Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  Before its disappearance into the maw of BMC, however, Morris’s declining empire was able to produce one excellent sports model, the MGA, which swiftly became the most popular sports car in the world and captured a large chunk of the American market, and one final outstanding small car, the Morris Minor. The latter’s success, though, was achieved in spite of, rather with the aid of, the Nuffield Organization’s eponymous founder.

  Despite the Ministry of Transport’s wartime ban on the production of cars for civilian use, in 1941 Miles Thomas, now managing director of Morris Motors, persuaded the government to allow work on a new small Morris car for peacetime, provided that this did not distract the plant’s work on tanks, armoured cars and armaments. Given the wartime context, it is unsurprising that the project was code-named Mosquito, after the twin-engined, wooden-bodied de Havilland fighter-bomber, which became one of the outstanding aircraft of the war. The Mosquito car was not only to have a revolutionary pressed-steel body; it was also to be equipped with a new fourcylinder engine – soon labelled the ‘flat-four’ – which maximized output while minimizing (taxed) horsepower.1

  When the war ended in 1945, Morris Motors was one of the very few car makers in Western Europe that was ready with a brand-new model. Miles Thomas gave the first Mosquito a spin and judged it ‘by far the best prototype car I have ever been associated with’. But Thomas and the car’s designer, Alec Issigonis, had reckoned without the interference of the increasingly reactionary Morris. The ageing, cantankerous viscount hated the car on sight and denounced its revolutionary, American-influenced body. ‘It looks like a poached egg,’ he barked; ‘we can’t make that.’ The conservative tycoon preferred to extend the lifespan of the tried and trusted pre-war Morris Eight and did not want to introduce any new models. As the ever-diplomatic Thomas later wrote: ‘Lord Nuffield was in no mood for changes. His argument was that we had more orders for the Morris Eight than we could cope with … I pleaded that the Morris Eight was rapidly becoming out of date, [and] the Morris Minor would give us a commanding lead. He was adamant. The frustration left a sour taste in my mouth.’

  Morris also tried to delay the project by insisting on comprehensive restyling and demanding that the project name of Mosquito be dropped in favour of a name from Morris’s pre-war past: the Minor. The mild-mannered but far-sighted Thomas could take no more, and resigned – a grave blow to the Nuffield Organization, which led directly to its ‘merger’ with Austin four years later. On 11 November 1948, Thomas was perfunctorily thanked by the Nuffield board, given a cheque for £10,000, and shown the door. Two years later he joined the fast-growing British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) as its chairman.

  Thomas’s abrupt departure finally stung Morris into reluctantly sanctioning the revised Minor. But he did insist that the radical separate rear suspension be dropped, on grounds of cost, and that the powerful ‘flat-four’ engine that had been designed for the car was replaced by a gutless pre-war engine from the Morris Eight.1 The underpowered nature of the resulting model meant that it could not compete in the US, leaving the field clear for the reborn Volkswagen. At least Morris agreed to retain the Minor’s revolutionary rack-and-pinion steering, while Issigonis’s lastminute design intervention, splitting the prototype in half and adding an extra four inches in length, did succeed in making the car look less egg-like.

  The Minor’s rounded curves and flush bodywork were clearly influenced by the latest American models, by the Volkswagen Beetle (though no one at Morris would have admitted this), and by the Renault 750 (whose suspicious resemblance to the Beetle was not accidental: Ferdinand Porsche had been forced to work on the prototype while interned in France in 1945). Issigonis’s design was even linked to Christian Dior’s curvaceous New Look fashions of 1947. In short, even watered down from its original concept, the Morris Minor was still a winner. As Issigonis wrote in 1948 (with characteristic immodesty), this was a car that ‘fits the economic conditions of this rather lean postwar era to perfection’. Motor magazine found it to be ‘a very good 8 hp car indeed’.

