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Some of the Earliest Automobile Enthusiasts Signed Up to Help the Allies in WWI. They Also Ushered in the Mechanization of War
When the gentlemen drivers of Britain’s Royal Automobile Club Volunteer Force shipped their roadsters and racers to face the Germans, they became chauffeurs, couriers and inadvertent combatants
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It was growing dark on August 25, 1914, when Toby Rawlinson cautiously steered his silver Hudson roadster into the town of Landrecies, France, about 15 miles south of the Belgian border. A volunteer driver and scout attached to the British Expeditionary Force, Rawlinson, dressed in civilian clothes, drove down a cobblestone street, watching for enemy patrols. Suddenly, a battery of British horses galloped up behind him, forcing him off the road and onto a railway embankment. The car struck the curb. Its carburetor smashed against the asphalt. Copper induction pipes tore loose. The Hudson, he later wrote, was “hopelessly out of action.”
As he searched the town for a way to repair the car, a column of spike-helmeted German soldiers burst from the adjacent forest. British infantrymen scrambled into position. Rawlinson was caught in the open, looking for a towrope. Gunfire erupted nearby. Shrapnel from German field guns smashed onto rooftops. A commander shouted, “Fix bayonets!”
Rawlinson found himself stranded as a battle ignited around him. Yet, the way he later told the story in a memoir, Adventures on the Western Front, it was little more than an inconvenience. The gunfire made a “devil of a noise,” he allowed, and the flying bricks and tiles were “exceedingly unpleasant.” What followed, however, never left him. “Our machine guns held their fire until the last moment,” he wrote, “but when they did at last open fire, a really appalling slaughter resulted.” The German column “simply faded away, leaving the street up which they had been advancing absolutely choked with their wounded and dead.”
Rawlinson, 47, was the unofficial leader of an improbable unit: the Royal Automobile Club Volunteer Force, 25 motoring enthusiasts who had come to the killing fields of France at the outbreak of the Great War, bringing their own cars with them. They were ex-Olympic athletes, big-game hunters, Boer War veterans, sheltered heirs, notorious rakes, even the London-based American representative of a Cleveland automaker. Some were too old to enlist: Rawlinson had last carried a rifle while stationed in India during the reign of Queen Victoria. But they possessed two things that the British War Office urgently needed: speed and mobility.
Did you know? World War I, by the numbers
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By the end of the war, more than 8.5 million troops had died from battle wounds or disease and more than 21 million suffered injuries. Civilian deaths are best estimated at about 13 million.
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Sixty percent of battlefield deaths were caused by exploding artillery shells, according to the National World War I Museum (U.S.)
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Once trenches solidified in late 1914, the front lines moved little through the war's end—barely 6 miles, for example, during the historically deadly Battle of the Somme.
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According to the Imperial War Museum, more than 2 billion letters were delivered by the British Army Postal Service
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At a historical moment when automobiles were still primarily the expensive playthings of aristocrats, these men found themselves hurled into the grim mechanics of modern combat. For several harrowing months, they would serve as chauffeurs, couriers, ambulance drivers, scouts and unofficial combatants, their contributions long neglected and lost to time. They experienced the First World War’s fast-moving opening phase at intimate range, before Europe dug itself into static and stultifying trenches: the retreat to Paris, the Battle of the Marne, the siege of Antwerp, the carnage of Ypres. The drivers carried messages between Allied armies, identified enemy movements, plugged gaps in the line and, at critical moments, helped stave off collapse. All, miraculously, survived.
They were also at the vanguard of a new kind of warfare. The world they had known, of cavalry charges and hand-to-hand fighting, disappeared almost overnight into something mechanized and merciless. Within months, Europe was killing entrenched soldiers on an industrial scale with machine guns, poison gas, artillery barrages—and soon tanks and airplanes. The Royal Automobile Club’s volunteer drivers were not merely transporting officers and dispatches. They were witnessing the birth of modern war.
