runaway car :-)

For what it's worth, the photo appears to have been taken outside the Rushen Abbey Hotel, which is now The Abbey Restaurant. The building is much the same albeit with a stucco finish over the stonework. The structure was built in 1765, became a school for young ladies in 1847, and a country house hotel around 1866.

If perhaps this Mors model could have been on the I.o.M. in 1905, when reportedly “the number of cars owned by islanders could be counted on the fingers of one hand”, there can’t have been many local woman members of the Manx Automobile Club. However, that year saw influxes of private car drivers attending the Gordon Bennett elimination trials in late May and for the T.T. mid September, over 60 at the former, including one well-known competitive chauffeuse: Miss Victoria Godwin. From the photograph, doubt it’s her but this was reported in June 1905:

“During eliminating trials in the Isle of Man, Miss Godwin, by request of the English Automobile Club, drove the Speaker of the House of Keys to the meet. There had been a law recently passed in the Isle of Man limiting the ordinary road speed to 14 miles an hour. Miss Godwin is suspected of having, to the evident, but unconscious delight of her passenger, permitted her car on that occasion to do its best.”

The Speaker at the time was the bearded Arthur William Moore, so probably not him pictured either but whoever, unconsciously delighting in speed or not, he needed to be a back-seat-driver as when Godwin was stopped driving Harvey du Cros’s car at 50m.p.h. on the Coventry-road in 1906, he got fined, being considered the person really in control of the car – take that Suffragettes! More sympathetically when she was stopped speeding in London, the policeman accepted that she had speeded up to get rid of a mosquito she claimed was biting her neck – just, he said no doubt with a smirk, what he would have done.

Godwin often drove a 40-H.P. Ariel-Simplex but also Spyker, Daimler and Mercedes, and who knows, possibly a muddy Mors.

An interesting scene…. The car has neither windscreen or hood; unusual and uncomfortable for the occupants on all but the shortest trips. The guy in the back has a car-rug.

The rear of the body could be detachable so maybe the car was dual-purpose and doubled as a sports/racer like the Collings Mercedes 60 HP? As there are no spare wheels in view these would perhaps have been stacked on the rear deck when the back of the body was removed?

Perhaps the rear body had been fitted for domestic use such as trips to the railway station to fetch Le Monsieur on a winter day? Just look at the mud all over the car and particularly the rear wheels….

An interesting point – is the rod hanging down under the car a ‘sprag’ or ‘hill-holder’ operated from the handbrake?

Is it too late to tell them thay have a flat tyre?

Fully agree with Craig. No radiator filler cap, the despite the photo quality still visible pins at both ends of the bonnet top, so undeniably a Mors. Possibly the 24-32hp model of 1907, or maybe even larger.

I think this is a Mors, about 1907? The steering wheel, wheel hubs, and radiator match.

Is she a chauffeuse ?