Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  Longbridge’s founder, sadly, never really seemed to enjoy his success. A dour and colourless man, Sir Herbert never recovered his spirits after the death of his only son on the Western Front in 1915. Austin was the typical British car pioneer, fascinated by engineering perfection and dismissive of business expertise. Humourless and gruff, remote and brusque, he made few friends. (William Lyons of Jaguar, which made bodies for Austin in the late 1920s, later declared that the car maker ‘was not a noted respecter of persons’.) Austin had no leisure pursuits apart from listening to music, and never seemed to be off-duty; an inveterate workaholic, he was often to be found prowling around the factory floor on a Sunday in his shabby suit, his trademark trilby hat pushed firmly to the back of his head. Austin did become Tory MP for King’s Norton but, typically, never spoke in the House of Commons. His devotion to his company initially earned him the respect of his workforce, but his resolute anti-union stance and campaigns in favour of longer working hours and against the forty-hour week had served to make Longbridge a centre of industrial discontent by 1939. In that year Austin withdrew from day-to-day involvement with the firm and passed over the reins to his nominated successor, the ruthless Leonard Lord, who cleared out what he called the ‘Longbridge gerontocracy’ of Austin’s senior management. ‘You’ll need a couple of coaches to take them away before I’m finished,’ Lord defiantly declared.1

  Notwithstanding Austin’s signal success with the Seven, in interwar Europe the car magnate par excellence was his Oxford-based rival, William Morris. Born in Worcester in 1877, six years before Daimler perfected the first successful petrol engine and eight years before Benz made the first car, Morris was the son of a shop manager from Witney, Oxfordshire, and was brought up in a humble brick-built terraced house in Oxford. In later years Morris tended to reinvent his past; a central element was his tendency to exaggerate his father’s achievements and qualities while omitting any mention of his mother. In 1937 he described his father (whose school William had already converted into a primitive car factory) as ‘a great accountant [and] a financial brain’, who had sought his fortune in Canada, where he had lived for a time with a native tribe. In truth, Frederick Morris was a mercurial lost soul who moved rapidly from job to job and migrated around the south Midlands. After a mysterious accident on the London Underground in 1880, which was never fully explained, his health was permanently impaired, and a simple job was found for him as bailiff for his father-in-law at Wood Farm in east Oxford. Yet the truth about his father appears to have been expunged from his son’s memory. William also later maintained that he was ‘always known as William or Will’ and that he had always had a particular dislike of being called Bill. However, a number of childhood acquaintances distinctly remembered him as Bill or Billy. William Morris’s curious insistence on reimagining his background was, as his biographer Martin Adeney has subsequently suggested, part of an attempt to ‘cut deliberately away from his origins’.

  Morris was the archetypal self-made man. By the age of sixteen he was repairing bicycles for a living and attempting to use his income to support his family, his father having had to retire from his bailiff’s job owing to severe asthma. However, in 1904 Morris’s Oxford Automobile and Cycle Agency collapsed, a disaster that was to colour his whole attitude to life and business. Nevertheless, the determined, wiry Morris set out to re-establish himself as quickly as possible. He started a new cycle business at his workshop in Oxford’s Holywell Street and developed a new motorcycle, and in 1908 he sold the company and used the resulting profits to build a handsome new workshop-cum-showroom just around the corner in Longwall Street, which he christened The Morris Garage.1 Unusually for the time, he displayed the motor cars he built here in a nearby showroom window, sited in the shopping area of Queen Street.

  Morris’s approach to car manufacture differed considerably from that of Ford or Austin. He did not seek to build cars from scratch, but aimed to become an assembler of other companies’ products, relying on his own mechanical skill to source and combine the best components currently on the market. Oxford was not far from established West Midlands car makers such as Humber, Singer and Standard, and Morris soon compiled an impressive list of suppliers all over the country. Crucially, his car-making philosophy minimized the amount of investment Morris, always mindful of his 1904 bankruptcy, needed to stake. As he often told his acolytes, this strategy helped him to survive the postwar depression of 1920–2, a time when many other automobile firms went to the wall. In truth, though, Morris Motors only survived due to a generous injection of cash by a prominent local landowner, the Earl of Macclesfield. Lord Macclesfield had originally contacted Morris in order to threaten legal proceedings after his car had been in an accident with one of Morris’s hire cars. As Martin Adeney has described it, the car maker gleefully pointed out ‘that the hire car had three chief constables as its passengers and any claim was unlikely to succeed’. Despite this bumptious reply, Macclesfield took to the energetic young man and in 1912 supported his reformed car business with £4,000 of investment. Seven years later, Macclesfield pumped over £32,000 into the business, allowing Morris to expand his factory and his model line just at the time when other car makers were contracting or folding.

