Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  The hand-crafted tradition of the pre-war British motor industry was just too expensive to maintain for all but the super-premium car makers. One pre-war Cowley worker recalled that it took him seven hours just to make one seat for a Vanden Plas. Now, in austerity Britain, mechanization and rationalization were the order of the day. Morris merged its midsize Morris and Wolseley ranges; and in 1952 Morris itself was absorbed by Austin into a conglomerate known as the British Motor Corporation (BMC). While Ford of Britain had one principal factory in 1952, BMC had fourteen.

  Many British car makers took advantage of the shadow factories that the government had built near their old plants during wartime by buying them after the war. Some, such as Standard-Triumph, abandoned their old, bomb-damaged factories in city centres altogether and moved wholesale into the shadow plants, which were usually on the peripheries of urban areas. However, postwar governments of all political hues would only allow new car plants to be built in areas of high unemployment, and would withhold the necessary Industrial Development Certificate if this criterion were not met. As a result, many car factories were built where there was no tradition of skilled labour of the sort needed to manufacture such a complex animal as a car.

  While many motor manufacturers eagerly moved into new factories, industrial relations in Britain remained in the stone age. French and German car makers now involved their workers, to varying degrees, in the process of decision-making; but the autocrats of Britain’s motor industry disdained any such newfangled notions. As the chairman of Austin, Leonard Lord, revealingly declared in 1947: ‘With whom are we going to cooperate – the shop stewards? The shop stewards are communists.’ The result was shop-floor strife and a tenfold increase in days lost to strikes between 1948 and 1973.

  Nevertheless, for a time Britain became, almost by default, the world’s leading car exporter, as its former European rivals sought to rebuild their shattered factories and American car makers concentrated on the home market. Ominously, when British car production was overtaken by a European nation, in 1956, it was the Germans who took the number one slot.

  In Coventry, Britain’s motor city, Standard’s chairman, Sir John Black, sought to learn from the example of Germany’s Volkswagen (a car he had originally dismissed) by decreeing that his firm would thereafter concentrate on just one model. Accordingly, the Standard Vanguard – ominously named after Britain’s last battleship,1 launched two years earlier – was unveiled in 1948 as the company’s hope for the future. The Vanguard was surprisingly advanced, with a three-speed synchromesh gearbox, hydraulic brakes, coil-spring front suspension and a new 2 litre engine. But it looked like an American car that had been involved in a rear-end collision. Walter Belgrove’s deliberately Atlanticist design made it resemble a contemporary Plymouth, with no trunk. Few bought the Vanguard at home, while the crucial export sales were non-existent. Black, and Standard, had put all their eggs in the wrong basket.

  Sir John Black was one of the car industry’s most eccentric characters. A clerk’s son, he had joined Hillman in 1919, married one of the Hillman heiresses (William Hillman had six daughters, each of whom inherited a share in the business), and rose from being just one of the sales managers to the lofty heights of managing director. When Rootes absorbed Hillman in 1929, he left the firm and joined Standard Motors as its managing director. His wartime role as chairman of the Aero Engine Committee won him a knighthood, and in 1944 he engineered Standard’s takeover of the bankrupt Triumph operation. But Black was also a dictatorial autocrat who, like Ford and Morris, brooked no criticism. He was tall, extrovert, immensely vain, bullying and worryingly unpredictable. Most of his managers were terrified of him. He was always accompanied by his butler – a similarly statuesque man – and was prone to sudden whims. On returning from a business trip or holiday, he would often announce that there were too many staff and promptly sack some of them. And every year, when the first snow fell, he insisted on being dragged round the Standard factory behind a car on a pair of skis.

  Unconventional and overbearing as Black was, many of his decisions – such as proceeding with the Standard Vanguard and the Triumph Mayflower, a bulky, poorly made car that was supposed to take America by storm – were simply wrong. In 1953 Black was seriously injured at the wheel of a prototype Triumph sports car which crashed, and after the accident his behaviour became even more outrageous. At the works Christmas party a few weeks after the mishap, whilst very drunk (and possibly still feeling the aftereffects of his collision), he declared that there were just too many managers at Standard-Triumph and began naming those who should go – including his second in command, Ted Grinham. For the firm’s senior officers, this was the final straw. On New Year’s Day 1954 the company’s board finally summoned up the courage to travel en masse to Sir John’s palatial home at Bubbenhall, outside Coventry. There they politely asked Black to sign his own resignation letter, which used his recent accident as a convenient excuse for his departure. Black was to leave the firm immediately, and to be paid off with £30,000, his company Bentley, access to the company bungalow in Wales, and (in a somewhat double-edged gesture) an unsold Mayflower.