In the years before the war’s outbreak, British military planners had anticipated that the next European conflict would be industrial—and at least partly motorized. In 1913, the United Kingdom counted roughly 140,000 cars and 180,000 motorbikes. The last horse-drawn bus vanished from London’s streets the next year, replaced by motorbuses. Across the Atlantic, Henry Ford’s assembly lines were producing a Model T every 90 minutes—a pace no European manufacturer came close to matching, but a harbinger of the industrial tempo the war itself would soon adopt.
The Royal Automobile Club (RAC) stood at the center of this transformation. Founded in London in 1897 by Frederick Richard Simms, a pioneer designer of gasoline engines, the RAC opened a grand headquarters in 1911 on Pall Mall, near Buckingham Palace, complete with Turkish baths, a heated indoor swimming pool and a domed atrium. Winston Churchill, Arthur Conan Doyle and other luminaries fraternized beneath chandeliers in the elegant dining room and library. “I doubt if there be collectively a wealthier club in the world,” one Edwardian-era journalist once observed.
Like the War Office, club members speculated openly about a coming conflict with Germany. Conan Doyle imagined automobiles whisking a “swarm of sharpshooters” into battle. Edward Shrapnell-Smith, an influential British magazine editor and early advocate of motor transport, warned that the War Office’s existing vehicles “would have disgraced a third-class engineering shop.” Yet for most members, and for the British public at large, war remained an abstraction. In July 1914, drivers from England, France and Germany competed at the French Grand Prix in Lyon, even as Europe edged toward catastrophe. German Mercedes outran French Peugeots, an unsettling portent that few spectators paused to interpret. The RAC Journal continued to praise Germany as “a touring ground” of “infinite variety,” inhabited by “gentle, unsophisticated people.”
The illusion dissolved in late July. A month after Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb nationalist, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Alliances snapped into place. German armies surged into neutral Belgium, aiming to sweep through northern France and seize Paris. Britain accused Germany of violating Belgian sovereignty and, on August 4, declared war in response.
Within days, “thousands upon thousands of men, of every class, profession and age, already thronged the recruiting offices ... begging and beseeching to be employed,” recalled Christopher D’Arcy Bloomfield Saltern Baker-Carr, a 36-year-old retired infantry officer from Cornwall. Baker-Carr was among them. At the War Office, the quartermaster general listened to his entreaty—“I want to be in this show”—and offered advice. The army had proposed to the president of the Royal Automobile Club that he recruit a squad of drivers for the fight. “Go to the RAC and register your name,” Baker-Carr recalled him saying in his memoir, From Chauffeur to Brigadier. “They’ve offered to send cars to France.”
Baker-Carr, who had earned a medal for valor as a young rifleman in Sudan in 1898, hurried to the Pall Mall mansion. Hundreds of applicants were inundating the club. From the group, two dozen, including Baker-Carr, were chosen. Some were competitive motorcar racers, like Rawlinson, whose open-seat roadster, equipped with a four-cylinder engine, was the fastest model produced by the Hudson Motor Car Company, founded by eight Detroit entrepreneurs in 1909. Jimmy Radley, a daredevil driver, aviator, balloonist and heir to a Yorkshire coal-mining fortune, arrived in a pastel-blue 50-horsepower Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost; it was the same car that he’d driven in the 1913 Alpine Trials, in Austria, an 1,820-mile competition that included 19 mountain passes and more than 800 miles of difficult terrain. Radley had begun the race in typical style, by pouring a glass of champagne into his Rolls’ radiator.
