On a recent Google expedition for all things Gordon England( I am building a GE Cup special) in the longer tail of the search Genes Reunited appeared!

Apparently GR Ltd have scanned all the newspapers in Britain back to some distant date, including all the postings of Births, deaths, weddings etc , but also the classified ads......!!!!!!

So it was a bit of a surprise to get 1.5 million(yes) hits on a search of "Gordon England Austin" as the "name" and "other" rather than Birth or death. Might be worth trying other Austin variants too, "Nippy" etc

As its All been OCR'd it's not perfect but you can decipher the odd mistake it makes. It lists vast numbers of classified prewar Austin car ads!!!!

Not only hundreds of GE car for sale adverts but also lots of timings of GE cars at hillclimbs, races etc. Perhaps from news reports of the period, so looks like the entire texts of the papers have been scanned?

As an older computer person who learned to program on one of the first 4 computers in Glasgow even I was impressed!!!

This was a free search from the landing page, a subscription might give better search facilities and yield a data set that itself could itself be searchable with car related search terms? In an external database?

A research project for the Archive?

Happy googling!

Bill G @ Scottish Border

Location: Scottish Border

Bill - O. M. G. that's remarkable... searching through 4300 Austin Nippys now, hopeful of finding a 1968 Newcastle clipping!

you get the summaries, but have to pay to view them though...

The British Newspaper Archives is quite good, shame there wasn't a requirement to list the registration and chassis numbers.