Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  By the time Lawrence was haring across the desert in his Silver Ghost, Rolls-Royce had already adopted its famous radiator mascot, the Spirit of Ecstasy, designed in 1911 by Charles Robinson Sykes. The Spirit’s lithe, sinuous figure was allegedly based on Eleanor Thornton, the secretary and mistress of John, 2nd Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, a pioneer of the automobile movement and editor of The Car from 1902. Eleanor, who had a child by Montagu, died in 1915 when the passenger ship on which she was travelling, the SS Persia, was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Interestingly, Royce himself hated the mascot, asserting that it impaired the driver’s view, and he refused to carry it on his own cars. Nevertheless, Sykes was subsequently brought back to Rolls-Royce to create a lower, more aerodynamic version of the mascot for the firm’s new sports saloons. (The resulting ‘kneeling lady’ mascot was first used on the Phantom III of 1936–9.) Today’s Spirit of Ecstasy – also known as the Silver Lady, although the figures were never made wholly of silver, and in the US as the Flying Lady – is mounted on a spring-loaded mechanism, designed to retract instantly into the radiator shell if struck from any direction.

  It was not only the Spirit of Ecstasy that made the Silver Ghost into one of the most instantly recognizable models on the road. The car’s prominent architectural radiator also helped create the luxury marque’s iconic status. Shaped in the form of a classical pedimented portico, Rolls-Royce’s radiator used the same principle of entasis – the vertical members tapering imperceptibly inwards in order to counteract the apparent distortion of the grille’s straight lines – that the ancient Greeks had used for their stone temple columns. Both the mascot and the radiator soon became distinctive and invaluable brand properties – assets that were, as we will see, to take central stage during the undignified auction of Rolls-Royce Motors at the end of the twentieth century.

  In hindsight, we can see how the Ford Model T and the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost pointed the way forward for the development of, respectively, the family and the luxury car. However, in the years before the First World War the future was not so transparent. The motoring enthusiast of 1914 would have been surprised to learn that, a century later, the names of great contemporary automotive pioneers such as Durant and Lanchester would be almost wholly forgotten, along with such household brands such as De Dion-Bouton and Panhard. He or she may also have been surprised at the global prevalence of the petrol-driven internal combustion engine. For as late as 1900 it appeared that steam-powered vehicles, rather than those run on oil-based fuels, would provide the transport of the future.

  The years of optimism for steam power were brief, however. In 1903 the Connecticut-based Locomobile Company of America, which had been making steam cars since 1899, switched to gasoline engines; seven years later the White Motor Company of Cleveland, Ohio, followed suit. The principal reasons for the flight from steam were safety and the constant need for a nearby fuel supply (the same problem that plagues plug-in electric cars today). A few high-profile explosions of steam boilers did nothing to help. In 1906 the public endorsement of the gasoline engine by the city officials of San Francisco proved the final nail in the coffin for the steam car; in that year two hundred private cars, fuelled by fifteen thousand gallons of petrol donated by Standard Oil, were pressed into service to rescue people trapped or hurt in the San Francisco earthquake. The city’s fire chief declared to the media afterwards that he had been sceptical about the value of the car before the disaster, ‘but now give it my hearty endorsement’. The internal combustion engine had proved its worth, and the steam car was left wallowing in its wake.

  Electric vehicles took longer to be vanquished by the petrol motor. Even while steam cars were beginning to be viewed as a liability, electric autos were becoming increasingly popular with pioneer drivers. The Electric Cab and Carriage Service was launched in New York in 1897 by two Philadelphia engineers, Henry Morris and Pedro Salom, and backed by the Electric Storage Battery Company; in 1899, against a background of encouraging sales, it renamed itself the Electric Vehicle Company (EVC). Yet the lead-acid batteries that the EVC vehicles carried were disproportionately heavy, weighing around 1,600 pounds each, and the cars’ tiny engines could barely cope with the added weight. Moreover, the batteries tended to leak corrosive fluid, while charging facilities were few, at least outside Manhattan. In 1907, predictably, EVC folded. Electric cabs continued running in New York City until 1912, but by 1914 few manufacturers or operators were continuing with electric cars. By 1919 just 1 per cent of all US commercial vehicles, and virtually no private cars, were electrically powered. The search was on to find a lightweight alternative to the heavy lead-acid battery, but it was a quest that would take almost seventy years to reach its goal.