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Other volunteers were wealthy amateurs. H. Stanley Westcott, a rare-automobile connoisseur, brought a four-cylinder racer built by the Diatto company of Turin, Italy. Founded as a high-quality carriage-maker in 1835, the firm sold roadsters to elite customers such as the Italian royal family and, during the war, the racer and future entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari. Later, Westcott switched to a sleek luxury automobile produced by the Spanish manufacturer Hispano-Suiza. Hugh Grosvenor, the second Duke of Westminster, a libertine aristocrat who divided his time among a 54-bedroom ancestral home in Cheshire, hunting estates in Scotland and France, and a Grosvenor Square mansion, contributed one of his 17 Rolls-Royces, though he often left the driving to his chauffeur. Frederic Abernathy Coleman, the London-based American representative of Cleveland’s White Motor Car Company, volunteered with his White Model 30, a gasoline-powered successor to the firm’s now-obsolete steam vehicles. The car, featuring an all-leather interior and nickel plating, had debuted at an English automobile show only in 1908. Described in a 1907 Vanity Fair cartoon as a “journalist, soldier, man of business, moralist and philosopher of the Peripatetic school,” Coleman had covered the Boxer Rebellion in China and was, he said, swept up in the Allies’ “righteous cause.” Together, they formed a unit unlike any other in the British Army.
On the evening of Friday, August 21, 1914, the volunteers assembled at Southampton and drove their cars into the hold of the troopship Gloucester Castle. They had packed spare tires, gasoline cans, tools and pumps, and wore improvised khaki uniforms and RAC armbands. Coleman had purchased his ill-fitting khakis from a theatrical costume designer in London and, Baker-Carr recalled, “looked like a prosperous banker in unsuitable fancy-dress.” In the smoking room on the main deck, amid a well-stocked commissary, “the wildest conjectures as to our future employment were being put forward,” Baker-Carr wrote. Some imagined themselves racing through enemy lines at 80 miles an hour, carrying messages “on which the fate of armies depended.” Others suspected that they would end up as glorified taxi drivers. Acquaintances were quickly made, Rawlinson noted, “which are never likely to be forgotten.”
They were sailing into a crisis. The Belgian government had fled Brussels the day before, and German troops had occupied the city without firing a shot. In its first engagement, the 90,000-man British Expeditionary Force, commanded by Field Marshal John French, had been forced to withdraw from Mons and was retreating south and west. Five German armies were advancing across northern France in accordance with the Schlieffen Plan, intent on outflanking the French and British forces and seizing Paris in a matter of weeks. There was, wrote one military observer, a “very real danger of annihilation.”
At dawn on August 22, the Gloucester Castle docked at Le Havre. Wearing a leather jacket, racing goggles and a cap, with a Union Jack mounted on the Hudson’s hood, the walrus-mustached Rawlinson led the 25-vehicle convoy inland toward Amiens, where the British had established a headquarters. By then the entire British Expeditionary Force had been ferried to the front by rail, which meant that few French, military or civilian, had yet to lay eyes on their allies. “The French military had a lot of questions about what the British commitment was going to be,” says Christopher Phillips, a lecturer in the history of warfare at Aberystwyth University in Wales and an expert in civilian-military cooperation on the Western Front in World War I. “The cars charging through villages gave a sense of presence. They announced that ‘the British are here.’ These guys conveyed real purpose.”
Rawlinson, the only volunteer fluent in French, knew the back roads of Normandy and Picardy intimately from his years of auto racing in the countryside. In village after village, crowds surged forward, showering the cars with flowers and fruit. “At least one member of the party suffered from a black eye,” Baker-Carr recalled, “caused by an apple thrown by a too-enthusiastic admirer to him while traveling at a speed of 50 miles an hour.” White dust lay inches deep on the roads, coating the drivers until they resembled flour millers. “I remember no road race which presented so many difficulties,” Rawlinson recalled.
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He was accustomed to difficult races. Born into one of Britain’s most formidable families, Alfred Rawlinson—known to everyone as Toby—had grown up steeped in ambition, scholarship and privilege. His father, Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, had been a soldier and diplomat in the Middle East who had won fame by deciphering ancient cuneiform inscriptions. Toby’s older brother, Henry, would rise to command armies on the Western Front. Rawlinson himself had excelled wherever danger and competition intersected. He served as an officer with the 17th Lancers in India, won a gold medal in polo at the 1900 Paris Olympics and raced a French Darracq roadster on the Isle of Man. He flew experimental aircraft alongside the Wright brothers and survived the kinds of crashes that killed others—including his friend Charles Rolls, co-developer of the Rolls-Royce, who died when his biplane plunged to the ground before a crowd in Bournemouth in July 1910.
