TOM KING is taken back to the days when a day in the country entailed a chauffeur-driven car

The photograph displayed above, taken in the back-streets of Westcliff, is being published for the first time.

It dates from about 1937, and shows what was - then - an ordinary stretch of Westcliff back-street. Now, of course, the entire scene depicted in the photograph looks like something from an "historic experience" theme park.

The vintage petrol pumps, the almost quaint lettering of the signboard, and the hulking cars - all fulfilling Henry Ford's dictum "you can have any colour you like for your car providing it's black"- indicate another era.

Above all though it is the price of petrol that takes the breath away. The 1/5d (one shilling and fivepence) a gallon would equate to a modern sum of 7p!

While countless picture-postcards and news photos of Southend survive from the era, the humbler scenes of side-streets and small businesses often tended to be ignored by photographers. The present photograph is a comparative rarity.

Little has changed on the site in Canewdon Road. The premises are now occupied by the fascinating Visual Glass. The company purveys stained glass windows around the world.

Archie Myers, the firm's proprietor, was enjoying an ordinary day' work at the molten lead, when into his premises walked a visitor from Oxford - Mr Stanley Jewson, complete with the picture that we now print.

Mr Jewson is the son of the proprietor of the business depicted in the photograph, and he has many memories of Southend in the 1930s, not least of the business of running a garage.

In the manner of the time Queens Motors mechanics would turn their hand to anything on wheels that went broom-broom.

"In the workshop at the back we had a hydraulic lift, which may have been something of a luxury for a garage in those days," recalls Mr Jewson.

In addition to servicing and repairing private cars, the firm also ran a fleet of six taxicabs - vast V8 pilots, big enough to take all the bridesmaids in a wedding, or several large guests, in one go.

The cars were hired out for special occasions and trips into the country, always with a chauffeur at the wheel (self-drive hire was unknown in those days).

Luxi Cars, as the fleet operation was known, lived up to its name. "My father was always very particular. The chauffeurs had to wear their peaked caps and have starched white collars at all times," Mr Jewson said.

With the arrival of the war frivolities such as country drives became a thing of the past, and brides were expected to walk or bike to their wedding. The huge V8s were requisitioned lock, stock and barrel by the Government.

Stanley Jewson believes that they were used by the National Fire Service. They would probably have been employed as "scout cars", performing immediate reconnaissance after a bombing raid, and perhaps helping to ferry the wounded to hospital.

The garage, along with its impressive hydraulic lift, was also requisitioned, for some sort of hush-hush war work. People didn't ask questions in those days, and just exactly what happened on the Queens Motors site remains a mystery.

While at first there was some doubt as to the exact date of the photograph, it was eventually narrowed down to 1937 or 1938. The giveaways are the price of petrol, and the car parked to the front of the forecourt.

It is a 1936 "Airflow" Chrysler, a car now as extinct as the brontosaurus which, in some respects, it resembled.

The garage itself had gone by the late 40s. It became a stationer's called Deans, an upholsterer's and a frozen food store before becoming the premises 12 years ago of Visual Glass.

Vintage - in this photograph, taken in Westcliff in the late 1930s, the car that now would be considered vintage was an ordinary road car and the price of petrol would make any modern-day driver wild with envy.

The picture at the foot of the page shows the site as it is today

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.