  While Morris’s policy of assembling other people’s parts served him very well up until the Second World War, the absence of any real vertical integration within his company, in the manner of General Motors, meant that after 1945 Morris’s car operation looked dangerously vulnerable and antiquated. By 1939 Morris had in fact bought up many of his former suppliers. But, always fearful of over-commitment, he was a cautious investor even when he was doing well. The result was that in 1952 the forward-looking Austin operation took over the stagnating Morris Motors – a result that would have surprised anyone looking at Morris’s mighty automotive empire in the 1930s.

  While he remained reluctant to change his business model, Morris was no technical conservative. He eschewed luxury models and, following Henry Ford’s Model T philosophy,1 stuck to cheap, reliable products like the famous Bullnose Morris Oxford (which owed its name to its pleasingly rounded radiator). Morris, like Ford, wanted his cars to be cheap and reliable – and he succeeded. In 1913 Autocar lauded the Bullnose Morris as, ‘a miniature motor car, possessing all the attributes of a full-size car but … made with all the care that is bestowed upon the highest priced cars’.

  William Morris continued to dog Henry Ford’s footsteps. Shortly after the First World War, Morris introduced Ford’s mass-production methods to Europe at his Cowley factory in east Oxford. To compete with Ford’s bargain-basement Model T, Morris planned a second model, the Morris Cowley, which was designed to a lower specification than the existing 8 hp Morris Oxford. Moreover, Morris wanted this Ford-beater to be made, as the Model T was, on an automated assembly line. His plan was to have this up and running by 1915, but the war intervened. In the event, the Cowley still became Europe’s first mass-produced family car, albeit after 1918. Moreover, the British government’s horsepower tax of 1920, combined with the McKenna duties on imported cars, helpfully gave the Cowley a distinct advantage over its imported rivals.

  After the First World War, Morris began to experiment with sportier autos. His racier version of the Morris Cowley, a 1923 model that boasted an open, twoseater body made by Carbodies of Coventry, was not a great success – partly, perhaps, because of its name, the Morris Chummy. But the following year Morris adapted the Chummy into a closed-body car which was rebadged as an MG, which stood for Morris Garages. This ‘vee-front’ saloon was adorned with an octagonal MG badge, a logo that the firm’s accountant, Edmund Lee, had designed in a spare moment from his ledgers. By 1928 the MG brand had grown sufficiently to merit its own factory at Abingdon in Berkshire, only six miles from Morris’s main Cowley plant. MG, though, was still owned personally by Morris, who regarded it as his private hobby. It was only when funds ran short in 1935 that he sold MG to the main Morris Motors operation.

  In 1926
Morris joined forces with a Philadelphia steel body manufacturer to create the Anglo-American Pressed Steel Company. Car bodies no longer had to be made by coachbuilders but could be mass-produced as a single unit. Pressed Steel’s British factory was predictably located next to the Morris factory at Cowley, but did not make bodies solely for Morris; car makers across the Midlands sought Pressed Steel bodies. When Morris realized that his personal stake was holding back the firm’s growth – many would-be clients came to see the Pressed Steel plant as merely another tentacle of the Morris octopus – he altruistically withdrew his investment. As a result, the firm remained proudly independent – while still being very handily placed to meet Morris’s needs – until it was caught up in the merger mania of the 1960s.