France would test Toby in a different way. The volunteers were dispersed to bases across the north and put to work. They chauffeured officers between command posts and field positions, reported on the condition of roads, searched the countryside for waylaid or disoriented infantry units, helped direct French and British soldiers as they marched toward the front, and carried messages between Allied generals. While the Allies also employed horses and military trucks, the RAC members’ cars were designed for speed and could navigate broken roads and bypass congestion far faster than heavily loaded military vehicles. “Communication between command structures was critical during the early phase of the war,” Phillips says. French generals feared that their British allies might veer off to protect ports along the English Channel, leaving the French Army to defend Paris on its own. “There was a sense that if the British fell back ... the two forces would be disconnected.” In the end, the British Expeditionary Force fought beside the French, and the drivers, especially the French-speaking Rawlinson, “solidified the relationship between the two partners.”
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Still, Rawlinson at first dismissed some of his duties as those of a “London policeman at Piccadilly Circus.” But, with shifting lines and ubiquitous German patrols, the danger was all around them. In his first days, Coleman, the American, watched a blood-drenched, bullet-riddled French limousine limp into Dammartin. A German cavalry patrol had ambushed it, killing a passenger and mortally wounding the driver. The threat from their own side was just as real: French and British sentries, awash in rumors of infiltrators and unnerved by automobiles, often panicked at checkpoints. One night, Baker-Carr was escorting an officer, Major James Shea, to a rendezvous when he pulled up to a checkpoint before a bridge. As the sentry examined their documents, a British officer stepped into the glare of the Mercedes’ headlights and, apparently panicking, fired two shots at close range. The first bullet went between their heads, Baker-Carr wrote; the second smashed one of the lights. Shea berated the shooter, then calmly turned to Baker-Carr, his chauffeur. “All right, old boy,” he said. “We must get on.”
The roads themselves posed constant hazards. Often narrow and unpaved, they were clogged with infantry, horses, cattle, supply carts and caissons filled with wounded troops. Baker-Carr was driving a general through Le Cateau “as hard as God will let you,” he recalled, when a line of horse-drawn wagons suddenly emerged from a side street. He jammed on the brakes of his Mercedes and twisted the wheel, skidding onto the pavement. The car grazed a lamppost and stopped. Baker-Carr “finally emerged onto the roadway safe and sound, not a little pleased with (as I thought) rather a pretty piece of fancy driving,” he recalled. But the general stepped out shaking with rage: “‘My God, my God,’” he repeated, Baker-Carr recalled, “as he gave me one parting look of loathing.”
Not every officer reacted to his driving mishaps that way. Cruising through the countryside late one night, with the same Major Shea snoring in the seat beside him, Baker-Carr began to doze off. Moments later, he struck a cow broadside, sending the animal flying into the air. Then came the violent jolts as the wheels passed over its body, shaking the colonel awake.
“What was that, old boy?” he asked, sitting up with a start.
“A cow,” Baker-Carr replied.
“Did you kill it?”
“I think so.”
“Well done, old boy!” Shea exclaimed, then fell back to sleep with his head on Baker-Carr’s shoulder.
As the Germans continued their relentless advance, the war grew louder and closer. German and British biplane pilots dueled overhead in crude dogfights—sometimes shooting at each other with pistols. The British rear guard, under constant attack from German artillery, marched down roads with “tottering gait and bleeding feet, their eyes glazing from exhaustion...their spirit still unbroken,” Rawlinson wrote. The volunteers were called on repeatedly to evacuate British officers from command headquarters and establish new bases at a safer remove from the enemy. “Rumors of thousands of [German cavalry] in the woods nearby arrived every moment,” Baker-Carr wrote of a last-minute escape from Dammartin. “Typewriters and office equipment were flung into the waiting lorries, which were drawn up in serried ranks in front of the chateau.”
