The early 1900s saw an increased availability of motor vehicles. The volume of motor vehicles on British roads merited changes to legislation to secure safety while encouraging road use. The Motor Car Act 1903 made reckless driving a crime, addressed regulations concerning the capacity of vehicle breaking, while upping the speed limit on public roads to 20 mph. This 1903 Act, and later Road Act 1920, also initiated measures to licence drivers of motor cars and motor bikes. Drivers were not required to pass a test, but the introduced licences were a means to individually number and establish ownership of vehicles by the council where the driver lived. Here in Archives & Collections we hold a small collection of documents concerning vehicle registrations issued by the Birmingham Motor Taxation Office under the collection reference MS 1070.
This is the licence and registration book for a grey, two-seater, touring car made by Day, Leeds. The engine dates from 1914. The car was given the licence number ‘0 4107’.
It was registered in September 1921 by Walter H Rains and was renewed annually. The car changes hands several times during the period of this book, passing to a William Arthur Hunt, to a William Henry Holden, and finally to a Robert Sell. The last date on this specific licence book being 30th September 1925.
The above document is Robert Sell entering an application for a new book for 0 4107. This is when the records we have for this vehicle end and is reflective of the collection as a whole. The surviving material from the Birmingham Motor Taxation Office only consists of the vehicle logbooks and licence renewals with some related correspondence of vehicles registered in Birmingham in 1921, for the ‘0’ series (there are no photographs in the collection either – the image of Herbert Austin comes from our general photographic collections).
Sadly, even within this single year and series, there are gaps and missing books. The sequence of records we hold is just a tiny portion of what must have been produced by the Motor Taxation office during its time. The rest of the records were destroyed when the office moved from Oozells Street in the mid-1970s. These few boxes of licences were saved by a private individual who donated them to Archives & Collections and they can be viewed by appointment in the Wolfson Centre.
References
- Catalogue of MS 1070 available from http://calmview.birmingham.gov.uk/CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=MS+1070&pos=1
- Wikipedia page about the Motor Car Act 1903 available from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_Car_Act_1903
- History of road safety https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/history-of-road-safety-and-the-driving-test/history-of-road-safety-the-highway-code-and-the-driving-test#:~:text=Driver%20licences%20were%20first%20introduced,20%20shillings%20(%C2%A31).
Rachel Clare, Senior Archives Assistant
The Iron Room 
What a shame that all those records were destroyed. I would love to have seen if my father’s car(s) were amongst them