  Customers agreed and the Minor was an immediate sales success. Two new assembly lines had to be added at Cowley in 1949 to meet domestic demand, and in 1952 a wood-panelled estate version, the Morris Traveller (later immortalized as Dame Edna Everage’s ‘half-timbered car’), was introduced. Altogether 1.6 million Minors were made between 1948 and October 1970. The millionth Minor was rolled out in 1960, prompting BMC’s public relations department to announce that a line of all the Minors made to date would stretch from Oxfordshire to the moon, and to make a series of films showing the Minor travelling thousands of miles through Canada and Germany.1 There was a nod to Oxford’s academic tradition, too: the millionth car’s number plate was IMHU, mhu being the ancient Greek abbreviation for a million.2

  Typically, though, first Morris and later BMC never properly exploited the car’s potential. As motor historian Jonathan Wood has observed: ‘Morris Motors unquestionably had the finest small car in the world with the Minor … Yet there is little evidence to suggest that the Nuffield Organization appreciated the quality of their talented designer’s work, and although the car proved popular on the home market, the export one was never fully exploited.’ Had Morris and Lord possessed the necessary vision, the Minor could have conquered the US marketplace before imports of the Volkswagen got going, and Issigonis’s ‘poached egg’ could have achieved the worldwide iconic status of its rear-engined German rival.

  Like the Minor, most British family models of the early 1950s were underpowered and poorly equipped. British motor manufacturers, like their continental equivalents, eschewed the automatic gearboxes that were taking the US by storm; nevertheless, the manual transmissions in British small cars were notoriously awful. Nor was the British car industry terribly bothered about their products’ failings. As historian Martin Wainwright has observed: ‘The prevailing attitude was epitomized at Wolseley, a Morris subsidiary, which received complaints about a model whose gear stick regularly snapped at the base. Complainants were sent letters effectively advising them to learn how to change gear more carefully’.1

  At the end of the decade, BMC’s management attempted to shake off some of their Little-Englander complacency and employed the Italian design house of Pininfarina to sex up some of their staid models. A few of the early results, like the Austin A40 of 1958, were undoubted successes. Pininfarina’s clean, purposeful straight lines contrasted sharply with the curved, waddling forms of many of the less distinguished, Americaninspired British vehicles. But not even Italian styling could disguise a dud car. The Morris Oxford V and Austin A60 Cambridge of 1959, for example, had sharp, clean lines from Pininfarina but offered appalling performance and abysmal roadholding. Such inherent defects encouraged even British buyers to look elsewhere, and helped ensure that in 1960 BMC lost its position as Britain’s premier car manufacturer to Ford. Neither BMC nor its successors were ever to occupy the top slot again.

  There were some bright spots in British motor manufacturing after the Second World War. The sleek, low Jaguar XK120 continued to wow American audiences, as did MG’s compact sports models. Rolls-Royce consolidated their reputation as the world’s premier luxury car maker. (Many of Rolls’s rivals had perished before or during the war, while Mercedes’ bomb-damaged German factories were in no position to offer any immediate challenge.) In 1949 Rover launched their new P4 (marketed as the Rover 60, 75 or 90, according to engine size), which over the years generated huge affection across Britain and its Empire on account of its portly but handsome lines, well-appointed interior and dogged reliability. There was the Morris Minor. And there was one outstanding British success, unveiled in the same year as the Minor: a Spartan utility vehicle based loosely on the Willys Jeep.

  That quintessentially British classic, the Land Rover, was conceived by Rover’s chairman, Maurice Wilks, who wanted a rugged, Jeep-type, offroad vehicle which could perform equally well on metalled roads and farm tracks. Wilks gave the brief to Ro
ver’s 32-year-old design chief, Gordon Bashford, who in a mere six months came up with one of the century’s most successful and enduring vehicles. Bashford’s Land-Rover (the title was initially hyphenated) used a Jeep chassis and the engine from the short-lived, oldfashioned Rover P3 of 1948–9. Launched at the Amsterdam Motor Show of 1948, the Land Rover was undeniably austere: not just seat cushions but even doors were considered luxurious extras. But it was simple, reliable – and successful. By 1955 the Land Rover was outselling Rover’s conventional cars. The British army snapped it up, followed by armed forces across the world. Even the Queen bought one; from November 1953 Land Rovers were being used for royal tours in Commonwealth countries.