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Always on the move, the volunteers lived better than the infantry, though far from their usual luxury. Coleman slept in a stable, or in his car, or in deserted houses. He ate cold soup, bread and jam ransacked from abandoned pantries; and, one memorable morning, tinned corned beef, sardines and rum brought by a villager to the shelter of a haystack. Rawlinson foraged for chickens and eggs in deserted farms and curled up many nights in his Hudson—though he also enjoyed an incongruously comfortable night at the Château de Ferrières of Baron Édouard de Rothschild, with whom he’d hunted and played polo before the war.
One day, Coleman watched British troops escort a captured German soldier past a mob of French villagers. “A mere lad in gray, smooth-shaven, with downcast eyes and pale face,” he observed in a memoir, From Mons to Ypres With French, “he seemed absolutely overwhelmed by the threatening cries of the rabble.” The prisoner’s fear reminded Coleman of his own precarious situation. Coleman knew that, as an American citizen in an unmarked uniform, he would probably be viewed as a mercenary or spy if captured. Baker-Carr agreed. The Germans, he wrote, “would have been fully entitled to shoot [Coleman] on sight.” The plain khakis worn by the volunteers raised a red flag for many British officers as well: After Westcott had to abandon his prized Diatto racer during the battle in Landrecies, he approached a British officer at headquarters for permission to retrieve it. “The officer immediately suspected me for a spy, and I was placed under arrest,” he recalled in a story for the RAC Journal later that year. “It was only after great difficulty that my identity was accepted.”
In those first weeks, with the threat to Paris growing by the day, displaced civilians flooded the roads alongside retreating armies. To Rawlinson’s friend James Armand de Rothschild, Baron Édouard’s cousin, the whole nation seemed to be on the move: “refugees flying everywhere barefoot, half-clothed [and] starving...children and women old and young. It is a pitiable thing.” A Paris-born heir to the European banking fortune, Rothschild—known as Jimmy—had returned from his home in London in July and been drafted into the French Army as a clerk. Restless and humiliated by his back-office posting, he persuaded Rawlinson to arrange his transfer to the British Expeditionary Force as a driver-translator—though he had been dependent on chauffeurs his whole life and scarcely knew how to drive.
His lack of experience showed. After taking lessons in his Rolls-Royce, he confused the accelerator for the brake and ran over a curb in reverse, infuriating the colonel he was chauffeuring. In Amiens, he skidded into a telegraph pole and destroyed the axle, but he was back behind the wheel before long. “I have got a splendid little Peugeot car, very fast and specially built for campaigning,” he wrote to his wife. Soon afterward, he swerved to avoid a truck and flipped the vehicle, which landed on top of him, crushing his pelvis. “I spent one night in hospital thoroughly ashamed.” His days as a driver were over.
By early September 1914, the Germans had advanced to within 25 or so miles of Paris. As citizens dug trenches and unspooled barbed wire around the city’s perimeter, Rawlinson drove a staff officer to the Hôtel des Invalides for a meeting with the city’s military governor, General Joseph-Simon Gallieni. The stream of refugees fleeing ahead of the enemy was the “greatest I ever saw,” he recalled. The French civilian government had fled to Bordeaux the day before. Any Parisians who could afford a train ticket followed, crowding the Gare d’Austerlitz and the Gare de Lyon in panic and abandoning their baggage as conductors squeezed ever more passengers aboard the rail cars. To Rothschild, who drove his Rolls-Royce into Paris twice to scavenge food for his mess, the capital felt like a “dead city.” Baker-Carr, delivering a message from Field Marshal John French to the British ambassador, saw not a single vehicle on the Champs-Élysées. Hotels and shops were shuttered, and a “deathly silence” prevailed. “The capitulation of the French capital seemed to most of us to be a foregone conclusion,” Coleman wrote.