  With Black out of the picture, Standard-Triumph was able to abandon its disastrous one-model policy. But by then the Standard brand was irretrievably associated with unreliability and poor performance. In 1959 Standard put its own name quietly to sleep and announced that all future models – beginning with the perky, boxy Herald – would carry the Triumph marque. Black’s promotion of the Standard Vanguard was not wholly without merit, however. Its engine was reused in Triumph’s first successful sports car, the fast TR2 of 1953, which won the RAC Rally and proved a smash hit in America – something that, sadly, could never be said of the Vanguard itself.

  Standard-Triumph’s great Coventry rival was Rootes, whose postwar model range began to look suspiciously like that of the American manufacturer Studebaker. This was not terribly surprising, as Studebaker’s Raymond Loewy was by then advising the Warwickshire combine and helped design both the Hillman Minx Magnificent of 1948 and Rootes’ Audax range of 1955. Yet in 1954, just when the market for premium cars was picking up, Rootes pulled out of the luxury car business altogether, ending production of the Humber Pullman and Imperial at Ryton.1 The Rootes brothers’ lack of foresight merely encouraged government departments and other corporate limousine buyers to go to other firms. Rootes’ assault on America in the shape of 1953’s Hillman Californian, a twodoor coupé version of the Minx, was equally disastrous. And when Rootes made yet another purchase in 1955, of Singer, the latter’s outdated models, and its cramped Birmingham factory,2 were of little help to the ramshackle group.

  In 1953, however, Rootes got it right, unveiling a variant of the Sunbeam 90 in the shape of a twoseat roadster powered by a gutsy 1725cc: V-8 engine from Ford. Rootes called this the Sunbeam Alpine, a model that they aimed primarily at the American market. The rakish Alpine was designed by Kenneth Howes, who had originally trained as an apprentice at the Great Western Railway works at Swindon and had subsequently worked for Studebaker and Ford in the US. The result was an instant classic that became a Hollywood favourite. Grace Kelly drove Cary Grant up the winding Riviera roads in an Alpine mark I in her last film, Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief of 1955; Elizabeth Taylor drove a similar car in Butterfield 8 in 1960; and later marks of Alpine were used by Sean Connery in the first Bond film, Dr No of 1962. Michael Caine drove a Sunbeam Alpine both in the engaging Hollywood comedy-thriller Gambit of 1966 and in the gritty British gangster classic Get Carter of 1971, during which a 1968 Alpine disappeared into the murky waters of a Tyneside dock with the car’s owner, Glenda (played by Geraldine Moffat), unconscious in the boot.

  In typical British fashion, though, Rootes’ managers were caught completely unawares by the Alpine’s success. In three years Rootes made just 1,582 Alpine Mark I–IIIs, with the result that demand far outstripped supply. And while a highly successful redesign by Howes and Jeff Crompton in 1956 (following which
the Alpine looked uncannily like 1955’s Ford Thunderbird) made the Alpine even more popular, the revamped car was based on the mediocre platform of the Hillman Husky and the running gear of the portly Sunbeam Rapier – which was itself, despite its much-vaunted ‘Studebaker’ curves, little more than a glamorous Hillman Minx.

  Not every British auto maker was prepared to take the financial risks that Billy Rootes did. Vauxhall and Opel, under a tight rein from their GM parent, produced no distinguished models at all during the postwar years. Their cars remained in thrall to American styling concepts, resulting in a design idiom that often seemed sadly out of place in the austere world of rationing and the Marshall Plan. Historian Anthony Pritchard has called Vauxhall’s American-styled Victor of 1957 (which soon became notorious for corrosion problems) ‘the warthog of the motoring world … all lumps and bumps’.

  Even Ford of Britain initially offered little new to its postwar customers. Its models were much the same as in 1939, blandly styled and mechanically conservative. The 1950 Consul was hailed as a stylish new development but was in reality merely a conduit for watered-down and scaled-down American styling.1 All that could be said of the 1953 Ford Popular was that it was, in the venerable tradition of the Model T, very cheap, undercutting all its rivals. Savings had been achieved on the Popular by using Henry Ford’s famous principle of ‘thrifting’; thus the car had only a few instruments, tiny headlamps, one windscreen wiper, heavy fuel consumption and a derisory top speed of 50 mph. But between 1953 and 1959 Ford sold more examples of the Popular – and its marginally more sophisticated stablemates, the Anglia, Prefect, Escort and Squire – than BMC sold small Austin or Morris cars. Britain thus became the only market worldwide in which Ford cars outsold those of GM.

