From the design it looks pretty old to me. Probably from the period between the wars, or possibly even around the WWI period. It may well have been made to solve a problem that doesn't even exist on modern cars.
It looks to me as if it works the wrong way round for a valve spring compressor. It looks as if it's designed for the mandrel part of the jaws to go down a hole in something like a bush, or a coil spring, and then working the handles forces the tapered U shaped part under the base of the bush or whatever. Presumably that either does the job of removing "it" or allows you to lever whatever it is off it's base.