Along a 160-mile front north of the Marne River, one million German soldiers faced around 100,000 British and more than one million French troops, preparing for what would be one of the war’s bloodiest and most consequential battles. The Royal Automobile Club’s most experienced drivers, including Rawlinson and Radley, spent days and nights racing along back roads outside Paris—tracking German movements, evading patrols and delivering intelligence to British and French commanders. One evening Rawlinson strayed into a no man’s land thick with German troops and drove 13 miles with his headlights off, the road illuminated only by moonlight. Later, while attempting to cross the Marne River, he nearly plunged off a bridge that had been destroyed, looking down on the wreckage of half a dozen vehicles that had failed to brake in time.
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The war was already shifting toward industrial-scale slaughter, yet Rawlinson and Coleman also witnessed the last flickers of a dying era: a cavalry charge. “Oh, the fascination of it!” Coleman rhapsodized, watching from a hillside. “The glory of a galloping regiment ... flowing over a green field in line of squadrons!” The “rolling thunder of many thousand hoofs” stirred Rawlinson’s nostalgia for his days as a lancer in India. Here the violence remained shockingly intimate: One trooper drove his lance through a German, Coleman noted, “till his hand touched the doomed man’s breast.” Amid the fighting, Coleman and his White roadster were pressed into service ferrying injured soldiers to a field hospital. “The wounded were tossed into the tonneau, into the front seats, on the folded hood at the rear ... wherever space could be found,” he recalled. “Bullets sang all about. Someone hanging on one of the steps was hit, and cried out as he dropped off.”
Elsewhere along the Marne, artillery and machine-gun fire cut down tens of thousands of exposed soldiers on both sides. The French line appeared close to collapse until the night of September 6, when Gallieni dispatched 3,000 reservists in 600 Parisian taxis to reinforce the depleted army. The arrival of the taxi brigade lifted morale. Much like the Royal Automobile Club volunteers working closely with the British Expeditionary Force, says Phillips, “this was a demonstration that we’re all in this together—the civilians and the army. It was a turning point.”
Soon afterward, French aviators and RAC drivers observed a 30-mile gap opening between two overstretched German divisions. Allied forces poured into the gap, threatening encirclement and forcing a German retreat north to the Aisne River, where both sides dug in. The Great War’s character was changing from a rapid invasion into a long, attritional struggle of trenches and fortifications.
James Rothschild took somber stock of the ruined countryside and the stacks of corpses, reflecting on the transformation of conflict. “Modern warfare ... has become largely a question of machinery and chemistry,” he wrote to his wife. “Explosives, airplanes ... wireless and motor transport.” After six days of fighting and as many as 500,000 casualties, Rawlinson declared, “The fierce and long-planned thrust of the German Army on Paris was completely defeated.” With the collapse of the Schlieffen Plan, the “Germans became locked into fighting a two-front war,” says Phillips. “From the German perspective, the war was lost at the Battle of the Marne.”
In late September, Rawlinson traveled briefly to London, where he bought “some excellent machine guns” and mounted one on the Hudson. The purchase proved prescient. He was about to be dispatched on his most dangerous mission as a volunteer.
With hundreds of thousands of German troops bogged down along the Aisne, the German command initiated a new offensive at Antwerp, hoping to use the Belgian fortress city as a springboard to seize ports along the English Channel. “The Germans had realized the incalculable value of the coast and were making frantic efforts to possess themselves of it,” Baker-Carr noted. “We, too, had awakened to the danger and were desperately endeavoring to avert this catastrophe.” The British Expeditionary Force quietly withdrew from France in stages to face the German threat. Rawlinson joined a convoy of drivers escorting his brother, General Henry Rawlinson, on a 300-mile journey from France to take over the defense of the besieged city. He brought 250 rounds of ammunition “for the benefit of any [German cavalry] who might offer themselves as a target.” But when he left his Hudson briefly unattended in Bruges, curious civilians commandeered his gun and accidentally sprayed the town with bullets. Luckily the weapon had been tilted upward, and the rounds “safely cleared the heads of the crowds in the street.”