  1 Today her epic journey is celebrated every two years in Germany in the Bertha Benz Memorial Route, a rally of vintage cars.

  1 Daimler’s former boss, Dr Nikolaus Otto, had developed the first true four-stroke petrol engine in 1876, but forbade Daimler to use it, and the two had soon parted company.

  1 De Dion’s embryonic media empire included Le Nain Jaune (‘The Yellow Gnome’), which the unrepentant marquis admitted ‘served no particular purpose’.

  1 De Dion stopped making cars in 1932 and in 1955 what remained of the company was bought by a motorcycle manufacturer, while in 1965 the failing Panhard company was absorbed by Citroën.

  2 The race was so disfigured by the deaths of drivers and spectators that it became the last such competition until 1927.

  1 Of Kahn’s six hundred factories worldwide, 521 were built for Stalin.

  1 For example, Durant paid $7 million for the Heany Lamp Company in order to acquire a patent for an incandescent light which turned out to be fraudulent.

  1 Legend has it that Olds intended to establish his new factory in Newark, New Jersey, but that he met a mining engineer on the platform of Detroit station who offered to bankroll his operation at a nearby location.

  2 Chapin went on to found the Hudson Motor Car Company in 1908. In 1954 Hudson merged with Nash-Kelvinator to become the American Motor Corporation (AMC), a firm that Roy’s son, Roy Chapin junior, later led. Chapin senior, however, was to earn notoriety as President Herbert Hoover’s last Secretary of Commerce in 1932–3.

  1 It is currently known as the Boji Tower.

  2 In 1954 Nash merged with Hudson to form AMC.

  1 He was also, however, notoriously mean with money and never paid for anything he could get for free.

  2

  Snakes and Ladders:

  Europe between the Wars

  In the turbulent years after the First World War, some famous European car-making names from before 1914 disappeared entirely, while newer manufacturers built worldwide reputations. It was a time of boom and bust; some manufacturers died impoverished and disappointed, while others became immensely rich. And those firms that had survived the tough years immediately following the war often prospered in the later 1920s, only to fall victim to the catastrophic depression that gripped the globe in the years following the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. Most of those that did survive tended to follow the example of Ford and Rolls-Royce, building a reputation for reliability and longevity, and aiming their products squarely at either the popular or the luxury end of the market.

  One of the principal British casualties of the Great Depression was Frederick Lanchester. In 1931 what was left of his firm was merged into Coventry’s Daimler. Three years later, and almost sightless, Lanchester was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He was only able to continue living in his Birmingham home through charitable donations, which helped him to pay his mortgage. In 1946 he died, blind, impoverished, and largely ignored by the motor industry.

