Austin Channing, who had been managing director of the Wexford People newspaper group, was less well known as the publisher of the phenomenally popular Ireland's Own, which he said he was "afraid to change because I never fully understood its success". After he left the British Army in India in 1945 with the rank of Major, he founded Motoring Life, which he edited for its first 25 years, and it was to this magazine that he brought his full enthusiasm. Armed with a searching intelligence and formidable engineering knowledge, he went to bat against the motor industry in an era when pent up post war hunger for cars conspired with low manufacturing standards to deliver some rather undercooked products to the consumer.
The largely pseudonymous Motoring Life contributors included Richard O'Hagan and Esmond MacFeeley. Channing told me that he had chosen names which would sound vaguely Protestant in the North while appearing comfortably celtic in the south. O'Hagan was Ted Bonner, while MacFeeley was Channing himself, and the wit and wisdom respectively of these two were the magazine's outstanding features. O'Hagan's "Off The Cuff" column was a whimsy datelined The Cloisters, Ballyfermot, where he lived with his Korean manservant Krim and his bloodhound Plasma. It ranged over topics as diverse as the dangerous proliferation of traffic lights in Dublin to the restorative effect of pouring warm Calvados over your breakfast cornflakes.
Other contributors recruited and cultivated by Channing included Leonard Set right and Joe Lowry, who brought a breadth of scholarship unrivalled elsewhere.
Motoring Lid was celebrated all over the world, provided the inspiration for Small Car (later Car) magazine in London, and was eulogised in New York by the American giant Car and Driver.
Writing in C and D in 1970, Bruce McCall said ML was "the best car magazine in the whole world. Let others scramble after hard news and previews and reviews, Motoring Life dispensed conversation, in the beguiling Irish style." The writers were, he said, "an amiable band of eloquent cranks. At their dullest, these gently demented poets could write any other scribes on earth clean under the table".
As well as the pseudonymous writers, the magazine featured other curiosities. There were no page numbers, so as to facilitate a completely different edition in Belfast, with a different advertising schedule and motor sport notes. And until 1968 there were no dates on the cover, other than Anno Domini and a cryptic serial number, which presumably maximised shelf life. The title incorporated Drive, another defunct paper, and when the Automobile Association brought out their own magazine, also called Drive, Channing took legal advice. Told he stood no chance against the might of the AA, he defiantly displayed the Drive title on his cover anyway. The AA maintained a discreet silence.
Although relations with the car industry were cordial, the forthright and sometimes combative articles, which were confidently written from a deep knowledge of the subject, sometimes caused friction. Channing told me how he was carpeted by the late Jack Mahony of Henry Ford and Son of Cork for prematurely breaking the news of the new Ford Escort in 1967. Channing, who almost never travelled on a press trip himself, often used anonymous contributions from those who did and published them, where possible, ahead of schedule. He was told by Mahony that unless he gave an undertaking not to repeat the dose, he would forfeit all Ford advertising.
Channing recounted the story of how Northcliffe, proprietor of The Times, had criticised his advertising manager for accepting an unsuitable advert. When the man protested that the paper needed the money, Northcliffe snapped: "Your excuse is that of the burglar or embezzler. Never take an ad because you want money". Channing gamely stood up to the pressure and Ford continued to buy space in Motoring Life, as before.
Austin Channing was an entertaining companion, but his stories were matters of record, never rancour. His natural innocence made it impossible for him to be malicious. He honoured his officer's commission.