  Morris always retained his eye for a good deal, even if he never really escaped his bicycle-maker roots. Sensing the mood of the Great Depression, in 1931 he was the first manufacturer to offer a model with a rock-bottom price tag, of £100. He also bought up bankrupt car makers: famous names such as Wolseley (acquired in 1927) and Riley (bought in 1938), whose marques he used to bolster the premium end of what had until then been a very limited and low-cost Morris model range. He also thoroughly understood the importance of marketing. Morris was the first car manufacturer to publish a magazine for existing customers: Morris Owner, launched in 1924. To run it, Morris hired Miles Thomas, a journalist from Motor Trader magazine, who soon displayed a flair for public relations (and who soon married Morris’s secretary). In the early 1930s, as the world sought to extricate itself from the Great Depression, Thomas, with Morris’s enthusiastic backing, launched what Morris himself boasted was ‘the largest concentrated advertising campaign ever issued in this country’.

  By 1936 Morris was operating the biggest car plant outside of America, at the heart of what was then the largest auto-producing country outside the US.1 Morris’s giant Cowley complex was a plant where, in emulation of the great Detroit factories, discipline was rigid, the needs of the assembly line were paramount, and independent thought was discouraged. University graduates, if they were discovered, were instantly sacked by the vehemently anti-intellectual Morris – the man who, ironically, went on to found an Oxford college.

  However, Morris also made mistakes. In 1924 he bought the Le Mans-based French car maker Léon Bollée. It was thought at the time that Morris was responding to Citroën’s rumoured arrival in Britain;1 but a Morris executive later admitted that the boss had not done his homework and that ‘we built the wrong car at the wrong price’. By 1928 even Morris was admitting that he might have made a mistake, and the Bollée factory was closed in 1931. The Empire Morris 16/40 of 1926, intended for the imperial market, also flopped disastrously, proving far too fragile and feebly powered for the tough conditions of the Australian outback and the Canadian Rockies. By 1928 hundreds of Empires were being returned from Australia unsold (Morris blamed the colonial roads) and the Morris Motor Company lost over £100,000. The original tiny Morris Minor of 1928 was another disaster which signally failed to dent the market of its main rival, the all-conquering Austin Seven. Bizarrely, twenty years later Morris insisted that the tarnished Minor brand should be reused for Alec Issigonis’s highly successful Mosquito project.

  Notwithstanding these setbacks, the humbly born mechanic was doggedly ascending the social ladder. In 1929 Morris was made a baronet by King George V; four years later he created a suitably appropriate home for himself and his wife in the village of Nuffield in south Oxfordshire.2 In 1934 Morris was made Baron Nuffield (he chose the title Nuffield because both Morris and Cowley were already in use), and was promoted yet further, becoming Viscount Nuffield, by Neville Chamberlain’s Conservative government in 1938.

  Morris always believed he knew best and, like so many other automobile magnates of the time, brooked no dissent. One misty November morning in 1913, for example, he unilaterally introduced motor buses to the ancient streets of Oxford, with no council sanction whatsoever, and then simply ignored the flood of complaints and the ineffectual protests of Oxford City Council. Morris was also ruthless in his personal relationships, suddenly dropping supposed friends and allies for the most trivial of reasons – figures such as Frank Grey, who had supported his Oxford bus network and even canvassed for Morris in the 1919 general election; Reginald Hanks, Morris’s vice chairman during the 1950s; and even Lord Macclesfield, whose financial investment had been invaluable to Morris’s success. In 1922 Macclesfield suddenly found himself persona non grata at Morris Motors because Morris believed he was interfering too much in the business. Morris bought Macclesfield’s shareholding and brusquely severed his link with the company the blameless earl had done so much to rescue.

  While he became immensely rich, and was subsequently a generous philanthropist, Morris frequently denounced what he saw as ‘extravagance’ in others. His publicity chief, Miles Thomas, later recounted how his boss had reacted to finding a piece of soap left in a full basin in a plant washroom (without asking what Morris was doing checking the factory toilets in the first place): ‘That bright-eyed little man fumed and swore and became tremendously hot under the collar.’ Morris recorded all his personal expenditure down to the last penny right up until his death, while his eating and drinking habits were notoriously abstemious (as, indeed, were those of his wife, who allegedly gathered scraps from the Cowley canteen for her chickens at Nuffield Place and then sold their eggs to the Morris workforce at the plant gates). Morris’s only extracurricular activity was golf – together with the mysterious, unidentified, Australian mistress he seems to have visited every winter.

