The pioneer of British motoring is recognised.

First published June 15 1996 in the Car 96 section of The Times. Now reproduced with the kind permission of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, a founder member of The Brooklands Society.

Lord Montagu of Beaulieu recounts the achievement of Frederick Simms, founder of the RAC and Daimler.
Simms at the trigger of a quick-firing gun on his pioneering quadricycle armoured car. His theories on mechanised warfare also saw the creation of a forerunner to the tank.

The pioneer of British motoring is recognised.

Frederick H. Simms, for whom a plaque was unveiled this week, is the one man above all others who should be commemorated in this centenary year of the British Motor Industry. Yet although people remember the rascally Harry Lawson, who used the foundations laid by Simms to build the British motor industry in 1896, the far-sighted Simms is often overlooked.

Born in Hamburg in 1863 - the same year as Henry Ford and Henry Royce - the young Simms was an inveterate inventor and one of the first people to realise the commercial potential of the compact internal combustion engine devised in the 1880s by Gottlieb Daimler.

Simms acquired the British rights to the new power unit, which he began importing In 1891. On February 8 that year, he wrote a letter containing the first recorded use of the term "motor car". Simms also claimed to have invented the name "petrol".

Simms rented a railway arch beneath Putney Bridge Station as the workshop where his mechanic Jo van Toll installed German Daimler engines in British-built boat hulls. It was under those arches that the plaque was unveiled this week by the chief executives of the RAC and the Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders, both of which he created.

The Daimler agency proved so successful that in 1893 Simms founded the Daimler Motor Syndicate. Two years later, Simms announced his plan to form the Daimler Motor Company Limited, to build Daimler engines in this country.

He founded the Motor-Car Club and was named vice-president, but the MCC was soon to be bound up in the affairs of Harry Lawson, a notorious company promoter whose British Motor Syndicate aimed to control the manufacture and sales of motor vehicles in Britain. Lawson offered Simms Ł35,000 in cash for the Daimler patent rights, which Simms accepted.

But the German Daimler company was drifting towards bankruptcy. After quarrelling with the board, Herr Daimler and his engineer had withdrawn at the end of 1892 to develop horseless carriages. Simms offered the German Daimler directors Ł17,100 for the Daimler licence, provided that Herr Daimler rejoined the company. Thus Lawson's money assured the futures of both the English and German Daimler companies.

The Coventry Daimler company took nothing from Herr Daimler but his name, basing its production cars on the French Panhard & Levassor rather than the already obsolete German Daimler.

Simms drifted away from the company he had helped create, but was pursuing new interests. His Motor-Car Club, which had organised the first London-Brighton Run in November 1896, had become little more than a mouthpiece for Lawson. In 1897, Simms founded the Automobile Club of Great Britain & Ireland. A decade later, the patronage of King Edward VII transformed the ACGBI into the Royal Automobile Club.

In 1902, worried by the random proliferation of motor shows, Simms also established the SMMT as a "strong, responsible and corporate body of the motor trade". The society organised its first show at the Crystal Palace in January 1903.

His theories on mechanised warfare saw the building in 1899 of a lightly-armoured quadricycle with quick-firing gun and an armoured "war-car", the ancestor of the tank.

His Simms Manufacturing Company produced engines of all sizes, and Simms Motor Units, which he ran until 1935, specialised in ignition, lighting and starting equipment. He continued working as a consultant, and died in 1944 at the age of 80.