While cataloguing a collection of the trade journal “The Motor Trader” from 1907 up to the 1940s I became fascinated with the changing face of how people coped with maintaining and running this new-fangled creation. The advent of the automobile brought with it whole new industries, one of which served the obvious need to buy fuel for your vehicle.

At the turn of the 20th century, and as the number of vehicles on the road began to increase, there start to appear in the motoring press advertisements for the supply of fuel to the consumer. To find the earliest evidence of this I trawled through the shelves in the archive for dates earlier than our 1907 Motor Trader and I found two advertisements that typically illustrate this. The first (fig.1 – The Automotor Journal 15 Oct 1900) is for Pratt’s Motor Spirit which comes in handy two-gallon tins and is available to “manufacturers, dealers and the trade generally”. In the same issue (fig.2) is an advertisement by Carless, Capel and Leonard for petrol storage tanks. These tanks would generally be bought by garages from where they could distribute fuel to their customers.

There were many suppliers of petrol in tins and their advertisements appeared regularly in the motoring press right up to the start of the 1920s. Interestingly it very quickly became the standard to have two-gallon tins of the same shape and size with each manufacturer stamping and printing their names onto the tins. Examples of this can be seen in fig.3 (Pratt’s); fig.4 (Redline); and fig.5 (Shell).  These examples are from 1919 and show just how long customers purchased their fuel in cans. Filling your vehicle with petrol from a can must surely be a hazardous operation and I came across an interesting advertisement for the “Atlas Safety Petrol Filler” (fig.6 – Motor Trader 1920). It must have been successful as you could get 10% off your car insurance by using one.

As time marched on and the number of motorists on the roads increased garages could make more profit by being able to fill a customer’s car outside their premises and to meet this demand companies like the Steel Barrel Company started to make and supply suitable equipment. Fig.7 shows a typical setup whereby fuel was stored in a tank (anywhere from 60 to 250 gallons). The example shown here is for 60 gallons and has fuel storage; a glass tube system showing the remaining quantity in the tank; a hand-cranking mechanism for dispensing the fuel; a long hose for reaching the car; and a graduated scale to show the amount delivered.

The first filling stations in the UK appeared around 1913 but only really started to gain popularity in the 1920s. The AA opened a roadside filling station in 1920 to promote the use of Benzole (the UK manufactured as opposed to the generally available fuel which came from Russia). There is a lovely film clip on the internet showing it in action. The opening of the AA station followed a press campaign in 1919 encouraging people to use Benzole rather than the Russian equivalent (partly as a result of the Russian revolution and anti-Bolshevik sentiment). Figs. 8 to 11 show the type of forecourt pumps available in 1920.

Fig. 8 through to fig. 11: Various styles and types of fuel pumps available during the 1920s

As with all things, there were a number of manufacturers making petrol pumps and over the next 20 years, the design and function changed very little, with the only major differences being in styling and in the introduction of electric pumps rather than hand-cranking. Examples showing the changes are fig.12 (Bowser 1923); fig.13 (Milwaukee 1923); fig.14 (Wayne 1928); fig.15 (Theo 1932) and finally fig.16 (The Bennett pump by E.P. Barrus 1939)