Pom's Prince Henry

When Laurence 'Pom' Pomeroy, the erudite technical editor of The Motor magazine in the early postwar years, was given the chance to purchase a one-owner Vauxhall Prince Henry in 1939, he jumped at the chance.

The Prince Henry was perhaps the greatest engineering achievement of his father, also called Laurence. Pomeroy Senior had joined Vauxhall in 1905 and over the next decade was responsible for designing the cars that were instrumental in making Vauxhall's name as a manufacturer of high-quality sporting machines. The Prince Henry, a development of the A-Type of 1910, is considered by many to be the first 'sports car', well before that term was coined.

This example was ordered in 1914 by T W Badgery, a Worcester leather magnate. He clocked up more than 140,000 of spirited driving over the next 15 years before retiring the car from active service. Pom's excitement with his new acquisition was stifled by the onset of World War Two, but Badgery offered to keep the car safely garaged until hostilities ceased. Pom eventually collected his Prince Henry in 1945, and the exciting sprint back to London, racing friend Marcu Chambers in his HRG 1500, was just the first of countless spirited drives Pom enjoyed over the next 20 years of ownership.

Vauxhall historian Nic Portway gives a detailed account of the Prince Henry's design and construction, and an overview of this well known example's history, in the latest issue of The Automobile, which is out now.