Wolseley ‘Baby’ X Type

Irish born Frederick Wolseley established the Wolseley Sheep Shearing Machine company in Australia in 1887, setting up a Birmingham branch two years later and
employing Herbert Austin as works manager.

It was Austin who was to make the first Wolseley badged cars, a pair of three-wheelers in 1896, and a four-wheeler in 1899. Wolseley died in 1899, and Austin established the Wolseley Tool and Machinery Company with armaments manufacturers Vickers Maxim as owners in 1901. Early Wolseleys had horizontally mounted single or twin cylinder engines (the single-cylinder model successful in the Thousand Miles Trial) but after 1903 sales dipped.

In 1904 Wolseley’s directors took over the company of car maker J D Siddeley and appointed him their designer and sales manager, causing Herbert Austin to leave and later to make cars under his own name. The Siddeley designed cars were of advanced specification and proved highly successful, some badged as Wolseley-Siddeleys, but arguments resulted in Siddeley leaving in 1909.

In the period leading to the First World War, the company was to manufacture a range of four and six cylinder vehicles - of which the ‘Twenty Four’ was one of the most popular - and by 1914 was the largest automobile manufacturer in the UK.

Wolseley wartime production consisted of military vehicles and aero engines. Post-war car production proved successful until financial trouble struck in the mid 1920’s and Wolseley was declared bankrupt in 1927 and acquired by William Morris.

About this vehicle

Considered one of the rarest of all surviving Wolseley light cars, the X22 was first purchased by the Shuttleworth family around 1929 from Earls Colne, Essex, for fifteen shillings. It became a regular participant in the early days of the London to Brighton Run before the family exchanged it for the 1899 Margot Gardon quadricycle in 1935.

During its subsequent ownership, the X22 took part in the final Brooklands veteran motor race prior to the outbreak of the war in 1939, where it achieved a fastest lap of 22.71mph. In the 1970s the vehicle was restored by Peter Garner and his restoration team following his untimely passing. The X22 is widely believed to be one of the only two surviving models of the ‘Baby’ X-type.