KIPLING THE MOTORIST
Kipling joined the ranks of automobilists at a time of running warfare between the begoggled motorists and the 'book 'em or bust' police, in collusion it seemed with quick-to-fine magistrates. Along the Brighton road, organised speed-traps, a measured distance with hidden policemen wielding stop-watches, caught the unfortunate motorists, who had no means of knowing when they were exceeding the speed-limit - 12 mph.	'...While we waited outside, the fat man on the grey horse rode up and entered into loud talk with his brother magistrates. He said to one of them - for I took the trouble to note it down - ‘It falls away from my lodge gates, dead straight, three quarters of a mile. I’d defy anyone to resist it. We rooked seventy pounds out of ‘em last month. No car can resist the temptation .... (The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat, 1913)

Kipling lost no time in nailing his colours to the motorists' mast, for once in his life in conflict with the Law, by ridiculing its perpetrators in boisterous motoring tales, such as Steam Tactics; in a series of verse parodies, The Muse among the Motors; and in a short play, The Marred Drives of Windsor , in which Shylock's bond is a Third Party Risks Policy, and a motorised Ariel sings a song beginning: 'Where the car slips there slip I -/In a Sunbeam's path I lie!/...'

His first car was a capricious American Steamer, that ran, when she ran at all, on a mixture of petrol, steam and water. Her water tank needed refilling very twenty miles or so. Nicknamed the 'Holy Terror', her only virtue seems to have been her (comparative) silence. 'But', as he pointed out to a friend, 'so is a corpse ... Her lines are lovely ... but as a means of propulsion she is a nickel-plated fraud ...'