The Jeremy Collins share certificate collection

At a recent seminar of the Society of Automotive Historians in Britain (the SAHB), Richard Roberts (who is also a board member of the SAHB), was able to celebrate the receipt of an exceptionally generous donation from Jeremy Collins, an SAHB member, of over 400 motoring share certificates. Jeremy has decided to sell his non-motoring certificates at auction but wished to donate the motoring ones to the Richard Roberts Archive so that they would be accessible in perpetuity to researchers. The RRA is completely independent of the SAHB but has very close links to it; three SAHB board members are also trustees of the RRA: Richard, Craig Horner and Peter Moss.

Richard Roberts receiving the generous donation from Jeremy Collins. He is holding just one of over ten binders containing over 400 motoring share certificates.

The certificates are magnificent. They come from Europe, the USA and the UK, and date from the earliest days of motoring (1896 is the earliest we have found so far) to very nearly the present day. 

They are without doubt a form of advertising – because they promote, in the beautiful graphic illustrations printed upon them, the products of their companies.

Here are some examples…

A 1918 certificate from Bellanger Automobiles Bellanger Frères. The company made cars from 1912 to 1925 and was taken over by Peugeot. The coupons below the certificate are used by the shareholder, who has to send in one coupon to the company every time there is a dividend, in order to be paid.

Louis Blériot was most famed for the first flight across the English Channel in 1909. But he was also an inventor, and developed, as early as 1897, the world’s first practical headlamp for motor cars, using a compact integral acetylene generator. This certificate for his lamp company dates from 1905. Here is a typical example of a lovely, engraved illustration that symbolises the company’s products – in this case headlamps for ships, trains and motor cars of 1905. But, of course, not yet aeroplanes.

Brouhot was a minor maker of motor cars in France from 1898 to 1911, a spin-off from the original company making agricultural machinery. This is the possible reason, in this certificate from 1906, for the opposing illustrations of a woman in the countryside and a man in an industrial scene. The illustration at the top shows that motorists in these early times were often women; this was not just wilful thinking by Brouhot.

Another French share certificate, but this time with an important English connection. Doriot, Flandrin & Parant (D.F.P.) was a French car maker based in Courbevoie, Seine between 1906 and 1926. D.F.P. started to make its own engines in 1912. The 2-litre 12/15 was used by W. O. Bentley in a tuned version with aluminium alloy pistons to race at Brooklands. The aluminium pistons were fitted to some 12/40 hp production cars from 1914. After designing rotary aero engines for the First World War, Bentley started his own car manufacturing company in 1919. The rest is history.

This certificate is difficult to date: the handwritten date is either from 1904 or, more probably, from 1914. It is for the British subsidiary of the German Daimler company but uses the name given to the cars from 1901 onwards, Mercedes, after the daughter of Emil Jellinek, an Austrian entrepreneur who promoted Daimler cars among the highest circles of society. He guaranteed to sell many of the new and advanced Daimlers of 1901 if they were renamed in this way. Daimler merged with Benz in 1926, and the car’s name became Mercedes-Benz – but the company is still called Daimler-Benz to this day.

Here is another certificate for a subsidiary of a company in a foreign land, in this case the Netherlands. Hispano-Suiza was founded in 1904 in Spain and eventually had factories in Spain and France producing luxury cars, aero engines, lorries and weapons. This certificate dates from 1951, by which time Hispano-Suiza’s Spanish operation had been sold to a Spanish state-owned vehicle manufacturer, and the French arm had ceased making cars but manufactured aero engines and components. The remarkable feature of this document lies in one of the signatures; Birkigt. Marc Birkigt was a Swiss engineer who co-founded Hispano-Suiza, (hence the “Suiza” in the name). He was one of the great geniuses of car engineering, alongside Royce, Bugatti, Bentley, Roesch and Miller. He died only two years after the date of this certificate.

This Italian certificate from 1911 has a relatively unremarkable illustration of a motor car – until it is inspected more closely. The driver (on the right of the car, as with most Italian cars until well after World War II), is accompanied by a passenger who seems confident to indicate that the car will be turning right at the otherwise confusing junction. No wonder: this company manufactured automatic signalling machines – not to inform following drivers but to direct the driver of this vehicle as to which way to turn. It used a continuous tape running through a box, seen here on the right of the certificate. A primitive but possibly effective early predecessor of the “Satnav”.