British registered Standard Ten car in France in the Fifties

Postcards for Petrolheads

Cars caught unawares in postcards of other things

List of Categories

The 5 Most recent posts

Pubs
Hotels (and town halls)
Glamour
Mysteries (some solved)
Lampposts
Messages
Rarities
Frontiers
Families
Photographs
Longer Reads
Holidays & GB stickers
Americans
Everything else

Featured postcards

  • Facel Vega Blow Up!Facel Vega Blow Up!
    In Michelangelo Antonioni’s fantastic, moody, exquisitely slow and sensuous sixties film Blow Up a photographer (David Hemmings) takes a photograph ...
  • ModernismModernism
    Nineteen fifty-five and France was looking optimistically to the future. Citroen launched the technically sophisticated and very aesthetically graceful DS19 ...
  • HRX990HRX990
    Rob van der Klugt, who regularly identifies mystery cars on this blog, emailed with a little mystery of his own. “Browsing ...
  • No mystery here!No mystery here!
    We’ve had quite a few mystery cars on this blog recently, but it’s easy to identify the car on today’s ...
  • Yet more from the Menton FrontierYet more from the Menton Frontier
    I’m always on the look out for postcards from the French-Italian border post at Menton. They often yield interesting cars ...
  • People and Cars in OsloPeople and Cars in Oslo
    This postcard was posted from Oslo on 7 August 1952 to Mr & Mrs Littles in Cheshire.  It has a ...

What you will find in the collection

Postcards for Petrolheads is a blog in which I talk about my ever-growing collection of postcards that feature classic cars. These are not postcards of cars, but postcards of other things, where there just happens to be a car. So, town centres, hotels, pubs, tourist attractions, mountains, rivers, border checkpoints – anywhere where a car might be parked or seen driving past.

I started collecting postcards in 2012 and started the blog in 2013. I now have many hundreds of postcards and there are about 300 posts.

The cars are incidental

What fascinates me is how the cars I write about have been captured in the photographer’s lens quite by chance. He or she was not photographing the car, but a monument or a mountain. The car just happened to be there. Now, fifty or more years later we get to see that classic car as it was back then. Sometimes we know from the registration plate that the car still exists, though I have no way of contacting the owners. However, very occasionally an owner will make contact and say how amazed and delighted they are to see their pride and joy caught on a postcard when it was in its youth so to speak.

Rare cars in postcards

My favourite postcards are ones that show particularly rare cars. For example a Ferrari 250GT, a Bentley R-Type Continental, a 1947 Packard Clipper Sedan, a Facel Vega or an Iso Rivolta. The chances of these cars being casually photographed in traffic by a postcard photographer taking a picture of something else are very slim. Such cards are in the Rarities category.

British cars abroad

For the same reason, I like postcards from abroad that have captured a British registered car. The chances of that car being in the frame is very low. When we see the car, more often than not with a roofrack and always with a GB plate on the back, we know that someone once went on a ‘Continental Touring Holiday’ in the days when the roads were less crowded and such a trip was a real adventure. Undoubtedly they would have bought postcards on their trip, but they would not have known that their own car would appear on postcards yet to be printed, which would be posted all around the world. These postcards are in the Holiday category.

What do I look out for?

Well apart form rare cars and GB stickers in foreign places, I look out for a clear image of the car. It’s not so satisfying if the car is a speck in the distance. And I look for a story, Are there people in the photograph that make it interesting? Has the place changed much? (I often compare the postcard with the same view on Google Street View). And I also look for an interesting message on the back.

Messages on Postcards

Some collectors want mint condition, unposted postcards. These do not interest me much though I do have many. To me the message and the postmark give the postcard a unique life of its own. Mostly the messages are banal, but occasionally they are romantic or sad and very occasionally they are about the journey, which I appreciate. What they are never about is the picture on the other side, though I often forget this momentarily.

I hope you enjoy the collection.

If you have any questions or suggestions or just want to say Hi, please see the Contacts page.

Bob.

July 2022