  Some car makers actually managed to profit from the rising tide of company failures. Surveying the collapse of so many famous prewar concerns, from the mid-1920s the Rootes brothers sought to build an automotive empire by buying up failing companies at rock-bottom prices. Billy and Reggie Rootes were not engineers but ca
r dealers. Billy, the natural salesman of the family, started his working life as a fifteen-year-old apprentice at Singer’s Coventry factory. At the end of the First World War he persuaded his bookish brother Reginald to leave his post at the Admiralty and help expand the family’s Maidstone-based dealership network into car manufacture. In later years Billy often joked that ‘I am the engine and Reginald is the steering and brakes of the business’ … ‘I think up the ideas, and then Reggie tells me whether they will work.’ It was a combination that initially seemed to work well. In 1926 the brothers put a marker down on their ambitions by establishing an impressive new central London showroom on the site of the old Devonshire House, opposite the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly. The two then proceeded to use this prestigious headquarters as a base for an ambitious campaign of acquisition, which was funded not from their own limited resources but by the mighty purse of Prudential Assurance, which the rapacious Rootes brothers had persuaded to back them. In 1928–9 Rootes bought Hillman, Humber and Commer, renowned brands which were struggling in the tough postwar trading environment. Not everything went to plan, however. In 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, Billy Rootes unveiled the new Hillman Wizard at a grandiose launch for a thousand people, held in the cavernous Royal Albert Hall. The guests consumed 278 bottles of champagne and 199 bottles of hock, and a message of congratulation from the Prince of Wales was read out. The upwardly mobile Billy Rootes had already insinuated himself into Edward, Prince of Wales’s notoriously raffish set; he often shot with the prince and was a frequent companion of his former mistress, Freda Dudley Ward, after the prince dropped her for the American heiress Wallis Simpson. The ever-persistent Billy had ensured that the prince had bought a series of Rootes cars. However, no amount of royal patronage or premium champagne could disguise the fact that the Wizard was the wrong car at the wrong time. Billy, though, was always quick learn from his mistakes: the Hillman Minx small family car of 1932 was cheaper and more conventional than the doomed Wizard, and proved an enduring success.

  As the Depression eased in the mid-1930s, the Rootes brothers recommenced their spending spree. They harvested the venerable coachbuilder Thrupp and Maberly, a firm that could trace its lineage back to 1790: Karrier commercial vehicles, British Light Steel Pressings of Acton, Talbot, and the prestigious Sunbeam company, then best known for its racing cars. Unfortunately, once the Rootes brothers had acquired new car makers, they did not really know how to market them. They contented themselves with badge-engineering, creating a range of similar-looking, downmarket marques based on Rootes’ run-of-the-mill Hillman platforms. The brothers were, it seemed, keener on new markets than on revolutionizing the car industry.1

  Wolverhampton-based Sunbeam was a good example. Sunbeam had, in 1920, absorbed the famous French firms of Darracq and Talbot to form STD Motors (one historic marque that seems unlikely to be revived). During the 1920s, Sunbeam cars won numerous Grands Prix and established four land speed records. STD’s luxury products, however, did not fare well during the Great Depression of the early 1930s and the firm was bought cheaply by Rootes after going into receivership in 1935. Thereafter, Rootes initially used the name only for mediocre cars based on Hillman chassis. Even the flowing, streamlined 1948 Sunbeam-Talbot 90 was little more than a Hillman under its stylish skin.

  One British car maker that seemed ripe for takeover after the war but which by the late 1920s had completely turned its performance around – thus evading the tentacles of the Rootes octopus – was Austin. Sir Herbert Austin was as different from Reggie Rootes as could be imagined: an austere, conservative, puritanical man, who disliked outward show or display and who, crucially, never wanted to think too far ahead. While he was happy to open showrooms across England, Austin, in dramatic contrast to the Rootes brothers, shunned advertising and publicity and refused to exhibit his cars at any of the new motor shows which were beginning to proliferate across Europe. Thus, though Austin did well out of the First World War, making shells, guns, aircraft and armoured cars for the Ministry of Munitions, his lack of forward planning meant that, when peace came in November 1918, Longbridge had all the wrong machine tools to restart car production. As a result, Austin was unable to compete with the deluge of American-made imports (mostly Model T Fords) which flooded into the country after 1919, and had to rely on his high-priced, medium-sized Austin Twenty for sales growth. At the end of 1921 the Longbridge factory was mortgaged and the Austin Motor Company went into receivership.

  Thankfully, one of Herbert Austin’s talents was his uncanny ability to attract funding. Having impressed the banks with his no-nonsense approach to business, Austin ensured that Longbridge was reborn. Sir Herbert himself appeared belatedly to have learned the lessons of the Model T, and now sought make a low-price utility car along the lines of Ford’s Model T rather than relying on inappropriate midsize models like the Austin Twenty. The result was the tiny Austin Seven of 1922, Britain’s first ‘baby car’ and one of the twentieth century’s most important automotive breakthroughs.

