Perfect!
Not many pics around..this was quite hard!
Here's an article about:
The prototype of today’s motor caravan was probably the creation of monocled Noel Pemberton-Billing, motoring and aviation adventurer.
Stoker, tram driver, chauffeur, garage owner and a horse trader in South Africa, he learned to fly in a morning at Brooklands and designed and built his own flying boats. His Pemberton-Billing Aircraft Company used the telegraphic address "Supermarine", which was adopted by the company as its new name when he left to become an MP.
Joining the Royal Naval Air Service, encouraged by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, he planned the first-ever bombing raid on the Zeppelin sheds at Friedrichshafen by four Avro 504s.
Pemberton-Billing went into parliament to protest at the conduct of the war. Supermarine prospered to make the Spitfire in the 1930s, and he went to Australia with his latest invention, long-playing gramophone records.
In Britain he published aeroplane magazines and a weekly called The Imperialist, and set up Pemberton-Billing Economic Homes for returning servicemen.
In 1927, according to Jeremy Bacon of the learned Society of Automotive Historians, Pemberton-Billing established the next milestone in the history of the motor caravan.
He called it the Road Yacht. Based on a 17hp American Erskine, stretched to a 3.66m wheelbase, its ovoid body had a galley, shower and lavatory, and was very properly divided into a gentleman’s cabin and a lady’s cabin, complete with dressing tables.
The gentleman’s had a wardrobe, the lady’s a three-panel mirror, and both had carpets, curtains, bedding and feather pillows. In the front was a chair for the driver, bench seats over the front wings and a table on top of the engine, which was inside the cabin. The Land Yacht was 5.49m long and 1.98m wide.
Pemberton-Billing described it as a portable hotel and put it on the market for 375 guineas (393.75), complete with wine bins alongside the engine (not good for your Chardonnay perhaps), a bookcase with 50 books, an electric glow fire and dinner service for six.
Even with a radio and gramophone, however, the Road Yacht did not catch on. With an ice machine, oil gas cooker under a hinged white sink, hot and cold water, and electric lighting, it was cumbersome, with a top speed of 45mph.
Pemberton-Billing did take it to America in 1930 - where he was trying to sell another invention, a forerunner of the jukebox - but it was perhaps just as well he never got his Land Yacht to the West Coast. At 45mph he would have spent a lot of time looking in the mirror.
