Page 5 - Sample pages "Kim: A Biography of M.G. Founder Cecil Kimber" by Jon Pressnell

property.’ It seems Charles Hunt warned Kimber of his eldest daughter’s temper and the lack of compatibility of the couple, but his future son-in-law was not swayed, and on 4 September 1915 Irene Hunt and Cecil Kimber were married.
‘One could wonder what qualities my much admired mother was perceptive enough to value in a lame, penniless salesman of printing ink who was not as tall as she might have wished5,’ writes Jean. ‘I now think that she succumbed, as my sister, my stepsister and I all did later on, to my father’s sense of adventure. He could make the simplest picnic into a memorable event. My mother would have responded to this, as she once told me that her father went off to skate and row on his own, never considering that his children might have enjoyed sharing his outdoor pursuits.’
After their marriage in Chester, Cecil and Rene Kimber – as Irene was usually known – spent their honeymoon touring Wales in Kimber’s new acquisition, a former racing Singer he nicknamed ‘Gladys Emily’ or ‘The Bus’. From Chester they motored to Pentre Vuelas, and thence to Criccieth, Towyn and Montgomery. Stops on the way included Rhyddybeulig, Cwmystradllyn, where the pair tried some fishing, and Aberdovey, where they went sailing: right at the start of the marriage, Rene was being initiated into two of her husband’s greatest passions. Then it was to their married home, 52 Linden Avenue in Norton Woodseats, outside Sheffield.
As for the somewhat fearsome-looking Singer, it had an interesting history – and an even more interesting previous owner. A 15.9hp model with a T-head engine6, it had competed at Brooklands in the July 1909 Junior Private Competitors Handicap, carrying the name ‘Jabberwock’. It was unplaced, and recorded a maximum lap speed of 43.8mph, which is somewhat short of the 80mph at which Kimber told his family it had lapped the famous banked circuit. The car was entered in two further races during 1909 but started in neither, after which it does not appear to have raced again.
The Singer had previously belonged to pioneer aviator Vivian Hewitt, who ran the car with a very tight-fitting pointed-tail body – complete with an exaggerated bird-like beak over the radiator – before having it rebuilt with the bodywork from an Hispano- Suiza. In its earlier form it was sampled by Cecil Kimber when a friend of his by the name of Gilbert brought the car to Abererch, where Henry Kimber had a holiday cottage; a photo dated by Jean to 1912 captures her father in the car. This suggests that Kimber and Hewitt were acquainted before Kimber bought the car, which by the time he acquired it had been further modified with a square-cut rear in place of the Hispano body’s original bolster- tank arrangement.
5 Kimber was 5ft 5in tall.
6 A T-head engine is an early type of side-valve unit with the inlet valves on one side of the block and the exhaust valves on the other, as opposed to the more conventional side-valve arrangement which has all the valves on the same side.
45 Chapter Two: Cars and Planes – Learning the Trade
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