  Worryingly, Ford of Britain’s exemplary pre-war record in industrial relations (which had been a sharp contrast to those at its Detroit parent) was soon badly tarnished following the acquisition of the problematic supplier Briggs Motor Bodies in 1953. The notorious ‘bell-ringer dispute’ of 1957, when production at Dagenham was stopped because a shop steward had been disciplined for attending a union meeting (which he eventually convened in his lunch hour), signalled the start of a period of growing conflict. This was only halted when Ford sacked seventeen activists in 1962 and simultaneously began to improve pay and conditions, particularly for skilled workers.

  Austin’s postwar offerings from its Longbridge works, the 8HP and 10HP, were similarly conservative and underpowered models, whose ancestry could be traced well back into the 1930s. Indeed, Austin’s new chairman, the irascible Leonard Lord, cared more about getting one over on his rival and former employer, Lord Nuffield, rather than about producing competitive and modern cars.

  Lord was a notoriously difficult man with a pronounced inferiority complex, who suffered few other people, let alone fools, gladly. A Coventry-born engineer who was, in the best British automotive tradition, brusquely dismissive of financial controls and marketing campaigns, he rose through the ranks at Daimler, Hotchkiss and Morris. Like his talented if eccentric protégé, the engineer-designer Alec Issigonis, Lord was deeply, indeed obsessively, devoted to his mother.1 He was rude, abrupt and unpleasant, and rarely bothered to remove his ubiquitous lit cigarette from his lower lip. Morris’s suave and cultivated publicity chief, Miles Thomas, later asserted of Lord that ‘everyone admired his methods if not his manners’. However, from other contemporary accounts it seems that Thomas may have been too kind. Certainly, some of the blame for the collapse of the British motor industry can be laid directly at Lord’s feet, since it was he who presided over the stagnation of BMC and was responsible for the firm’s criminal failure properly to exploit successes such as the Mini and the Minor.

  Lord’s big break came in 1929 when Morris promoted the opinionated and abrasive manager to reorganize Wolseley Motors, which Morris had recently bought following Wolseley’s bankruptcy. Lord’s success, and his seeming indifference to the unfavourable impression he made upon people, quickly recommended him to the antisocial Morris. He modernized the Cowley factory, launched the small and tidy Morris Eight, which quickly became the bestselling small car in Britain, and mapped out a new model range. Yet Morris’s failure to retire, as he had promised, and his mean-minded rejection of Lord’s justifiable demand for a greater share of the firm’s profits (after all, Morris Motors’ fortunes had been transformed by the success of Lord’s Morris Eight), led to Lord’s ill-tempered resignation in 1936. Then he enraged Morris still further when he joined Morris Motors’ bitter rival, Austin, as general manager in 1938.

  Lord’s perception that Nuffield had treated him very shabbily in 1936 left such a bad taste in his mouth that he vowed to ‘take Cowley apart brick by brick’. And after 1952 he effectively did just that. On Herbert Austin’s death in 1941, Lord had assumed complete control as chairman at Austin. And when, eleven years later, the Conservative government persuaded Austin and Morris, Britain’s two leading car makers, to join together as BMC, Lord ensured that what was ostensibly a ‘merger’ was in fact an Austin takeover of the Nuffield Organization. He placed Austin executives in charge of every major division of BMC and went out of his way to demean even those Morris directors who had supported the merger. As motor historian Gillian Bardsley wrote, Lord ‘made the most of every opportunity to belittle the former directors of Morris Motors and ensure that Austin was the senior partner in every way’. This unpleasant atmosphere was too much for the talented Alec Issigonis, who left even before the creation of BMC could be publicly announced and joined the small Coventry car maker Alvis. William Morris himself was encouraged to retire after a brief stint as non-executive chairman, while Morris Motors’ entire engine programme was scrapped. Cowley was very much the junior partner in the supposed coalition. Yet Lord also negligently allowed Austin and Morris cars to continue to compete for both home and export sales, and Longbridge and Cowley each retained its own set of dealers. Thus, when Issigonis’s Mini was launched in 1959, virtually identical Austin and Morris versions of the car were made, marketed and sold by the two separate companies – an extremely wasteful use of BMC’s resources which did nothing to help the car’s profitability. This was a crucial mistake that GM would never have made.

