More than 100 years ago, before the turn of the twentieth century, the British ‘establishment’ didn’t particularly like the automobile. The Germans had the best claim to inventing it, the French had arguably done most to popularize it, and America was starting to come to terms with it, but those who made the rules in Britain (and in the late 1800s that generally meant the upper classes) largely thought it was a dirty, noisy, antisocial thing that frightened the horses and had no place in a proper gentleman’s rather more leisurely and waited-on way of life.

While much of the rest of Europe was already thinking of ways to go quicker and further, and pitting their infant makes against each other in trials of ability and reliability, Britain’s law-making elite were still trying to resist the inevitable – occasionally to what are now laughable levels.

In 1865, for example, the passing of the so-called ‘Red Flag Act’ had restricted ‘road locomotives’ to a maximum speed of 4mph, and required a pedestrian to walk in front - during the day carrying a red flag, and at night waving a red lantern. No, seriously.

And while that law was drawn up in the days of huge and unwieldy steam wagons, it was still in force come the mid-1880s and the birth of the gasoline-powered automobile – and in force it stayed; so, absurd as it was, while the rest of Europe must have looked across the Channel and rolled around laughing, Britain’s anti-automobile establishment used the Red Flag Act to hound any pioneer automobilist who had the audacity to rock their old-world boat. So while Europe (and later America) pushed ahead, Britain, literally held the automobile back.

But eventually, once the titled and moneyed classes began to adopt the automobile as a status symbol of their own, as the growing industry started to apply commercial pressures, and not least when the new ‘motoring press’ like The Autocar magazine started to take up the cause, the cracks began to show. And the movement scored its first big victory in 1896, when a new Locomotives on Highways Act raised the limit on Britain’s open roads to a heady 12mph for vehicles up to 1.5 tons, and finally dispensed with that ludicrous need to be accompanied by a man on foot. It was the biggest concession so far to the new order, and clearly had to be celebrated.

So on the very day the almost universally hated old Act was replaced, on Saturday 14 November 1896, the newly formed Motor Car Club held what they gleefully dubbed an ‘Emancipation Day’ run from the heart of London to the fashionable seaside town of Brighton, on the south coast. As the hurriedly printed program for the day called it, ‘The First Legal Run of the New Automotor Carriages in England’.

At a time when an automobile was still a fairly rare sight in rural Britain, 58 cars were originally promised for the Run, and even after the inevitable no-shows and last-minute breakdowns, around 35 set out on the 53-mile route from capital to coast.

The idea was that at 10:30am sharp, on the sound of a horn, they set off from the Embankment in as tightly organized a group as possible, crossed the River Thames over Westminster Bridge alongside the Houses of Parliament, and made their way to Brighton and the south coast. They were requested up to this point to keep to a slow speed, because what they didn’t want was to give those who still despised the automobile the chance to say ‘told you so’.

From Brixton they were allowed to set their own pace to meet up at The White Hart, a pub at Reigate, in Surrey, keeping in mind that there were such strange laws about speed but not very much about drinking and driving.

From there they’d be off again for Brighton – as the going got tougher. Many struggled on the hills of the South Downs just before the coast, others had already broken down and been repaired by the roadside as the suburbs had faded into the countryside, and only 14 made the full trip unaided but most arrived eventually – either under their own power or not, including one who had supposedly been brought down by train and rubbed mud over the car before taking it on to the finish.

When they reached Brighton they were asked to gather at Preston Park, a large public park on the outskirts of town, so that as many of the cars as possible could finish the remaining couple of miles together, to form a celebratory procession along the Promenade to the very chic Metropolitan Hotel. Both en route and when they arrived, all of them had celebrated their new freedom, and even though the early November weather in 1896 was wet and nasty, they had crowds of local onlookers line the roadsides to celebrate with them.

The Run had also been peppered with the celebrities of the motoring world. One of the first men ever successfully to build and market a horseless carriage, Gottlieb Daimler, was there in a Daimler, and there were several cars and drivers from overseas – including two Duryeas and a Pennington Tricycle from the USA; Frenchman Leon Bollee made the trip in a Bollee Tri-car three-wheeler and was supposedly to first to reach Brighton – having averaged 15mph, or if anyone had stopped to think of it, 1mph more than the new limit!

So the 1896 Run attracted a huge amount of publicity, but the best thing of all is that in the 1920s, a group of old car enthusiasts thought it should be remembered, and with the support of The Daily Sketch and The Sunday Graphic newspapers, they ran the first of what soon turned into a regular annual commemoration, with just over 50 cars turning out to make the trip on as nearly as possible the same roads.

Ever since, one of the first Sundays in November has been a day for enthusiasts from all over the world to come together to celebrate the ‘emancipation’ and to retrace as closely as possible the original 1896 route from London. And in 2006, on 5 November, there were almost 500 entries and thousands of spectators all along the roadsides in glorious autumn sunshine. There were more than 85 international entries from 21 countries – including no fewer than 20 drivers from America, seven from Australia and one each from China and South Africa.

They stop in Preston Park as they did the first time, to have their time cards stamped, and then they putt-putt-whirr and clank on through the town to drive under the official Finish banner, collect their certificates (there are no real prizes, it isn’t a race or a competition) and go to join their friends for a glass of champagne and maybe watch the World War I bi-planes doing lazy loop-the-loops and falling-leaf-spins over the choppy grey sea by the Victorian pier.

And even in their hundreds and surrounded by literally thousands of enthusiastic spectators, they strike you again as being mostly so quiet that when their enemies said they would frighten the horses, they must have been thinking of some very nervous horses. All we have to do now is make sure they take heed of the next generation.