This is Colin Borley’s 1919 Ten HP as it was around 70 years before Colin acquired it as a pile of bits. Colin tells us:
The car was all there, including the second spare wheel visible in this 1920s picture, but minus the steering column to dash board mounting bracket, which I had to make. The rest had been scattered around several garages and sheds. If I’d hunted long enough I bet I would have found this bracket too! The engine was in a wheel barrow and the body perched on a shopping trolley. I finally found the exhaust manifold in the bottom of a 45 gallon oil drum full of alternators, and when I described the missing magneto to a guy who was hovering about, he said: “Oh I think I put that in the shed on my allotment.” And sure enough, there it was – a genuine BTH ML made at the BTH factory in Coventry, which was right next door to Singer’s Read Street works.
The rebuild took me 15 months, since when the car has won a prize at Alexandra Palace Classic Car Show in 2002, been to several NEC shows, driven on the Brooklands banking and attended many events annually, including ASCO’s 2014 Singer National weekend in Cheshire.
I bought the 1920s card from E-Bay, but there was nothing written on the back, and despite several articles in the Romford papers, where we think it lived most of its life, nothing has surfaced to establish any links.
