Jowetts Of The 1920s by Noel Stokoe Amberley Publishing, £14.99

As boys, William and Benjamin Jowett helped out in their father’s blacksmith’s business in Girlington.

They were involved in mechanical repairs and, by the late 1890s, were working there fulltime.

Sharing a dream of building their own car, Benjamin and William went on to set up their own business, The Jowett Motor Manufacturing Company, in 1901, each investing £30.

For some time the brothers had wanted to design a better engine, with less noise and vibration, and their experiments led to a twin-cylinder horizontally-opposed unit, rated at 6.4 horsepower. The engine was used in the first prototype tiller-steered car built by the Jowett brothers and registered AK on February 14, 1906.

A local coachbuilder built the vehicle, described by the brothers as the world’s first purpose-built ‘light car’, and the first batch of 12 cars was built between 1910 and 1911. By the 1920s the Jowett car was well known as a rugged, reliable form of transport, much beloved of its owners, who formed an Owner’s Club, now the oldest one-make car club in the world.

The new Jowett factory opened in Idle in 1919 and the first car produced was the Jowett Seven, with commercial models following in 1922.

During the decade after the First World War Jowett’s manufactured thousands of their economical cars and light vans to appreciative, enthusiastic motorists.

In this book, the latest in Amberley’s Road Transport series, Noel Stokoe brings the Bradford company’s prolific 1920s period to life. The owner of Jowetts for two decades – he currently has two – Noel is historian of the Jowett Car Club, which celebrated its 90th anniversary last year.

Beautifully illustrated with photographs of old Jowett cars, this book is a must-read for enthusiasts and also enjoyable to leaf through.

I particularly liked the chapter on Jowett advertising, which Noel says has a “style all of its own”. Advertising began when the brothers moved to the purpose-built factory at Five Land Ends, Idle.

“From the very start of their advertising the main theme was to extol the fact that the cars were sturdy and strong and, above all, cheap to run and maintain,” writes Noel. “The style in which this was done was unique as far as I am concerned, as many adverts never pictured the cars at all but were full of poetic prose, asking the reader to send for a sales brochure. Another popular theme was to wax lyrical about the virtues of Yorkshire, and if possible make fun of Lancashire at the same time!

“It was as early as 1923 when one of Jowett’s best-known slogans was first penned, ‘The little engine with the big pull’. This of course was the first of many.”

“All the best of Yorkshire except the pudding,” says one slogan, next to a photo of a Jowett car at Ilkley Moor. In another advert, a little girl opens a car door for her mother as the father surveys, with pride, “the Brown family coach, which happened to be blue”.