  Despite his notorious irascibility and his hijacking of BMC, by the time of his retirement in 1961 Lord had, somewhat puzzlingly, come to dominate the British motor industry. He had been knighted for his services to the industry in 1954 and was raised to the peerage as Baron Lambury (rather than Lord Lord) in 1962. His rise and dominance over the automotive trade is perhaps a testimony to the poor standard of British car executives at the time. While American, French and German rivals encouraged leading graduates to enter the industry, in Britain the engineer still held sway and graduates specializing in areas such as financial control, marketing and public relations were largely ignored.

  In the years immediately after the Second World War, Austin’s network of worldwide franchises meant that, however uninspiring the car, Austin products would continue to sell well. A venture into the American market, the Austin A90 Atlantic of 1951, flopped badly – a fiasco that merely encouraged Lord not to listen to the innovators. The performance of the tiny Austin A30 was abysmal when it was fully laden with four people, but the model continued to be exported well in to the 1960s. In a similar vein, a vehicle based on the Morris Oxford of 1954 – which historian Anthony Pritchard has labelled ‘a car of unsurpassed ugliness’ – is still produced under licence in India to this day.

  Morris himself was unable to acclimatize to the postwar world and became an increasingly isolated figure. Inevitably, he regarded the Labour Party’s landslide election victory of 1945 as a national disaster, and continually demanded the reduction of state powers and the reversal of the Attlee government’s nationalization policy. ‘All manufacturers,’ he declared, should ‘be given the opportunity to work out their own commercial salvation in their own way, unfettered and unhampered by red tape, restrictions and regulat
ions.’ Morris’s laissez-faire economics and Victorian social attitudes failed to adapt to the challenges of nationalization and the welfare state, and his dissatisfaction seemed to grow with every month of Attlee’s Labour administration. Miles Thomas later wrote:

  Gradually we began to realize that in his increasing disenchantment and dislike of the immediate postwar frustrations of shortages of steel, continuing government controls, and all the trammels and trappings that chafe a man who has sat … on the throne of a dictator, he was an unhappy man. He whose implicit wish became translated into a command to the executives of one of the most successful and fast growing businesses in the country, now had to bow to bureaucratic influence in business.

  Like Ford, Morris also constantly reneged on his promises to leave the company to a younger generation. As early as 1932 Morris, then fifty-five years old, declared that he would be shortly stepping back from day-to-day supervision of the Morris Motor Company (which was formally retitled the Nuffield Organization in 1940); but, like Henry Ford, William Morris found he could not let go. As Miles Thomas wrote of the immediate postwar period: ‘Although [Morris] had said long before that he was going to leave the running of the business to the board, he still persisted in exercising what was inappropriately, if undeniably, his right of destructive criticism.’ The result was that talented senior managers such as Leonard Lord and Miles Thomas abruptly left the Nuffield Organization in fractious circumstances. Thomas had proposed rationalizing the firm’s tangled web of factories and suppliers in 1945, but Morris, having returned from his annual holiday to Australia, senselessly axed the plan. Even the suave and mild-mannered Thomas decided that he could stand Morris’s myopic tyranny no longer and resigned in November 1946. Leonard Lord had fallen out with Morris in 1938 and had promptly joined the ‘enemy’; they never spoke again. Lord had finally had his revenge when Morris was unceremoniously kicked upstairs, first to the post of non-executive chairman of BMC and then, in 1954, that of honorary ‘president’. For the last nine years of his life Morris had no involvement with BMC whatsoever, other than being summoned for the occasional publicity photo – for which he famously hated posing. By the time of his death in 1963, Morris, despite his fortune, appeared to be an unhappy man. He was particularly saddened by his failure to have children, writing: ‘I have more money than any man can possibly want, and for what it is worth I have a title, but all that I have been dies when I die.’ As indeed it did: the title of Viscount Nuffield was extinguished on his death. Today, few Britons born after 1975 remember Morris cars. The stone obelisk of the ‘Nuffield Needle’ in Cowley is all that remains of the old Morris works in Oxford, which once employed thousands of workers but was demolished in 1993.