  In 1958 Rover brought out a less austere variant, the Series II, which had actually received the attentions of a stylist, Rover’s David Bache. The more comfortable Series II was more appropriate for the ‘never had it so good’ years of Harold Macmillan’s post-austerity administration than its ascetic predecessor, and – along with its progeny, the IIA, IIB and Series III, all of which differed relatively little from the 1958 original – continued in production well into the 1980s.

  By 1970 Land Rovers were a reassuringly common sight on the world’s roads and trails. In that year Rover produced an upmarket companion to the Land Rover, which proved a huge and lasting success. That Rover and its new owners failed to capitalize on these impressive breakthroughs to dominate the vast offroad market by the end of the twentieth century remains, as we shall see, one of the great lost opportunities of automotive history.

  1 HMS Vanguard was also the best of a long line of twentieth-century Dreadnought battleships. Sadly, she was prematurely scrapped in 1960.

  1 The celebrated, handsome Humber Super Snipe series was not introduced until 1958 – and prematurely axed by Chrysler in 1967.

  2 Singer had persisted with the Fiat model of 1923, producing its cars vertically: parts were fed into the bottom of the factory and the finished cars were rolled out at the top.

  1 The Mark II Consul range of 1956 was a substantial improvement in visual terms but still looked too American to prove a runaway success.

  1 Unlike Issigonis, Lord did marry, and had three daughters.

  1 Given the delays that Morris imposed upon the project, by the time the Minor was launched Attlee’s government had replaced the horsepower duty with a flat-rate car tax.

  1 In 1956 a gutsier engine was finally installed, and the split windscreen with its primitive wipers was abandoned.

  1 These films had a somewhat less than subliminal message: Minors were filmed continually overtaking VW Beetles.

  2 The occasion was also marked by the production of a small batch of Morris Millions, identical to their parent Minors except for the name, which read Minor 1000000, and their inexplicable lilac paintwork.

  1 Even the Minor itself was knowingly supplied with a bonnet that did not lock properly, causing it to fly up on occasion when the car was in motion.

  7

  Flight of the Phoenix

  Along with most auto plants in continental Europe, France’s car factories were in a sorry state in 1945. Peugeot’s Sochaux factory had been wrecked when the Americans and Germans used it as a battleground in 1944. Panhard’s Ivry works had been used as a bomb dump by the Germans. Bugatti’s factory at Molsheim in Alsace, which had been requisitioned by the Germans in 1940, had also been deliberately razed when the Nazis retreated. It took years for the firm to re-establish its legal right to the site, and by the time it did, Ettore Bugatti, the man whose products had dominated motor racing in the 1920s and 30s, was gone; he had died, exhausted and dispirited, in 1947.1 Indeed, the immediate postwar years proved the graveyard not just of Bugatti but of many other celebrated French marques. Firms that had relied on expensive luxury models and sleek, high-powered racing cars to sell their wares found that the shattered, straitened Fourth Republic was in no condition to support either market. The Paris-based luxury car maker Voisin did not survive the war at all, while the Hotchkiss management was accused of collaboration in 1944 and the firm never shook off the stigma; by 1953 it was producing a miserly 230 cars per year and was soon concentrating only on manufacturing Willys Jeeps under licence.2 Delahaye, whose racing cars had challenged the racetrack hegemony of the powerful Mercedes and Auto Unions before 1939, also struggled to find its feet, and in 1953 made precisely three cars before being taken over by Hotchkiss. The same year saw the demise of the famous luxury and sports car manufacturer Delage. Meanwhile, the French arm of the pre-war Anglo-French Talbot company (whose British arm had been absorbed by the Rootes Group in 1935) limped on until 1958, when it was taken over by the expanding, Fiat-backed Simca.

  Some car makers simply gave up. Berliet, based outside Lyons, never made another car. In 1944 the firm, which had enthusiastically cooperated with the Germans, was summarily taken over by a self-appointed board of Resistance workers, who decided to stick to trucks. Berliet was finally taken over by Citroën in 1967.

