LOOKING BACK
B
ack in the mists of time, at the
window of a second-f loor f lat in
Glasgow, a toddler scans the
street below.
“Vauxhall Viva! Morris
Marina!” she shouts. “Ford
Cortina Estate!” Reader, I was that tiny nerd. An
obsession with cars took hold at three and is still
with me, more than 40 years later. I’d beg my
parents to drive me to the leisure centre or some
far-f lung park, not to swim or swing, but to eye
how they changed gears on our little red Mini.
I’d soon negotiated my way to the passenger
seat if it was just me and Mum in an empty car
park. She would screech “now!” as she depressed
the clutch and I clunked into second with two
chubby hands on the gearstick. ‘Driving’, even at
10mph, was a thrill I’ve never topped. Over the
years I’ve made a living out of driving, talking
and writing about cars, but still words can’t do
justice to that feeling of power and control,
acceleration and elation.
GEARING UP FOR FREEDOM
You may be a car nut like me or just reply, ‘Er... a
red one?” when asked what you drive, but there’s
no denying we have the motor car, in part, to
thank for the liberation of women, giving us the
opportunity to swerve the bus stop and become
mistresses of our own destinations and destinies.
Soon after the first be-goggled Edwardians
took to the road, their sisters whizzed off to
suffragette protests, crewed ambulances in the
First World War and trained as taxi drivers
when they didn’t have the means to pay for their
own wheels. Ex-nurse Sheila O’Neil was the first
women to set up as a London cabbie, though she
was refused a licence. One reporter commented
that her previous training would come in useful
when she ran over pedestrians. (Women driver
‘jokes’ were a thing, even in 1908.) It wasn’t until
1967 that a female cabbie got her badge.
Flappers and farmers’ wives, Land Girls and
dolly birds, we drove through the decades,
Opposite: the art of
closing a car door
gently. This page, from
top: an early Thelma
and Louise, 1910; a 1931
edition of Britannia and
Eve featuring a racy-
looking woman at the
wheel; Shirley Preston,
the first female licensed
taxi driver in London,
pictured inside her cab