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Churchill, the civilian head of the Royal Navy, arrived by special train in Antwerp on October 3, followed by a small naval brigade under his command. But German artillery fire forced the defenders to abandon the city, and Churchill and Henry Rawlinson withdrew alongside them. On long and especially hazardous journeys, the volunteers sometimes traveled in pairs. For the next week, Toby Rawlinson and his traveling companion, a fellow RAC volunteer known only as Borritt, carried top-secret messages between commanders in Belgium and in France, helping coordinate the deployment of British troops along a new front line near the Belgian city of Ypres, a critical geographical barrier protecting the Allied ports at Calais and Dunkirk. Villages along the coastal route lay eerily deserted; German patrols were rumored to be lurking in the marshes. Rawlinson also spent part of the journey with his longtime friend Hugh Grosvenor, who always seemed to procure the best food and accommodations on the front lines; they scoured the Belgian countryside looking for a suitable headquarters for the general staff, eventually finding a chateau near Ostend. Once, when Rawlinson spotted an enemy barricade near Ypres, he concealed the Hudson behind a hedge and opened fire with his machine gun on a German officer and a motorcycle courier, killing both men. He took the overcoat of one of the dead as a souvenir. His transformation from chauffeur to courier to combatant was complete. “I had no compunction whatever in killing any number of Germans,” he wrote.
In November 1914, the Allies made a stand around Ypres that cemented the reality of brutal trench warfare. Day after day, the German infantry was hurled against the British front line and repulsed with massive casualties. Shells rained down on British troops sheltering in “shallow scratches in the ground that in those days answered to the name of trenches,“ wrote Baker-Carr. Thousands more shells fell on the medieval town. “Gradually, Ypres was deserted,” Baker-Carr wrote. “An oppressive silence reigned as one drove through the square, accentuated by the ear-splitting burst of heavy shells.” The Allies held Ypres at a fearsome cost: roughly 130,000 soldiers on each side killed or injured.
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Soon after the horror of Ypres, the men of the Royal Automobile Club went their separate ways. In the new immobilized war of mud and parapets, the unit became obsolete. Rawlinson drove his Hudson—pocked with bullet holes, still flying a frayed Union Jack and bearing two spiked German helmets mounted on the grill—to Boulogne, drawing cheering crowds all along the way, before putting it on a ferry back to England. He soon returned to France and fought with the British Expeditionary Force until he was wounded at the Battle of Aubers Ridge in May 1915. Back in England, he organized London’s air defenses against zeppelin attacks. Months before the armistice, now promoted to colonel, he gathered intelligence in the Caucasus. Then, following the Allied victory, he oversaw the disarmament of Turkish forces in Anatolia, where the Ottoman government imprisoned him for 20 months as a suspected spy. His machine gun, Rawlinson wrote, “traveled with me everywhere until it was eventually taken from me by the Turks at Erzeroum ... in March 1919.”
Rawlinson’s friend James Rothschild, whose stint as a chauffeur had been disastrous, received a second chance at glory. He served as a major in the British Army’s Jewish Legion in Palestine in 1917-18, earned the Distinguished Conduct Medal for recruiting volunteers there, and later became a member of Parliament, philanthropist and prominent figure in the Zionist movement. Hugh Grosvenor—known as “Bendor,” after one of his grandfather’s racehorses—followed a darker path. He became a Nazi sympathizer, notorious for his antisemitic rants and membership in far-right pro-German clubs, and is best known today for his long affair with famed French fashion designer Coco Chanel (who had a pro-Nazi streak herself).
