LONG BEFORE THE NAME OF CROSSLEY of Manchester appeared on a motor car, the company was famous for its gas engines. Little known today is the fact that it was the Crossley brothers that were the first engineers in Britain to build four-stroke internal combustion units, under licence from Otto & Langen of Deutz in the early 1860s. The Crossley brothers engineering reputation was so high that, when the motor agents Charles Jarrott and William Letts were looking for a company to produce a quality British car that they could sell alongside imported Oldsmobiles and De Dietrichs, Crossley was their natural choice.
Not that there was much British about the original Crossley car, designed by J. S. Critchley (formerly with Daimler), as it was largely assembled from imported components; chassis frames came from Belgium, the carburettor was a French-built Xenia automatic, and there were even suggestions that the four-cylinder, 24 hp power unit was an imported Mutel, also used in the Feltham-built Meteor, which used a gearbox-with a bevel pinion at the end of both gear shafts - similar to that of the Crossley.
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