ONE of Winchester’s best-kept secrets is that for 50 years it had a pioneering caravan business set up by a local man. With works in Fulflood, between Stockbridge Road and Fairfield Road, it produced deluxe caravans for wealthy clients.

Its founder, Bertram Hutchings, came from a long-established family in the city. His father was a compositor with local printers and publishers, Warrens, his grandfather a cabinet-maker – and subsequently a brother of St Cross Hospital – and his great-grandfather a tailor. A great-uncle, Henry Hutchings, built carriages in Jewry Street.

Bertram displayed a wide range of talents. Before marriage, his mother Diana lived for some time with relatives at the British Embassy in Madrid. There she learnt classical guitar and passed on her musical prowess to him. He was also a talented photographer and won many national prizes.

By the age of six he was performing in public on piano with Diana and at 15 was appointed organist and choirmaster (yes!) at St Swithun’s Church, Headbourne Worthy. He studied under the cathedral organist Dr William Prendergast and filled his Sundays with a military parade at the Cathedral, then services at Headbourne Worthy, finishing in the evening at the Garrison Church in Peninsula Barracks (now The Screen cinema).

He went on to play the organ at St Cross Hospital church for 25 years and at one stage was even offered a prestigious post in Syracuse, New York State. But his future lay elsewhere

His father had him indentured as a printer with Warrens, but he didn’t take to the trade and instead embraced fruitarianism – an early form of veganism – and opened a health food shop in Southgate Street, Winchester. Also, at Headbourne Worthy he met his future wife, Grace, the daughter of a local coach-builder.

The stage was set: she like him shared an interest in ‘life in the open air’ – they even lived in a tent for the first six months of their marriage, before wintering in a horse-drawn caravan. He decided to design a better, lighter van, which his father-in-law built for him.

Before long he and Grace were hiring out a fleet of 15 caravans and he had written a book Caravanning Made Easy. It was a meteoric rise that survived the Great War, prospered in the 1930s and made ‘Hutch’, as he was called one of the most respected designers of caravans in the country.

His life and career are covered in W.M. Whiteman’s classic The History of the Caravan, where he is billed as ‘an outstanding builder of trailer caravans’. The attention to detail and craftwork of his products were unrivalled for more than 40 years. His sales patter included the telling adage: ‘The quality remains when the price is forgotten’.

The little-known story of his success in building the Winchester range of deluxe caravans was first featured in the Hampshire Archives Trust Newsletter and later covered in the Chronicle (May 16, 2019).

It followed the donation of a huge collection of photographs and other material by his grandson, local resident Chris Hutchings, to the Caravan and Motorhome Club Collection at the National Motor Museum, Beaulieu.

Since then, curator of the Club’s Collection, Angela Willis, aided by temporary curator Richard Noyce and a team of volunteers, have preserved and catalogued more than 1,000 images, providing an unrivalled archive of material open (in normal times) to researchers by appointment.

Most of the pictures were taken by Bertram himself, who became life president of the Winchester Photographic Society and a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. He often trailed his caravans to picturesque and remote places to show them off to great advantage. Some pictures were taken abroad, including a sales foray to Germany that went awry, when local drivers insisted on using cars festooned with swastikas.

After the Second World War, his son Lionel, who read Engineering at the Hartley Institution (forerunner of Southampton University) and served as a Squadron Leader in the RAF, returned to the business. In 1956 the Echo reported that he had won the trophy at the third road rally of the Caravan Club of Great Britain and Ireland, towing a Winchester Pipit behind an MG Magnette.

Mrs Willis said: “We are delighted to hold this collection, which provides a unique record of an extremely important business, both locally and in the wider history of the British caravan industry. Bertram Hutchings was an extraordinary man with many talents and his activities had a significant impact on the social history of the first half of the last century.

“He started building caravans for the wealthy, but later as more and more people obtained cars they were increasingly bought by the middle classes. However, by promoting the company as the ‘Rolls Royce of Caravans’, he never entered into the mass production market that grew up after the Second World War.

“We have this extraordinary collection of photographs, with a variety of models of caravans and cars, which we can identify with confidence. But often they are in settings which we cannot recognise. We would like help from the public in identifying these locations. They include city streets, mountainous landscapes and places by the sea.

“We are therefore putting series of these ‘mystery photos’ online in the hope that people will recognise where they were taken. We also want to share the collection with a wider audience and hope in the future to show more of it locally, so that the work of Bertram Hutchings becomes better known.

“The mystery photos will be gradually uploaded to the website Flickr, where we invite people to share their knowledge of places where the pictures may have been taken.”

Places where examples of Hutchings caravans are kept include the Milestones Museum, Basingtoke, the National Motor Museum, Beaulieu, the Cotswolds Motor Museum, Bourton-on-the-Water, and Winchester Caravans, Colden Common, a company unrelated to the one that Bertram founded.

For more, visit: www.flickr.com/photos/camc_collection/, the Club’s Collection on Twitter at @camccollection and www.hampshirearchivestrust.co.uk.