  Morris was also socially clumsy and a poor communicator. Thomas later noted that: ‘Bill Morris was at his unhappy worst at a meeting … He lost his temper easily, wriggled in his chair and on numerous occasions simply had to leave the boardroom. Of these shortcomings he was acutely aware and avoided both calling and attending round-table discussions.’ A shy workaholic – ‘a self-centred withdrawn introvert’, in Miles Thomas’s words – who was always moving and full of nervous energy, Morris’s attitude to his workers was benevolently paternalistic. He paid above the statutory wage rate – attracting agricultural labourers from all over Oxfordshire to his Cowley factory with his munificent salaries – and before 1939 he prided himself on knowing most of his workforce by name. But he always had to have his own way, and towards the end of his life he became increasingly unsociable. Designer Alec Issigonis recalled that he only met his boss twice, ‘and the second time was eleven years later when we’d made a million Morris Minors’. Even in his declining years, having made a vast amount of money from his car business, Morris remained a cold and ruthlessly competitive man. At the same time, however, he was an extremely generous benefactor to hospitals and health charities. His Nuffield Foundation gave generously to the local Oxford hospitals; and, as an inveterate smoker, Morris provided a fund in October 1939 to buy cigarettes for troops based overseas. By the time of his death Morris had given much of his fortune – over £25 million, a vast sum in those days – to charitable causes, particularly those that sought to alleviate the conditions of the ‘deserving poor’.

  Always eager to point out that he had had no formal schooling past the age of fifteen, Morris affected to despise ‘intellectuals’ – particularly those with a university background. ‘I’ve lived long enough to know that it is not always the men who have an expensive education who do things,’ he was fond of declaring. He was never seen to read a book, and he only skimmed the front page of his newspapers. More seriously for the Morris Motor Company, the boss’s anti-intellectual bias led him to spend almost nothing on market or product research. Only in 1949, at the very end of his reign, did Morris reluctantly appoint an ‘experimental engineer’.

  It was somewhat surprising, then, when William Morris founded a new college at Oxford University. In 1926 he had funded university chairs in anaesthetics and Spanish, but for very specific reasons: the former because he had suffered from poorly anaesthetised oper
ations early in his life; the latter because he sought to win over the motoring enthusiast King Alfonso XIII of Spain, whom he had recently met, and after whom the chair was named. (King Alfonso, Morris thought, would provide a useful conduit to the Iberian and Latin American markets for Morris cars; Alfonso was deposed five years later, however, and Morris’s plans evaporated.) Then in 1937 Morris proposed creating a new institution devoted to engineering, which would be built on an empty site he had just bought to the north of Oxford Castle. In the event, the University’s shrewd vice chancellor, the philosopher A. D. Lindsay, adeptly managed to steer his benefaction away from engineering and towards the social sciences. Morris later claimed that Lindsay had cheated him out of his expressed wish for an engineering college; but in the late 1930s he seemed happy to go along with Lindsay’s proposals. Morris did, though, object strongly not only to the college’s proposed design but also to its first head, the socialist philosopher G. H. D. Cole, and, after 1943, to the absence of any engineering courses from its curriculum. In his last years he rarely visited Nuffield College. The first Nuffield dons appear to have got their own back on their problematic patron by choosing as their college motto a punning reference to one of the Morris’s major European competitors: Fiat Lux.

  One of Morris’s greatest achievements, for good or ill, was permanently to change the face of the ancient university city. By 1936 Oxford was no longer merely one of the world’s most esteemed centres of higher education. It was also home to one of the biggest car factories in the world, a plant that employed almost thirty thousand workers – far more than worked for Oxford University. As John Betjeman observed of Morris in his 1938 book An Oxford University Chest: ‘It has always occurred to me that the great black wall of the University has shadowed his life. He has stormed it and won. Oxford is no longer primarily a university town but primarily an industrial town. The shade of the wall may now seem grateful to Lord Nuffield. He is able to bolster its crumbling bastions, to mortice it with gold.’