The last time I featured in your newspaper was in 1956 when I was 18 and had just resurrected a 1926 BSA Motorcycle Taxi combination which had, during the Twenties, plied for hire from a rank outside the Aquarium on Brighton seafront.

A good many years have intervened - I shall be 67 in January - but I am still very much involved in early transport matters and have earned my living as a motoring journalist and historian for many years.

Currently I am researching The BMR Co Ltd which, between 1919 and 1921, was variously located at

53 Dyke Road, Brighton, 19-23 Goldstone Road, Hove, Camden Street, Brighton, and finally Ellen Street, Portslade.

The company made a car called the BMR Gearless - so-called because it employed a friction transmission with infinitely variable gears - and at least ten cars were laid down, of which five were completed.

I have photos of the factory and the car assembly line. Only four cars were successfully sold, however, and the company was voluntarily wound up at the end of 1921.

The make is not recorded in any previous features about cars made in Brighton (and there have been quite a few) or in any of the standard reference works.

My aim is to put this right and, to this end, I have traced the patent for the friction transmission in the British Library.

Some years ago, I was able to interview a surviving employee, now sadly deceased, Mr FG Watts who, as a boy, had been a turner in the machine shop. His father had operated the smithy in the works.

The proprietor of the company was Arthur Montague Banister and other directors were Harold Victor Robinson, Ralph Dean Thompson and Philip James Winsheare McCarty, all of Brighton or Hove.

The patentee of the transmission was Henry Edmunds of Moulsecombe Place, Brighton. Banister lived at 11 Buller Road, Brighton.

Any information concerning these individuals or the BMR Gearless cars would be much appreciated. One assumes the four cars were sold locally. Do any photos survive of them?

Michael Worthington-Williams, motoring historian and journalist,

-Carmarthenshire