  Citroën itself, however, was one of the great success stories of the Fourth Republic. In 1948 the company unveiled the 2CV, the era’s ultimate expression of stylish utilitarianism and a worthy successor to Ford’s Model T and the Austin Seven. Much like the Model T forty years before, the 2CV was specifically aimed at rural customers who could not previously afford a car. Accordingly, its specification decreed that the car needed to be a low-priced, rugged, ‘umbrella on four wheels’, in which two peasants could drive 100 kg (220 lb) of farm produce to market at 60 kph (37 mph) – wearing clogs. It had to be able to negotiate across muddy, unpaved roads and, most famously, should be able to cross a ploughed field without breaking the eggs it was carrying. And it should average 3 litres of petrol to every 100 kilometres.1

  When France was invaded by German troops in 1940, Citroën had two hundred and fifty prototypes of the 2CV chugging around roads all over the country. Citroën and its Michelin managers were well aware of the car’s value either as a military transport or as a civilian equivalent to Nazi Germany’s KdF-Wagen. Many of the prototypes were therefore hidden in secret locations all over France, some so secret that they had been wholly forgotten by 1945. (One prototype was successfully disguised as a light truck at the Michelin factory at Clermont-Ferrand.) Those that survived the war were ordered to be destroyed in 1948 by the austere, Gitanes-smoking Michelin supremo, Pierre-Jules Boulanger, who wanted to start from the drawing board and was embarrassed by these old, crude prototypes. Thankfully for posterity, Boulanger failed to find them all; three pre-war 2CVs were discovered in a barn near Citroën’s test track at La Ferté-Vidame, to the west of Paris, as recently as 1994.

  After the liberation, at a time when many French auto manufacturers were under investigation for collaboration, Boulanger, with his impeccable Resistance credentials, was able swiftly and painlessly to retake control of Citroën. Two prototype 2CVs were rescued, and Boulanger hired the designer Flaminio Bertoni to reconfigure the bodywork. Boulanger himself was never able to enjoy the fruits of his labour; he was killed in a car crash in 1950 (while driving, with cruel irony, a Citroën Traction Avant). Bertoni, however, went on to complete the 2CV and, subsequently, to design Citroën’s legendary DS.

  Bertoni had been a sculptor before the war, and the 2CV’s sinuous, almost erotic, lines betrayed his sculptural insight. The 2CV was crude, it was agonizingly slow (the original, 9 bhp engine provided 35 mph on the flat, if you were lucky), and its suspension was laughably soft: the car tilted alarmingly round sharp corners and could be rocked from side to side by a small child. But, as Michael Sedgwick observed, ‘it was properly made and enjoyed the backing of nationwide service’. And as the car’s English biographer, John Reynolds, has noted: ‘Conceived as a utilitarian vehicle, it was engineered to the highest technical standards. Seemingly crude and basic, with the frailest of bodywork, it was one of the most ingenious and sophisticated designs ever offered to the motoring public.’ The 2CV’s detachable seating enabled it to carry loads that s
eemed impossible. Its hydraulic brakes were a considerable improvement on the VW Beetle’s primitive braking system, and it was also longer than its principal rivals, the Morris Minor and the fractionally more upmarket Renault 4CV. In its early years, the 2CV was also half the price of a Beetle. Moreover, the 2CV’s relative lack of moving parts – a key element of the original design brief – made it very reliable and remarkably cheap to repair on the few occasions when it did fail.

  In contrast to the engine-led attitudes of the great American and German car makers of the 1930s, who sought to maximize brake horsepower at the expense of everything else, Citroën was primarily concerned with safety and comfort. The 2CV was thus founded on the fundamental principle of guaranteeing excellent stability, even when the car was driven badly by an inexperienced driver. To achieve this, wheels were positioned at all four corners, and the engine and gearbox placed ahead of the front axle. The car was given the latest rack-and-pinion steering, which required only 2.3 turns from lock to lock. And since the body waas largely made of bolt-on aluminium panels, which had no load-bearing role at all, the 2CV was surprisingly light, assisting both handling and fuel economy.