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When Emily Pankhurst, the suffragette, came to visit her friend Flora Drummond, known in suffragette circles as “The General”, in Pirnmill, just across the water from Carradale, she was driven about the island by Robert Anderson whose family were the Pirnmill carriage-hirers and blacksmiths - Robert’s son, John, was a keen photographer and published local picture postcards. By 1907, Andersons owned a number of horse-drawn carriages and were even doing “Round The Island” tours of Arran using a horse-drawn charàbanc. Then, in 1913, John issued an ultimatum to his father that, if nothing were done to modernise the family business, he would go off to Canada to join his uncle. The Andersons did ‘modernise’ and obtained the first motor car and lorry dealership on the island and were soon and for long selling ‘Model T’s’ and other Ford vehicles throughout Arran and Argyllshire. The Ford Model T automobile was introduced to the American market on October 1, 1908. Henry Ford and his engineers had struggled for five years to produce a reliable, inexpensive car for the mass market. The fledgling automobile company settled on a promising design with their 20th attempt and the car was christened the Model 'T' after the 20th letter in the alphabet. The World’s first mass-produced automobile, Henry Ford’s Model “T”, known affectionately as the “Tin Lizzie”, quite literally put The World on wheels and over 16 million cars appeared from Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan assembly line between 1909 and 1927, the company's use of revolutionary mass-production methods such as the assembly line eventually enabled it to turn out a Model T every 24 seconds. Even though described as the first ‘affordable’ motor car, the Model T cost $550, equal to around £7,000 today. Few of the buyers had ever ridden in, let alone driven, a car before and many first-time buyers found driving so scary that they quickly sold abandoned their ambitions, went back to the horse and sold their Model T’s. 
Although all was explained in painstaking detail in the Model T’s ‘instruction booklet’, the process of starting the car’s four-cylinder 22-horsepower, 2.9 litre, ‘L-head’ engine, its petrol tank located under the driver’s seat to allow gravity to feed the engine’s carburettor, involved some eight bewildering and separate actions of knob-twisting,, priming and lever-pulling before finally turning the crank and firing the engine housed under the centre-hinged bonnet. Once started, it taking some 40 seconds to reach 40 mph, the car could get up to a top speed of around 55 mph, its fuel consumption being 15-20 mpg. Thanks to the position of the acetylene lighting generator on the running board, the driver entered the car via the passenger door. Now behind the wheel, the driver adjusted the left hand lever on the steering column to adjust the timing of the spark plugs, the right lever on the column being the car’s throttle and moved upwards to increase speed - no speedometer or gauges ! The three floor pedals might even nowadays look familiar but their functions now seem awkward - the left pedal operating in conjunction with a vertical dual-purpose floor-lever to change the gears and the lever too functioning as a handbrake, the centre floor pedal putting the engine into reverse and the right hand floor pedal, reassuringly, operating the main brakes. The car’s instruction booklet goes into depth about all the technicalities of valve-grinding and cam-shaft adjustments etc. and sternly warns the drivers that “the liability of trouble, with the consequent marring of pleasure trips through neglect to make adjustments promptly, increases by the square of the times these adjustments are neglected” ! In 1914, some 300,000 of the ‘famously all-black-painted’ Model T’s rolled off Ford’s Dearborn assembly lines but none of these would be destined for Arran or Kintyre as, during the 1914-1918 war, Pirnmill’s young John Anderson was a mechanic-motor engineer in France and worked on AEC open-topped double-decker buses used as troop transports - He nearly brought back a double-decker bus to Arran ! | 
