“7.5 tons, 85 brake horsepower, compression-ignition engined furniture van, March 1936. 1,200 cubic feet (internal van capacity for furniture)”, says the caption in the Archer Cowley album page..
This is very much the kind of van with which I became familiar in my young days (age 7 in 1948). The year 1936 is well-before the move of head-office to Park End Street, the van saying: “Head office: Pembroke Street, St Aldates”.
Clearly (to me) this view is taken at Christ Church college, perhaps in Tom Quad(rangle). I got to know Tom quad very well in my school-days at the Christ Church prep-school in Brewer Street, off St Aldates, Oxford, from 1948 to 1954, not least because every morning we walked across Tom quad in a crocodile, en-route to the Latin Chapel in the cathedral, for morning prayers, led by the headmaster. I also recollect a summer-holiday job ‘on the vans’ at Archer Cowley & Co in the late 1950s, in which we were packing up and into book-boxes, all the thouseands of books possessed by a certain ‘Canon Jenkins’ of Christ Church. His dates were 1877-1959 (according to Wikipedia) so perhaps the job in question was after his death in 1959. His books were stacked everywhere, including on every step of every staircase.
These vans would presumably be capable of steady road speeds (subject to traffic) of 45 to 55 mph, perhaps. This is very comparable with the best goods train speeds, so, from, shall we say, the mid-1930s, the speed of road-travel had caught-up with the speed of rail travel which had been available since (at a reasonable estimate) the mid-1860s i.e. 70 years earlier. And James Archer had made use of the rail facility to speed his customers’ inventories to their destinations since 1865, or even before. This may explain or partly-explain his success in establishing his transport business and increasing its size. (5.11.16).
After James Archer’s retirement from 1919 onwards, the Archer Cowley business changed from general transport of all sorts of goods, and including supply of sand, gravel and other ‘ballast’ - type materials, to purely furniture removals and storage, which it certainly was in my young days in the 1940s and 1950s. And the mode of transport changed from ‘just post-horse-drawn-transport systems integrated with rail-hauled furniture containers’ to diesel-engined pantechnicons capable of modern road-speeds and manoeuvrable to access almost all property requirements.
In the fifty years from 1919 until 1969 during which WGRA was part of the Archer Cowley & Co (“AC&Co” hereafter) business, and it passed onwards to Cantays, who subsequently sold it to Robinsons Removals, the AC&Co business was operating mainly in the era of ‘road-only’ transport, rather than "road-rail-road”, which had been James Archer’s watchword and, perhaps, the key to his financial success. This arose from the fact that in the 20th century, road transport caught-up and overtook rail transport in terms of its operational characteristics and advantages.