Frederic Coleman, the American businessman and journalist, wrote two vivid memoirs based on his experience in the corps, but he soon disappeared from history. Baker-Carr, like Rawlinson, parlayed his service in the RAC Volunteer Force into a return to military life—and into the mechanization of war itself. He successfully lobbied Secretary of State for War Herbert Kitchener to create the Machine Gun Corps, helped develop some of the first tanks deployed on the Western Front in 1916 and rose to brigadier general. He often thought back to his days as an RAC chauffeur, speeding through the idyllic French countryside in his Mercedes, still holding out hope for a swift victory. “Little did we dream,” he wrote, “that we had before us more than four years of misery, mud and slaughter.”
In Britain, the Royal Automobile Club is still regarded as one of the country’s most prestigious private members’ clubs, with its Pall Mall mansion and a 350-acre country estate in Surrey. The volunteer force it sponsored has long since slipped from public memory, but traces of its efforts can be found within the personal recollections, photographs and memorabilia of its members’ families.
One December day, I traveled to Norfolk, in East Anglia, to meet descendants of Toby Rawlinson, who died suddenly in June 1934 after a brief illness at the age of 67. At Heydon Hall, a 16th-century estate, I met Sarah Jane Bulwer-Long, Rawlinson’s 87-year-old granddaughter. “Oliver Cromwell climbed a tree here as a boy,” she told me, pointing out 400-year-old portraits of Cromwell and his mortal foe, Charles I, that hang on the manor’s drawing room walls. Traces of her own family lie interspersed among older relics. From a chest of drawers, Bulwer-Long extracted a booklet with a black cover: her grandfather’s 1910 international aviator’s certificate, adorned with a faded photo-graph of Toby in his crisp RAC uniform.
Bulwer-Long’s younger brother, Andrew Rawlinson—known to everyone as “Puddy”—lives in a cottage in nearby Gunthorpe, where he serves as the unofficial keeper of the Rawlinson family flame. He worked on two documentaries about the Battle of the Somme, the 1916 cataclysm in which his great-uncle, Lieutenant General Henry Rawlinson, and General Douglas Haig sent tens of thousands of young men to their deaths on the bloodiest day in British history. Framed photographs of Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, the cuneiform decipherer, and a young, dashing Toby in his 1886 cavalry uniform hang in the hall. The library is stocked with World War I histories, including Toby’s three memoirs and an out-of-print biography, Toby: A Real Life Ripping Yarn, by A.J. Smithers, a British World War II veteran and military historian.
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This article is a selection from the September/October 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine
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A balding man with a rosy, weathered face and blue-gray eyes, Puddy Rawlinson never knew his grandfather, who died six years before he was born. Puddy’s father, Frederick, said little about Toby’s exploits. “I was fascinated, but my father was a bad tutor,” Puddy told me as we sipped tea in his study. Frederick had been closer to his father’s older brother, Henry, Puddy said, even joining him on big-game safaris in the 1920s, when the elder Rawlinson was serving as commander in chief of the British Army in India.
Few other family members gave much thought to preserving the trophies from Toby’s service. Puddy remembers seeing his grandfather’s tattered Union Jack at the home of Puddy’s older brother, Tony, mounted on the same wooden cricket stump that had once been fastened to the front of the Hudson. But it disappeared decades ago, and Puddy suspects it was thrown out. “In those days, memorabilia wasn’t really thought about,” he told me. The two spiked German helmets, or Pickelhauben, also vanished.
Some time ago, Puddy began searching for the ultimate prize: the Hudson race car. He asked the Royal Automobile Club for help, to no avail. He sent the editors of Motor Sport magazine a letter seeking information from the public. “They published it,” he told me, “but no one replied.” Today, the only trace of the Hudson is an image in the family’s hands: a sepia photo of Toby Rawlinson just after the Battle of Ypres, clad in his leather jacket, a cigarette in his gloved left hand, poised confidently at the wheel of the motorcar that served him so well.
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