  There had been smaller British autos before the Austin Seven, but they had not really been true motor cars. The Rover Eight of 1919, for example, was really a hybrid cycle-car. Neither was the Austin Seven Europe’s first utilitarian small auto; that accolade properly goes to the Peugeot Quadrillette of 1921. What Austin did, however, was to create a vehicle that was bigger and thus more adaptable than a Quadrillette, but smaller and thus more economical than a Model T.

  It was a good time to introduce a small car into Britain. Foreign imports were still handicapped by the swingeing McKenna duties of 1915, which added up to a third of their value in tax;1 and Austin was additionally aided by the 1921 road fund licence, a horsepower tax which meant that high-powered US imports such as the Model T were effectively penalized in favour of low-powered British rivals.

  Launched as ‘the Motor for the Million’ – ‘so cheap to run it makes walking foolish’ – the Austin Seven was initially aimed at the motorbike and sidecar market. Austin declared that the car could be bought by ‘the man who, at present, can only afford a motorcycle and sidecar, and yet has the ambition to become a motorist’, and it initially cost only £25 more than a top of the range BSA motorcycle and sidecar. Firmly wedded to principles of utilitarian design and sound engineering – the motor industry was not, Austin reminded his dealers in 1922, ‘a fancy trade’ – the simple Austin Seven was Sir Herbert’s ideal car. But the runaway success of the £165 ‘Baby Austin’ encouraged even the cautious car maker to be more ambitious in his marketing strategy. The Seven soon proved to be a classless and gender-free automobile (just like the Mini, forty years later) which was bought by both aristocrats and shop workers. Working families bought it as essential transport; wealthy households that already owned a large car bought it as a fashionable runabout.1 It also appealed to women. By 1930 the Austin Motor Company was advertising the Seven as ‘the first small car to give the woman driver everything she wants’, and was producing a well-upholstered saloon version, the Ruby, specifically for a female market. Herbert Austin even forgot his prejudice against racing and agreed to enter the car in a variety of motor races and hill climbs. Nevertheless, he was still wary of advertising and failed to exploit the car’s triumphs in a manner that fellow car makers such as Morris, Chrysler and Citroën would have found puzzling. What advertisements Austin did agree to release stressed the Austin Seven’s dependability, rather than its versatility or fun.

  As he had already proved, Austin was no natural businessman. Reluctant to tamper with an apparently winning formula, he strenuously maintained that the path to success lay in small profit margins on a high volume of sales. (This voodoo economics was to have serious repercussions for the Austin Seven’s equivalent, the evergreen Mini, in the 1960s, and indirectly led to the bankruptcy of British Leyland.) The result was that Austin’s cars effectively stayed the same for years and, as Ford had found with his Model T, ultimately became obsolescent. By 1939 even Lord Austin – Sir Herbert was
ennobled as Baron Austin of Longbridge in 1936 – had come to realize that his firm was dangerously over-reliant on the success of the Seven.

  By 1932, the year in which Austin-led exports had secured the UK a 28 per cent share of the world car market, the Austin Seven had become the Model T of Europe. Even Adolf Hitler had bought one. The car was licensed for production around the globe. In Germany it was made by Dixi (which was bought by BMW in 1928), and in France by Rosengart. In America it was made by an Austin subsidiary, and in Japan a locally built Austin Seven became, in 1925, the country’s first export car (six years later Austin’s Japanese licensee, Jidosha Seizo of Yokohama, became Nissan). In production until 1939, the jaunty, economical Austin Seven was Britain’s bestselling car of the interwar years, and, after the Model T, the most successful automobile of its day. Admiring the Seven’s achievements, the mighty General Motors even made an offer for Austin Motors – a flattering proposal which Austin’s senior managers curtly refused.