Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  Bardsley laid much of the blame for the ultimate the collapse of the British car industry at the door of Lord and Harriman. The former exacerbated divisions within BMC by favouring Austin over the former Nuffield marques, while Harriman ‘took little personal interest in what was going on at shop floor level, a sharp contrast to the days when Herbert Austin and William Morris would wander round the assembly halls making sure they kept in touch with their workforce’.

  The charming Harriman always did as he was told by Lord, which is why the two managed to get on. Bardsley is surely correct when she asserts: ‘Harriman turned the growing gap between the bosses and the workforce into a yawning chasm. The more the management team tried to impose its will, in an ever more arbitrary fashion, the more alienated the workers became, the more inclined to strike over the most trivial issues.’

  Harriman was also guilty of allowing one of William Morris’s less endearing legacies, his suspicion of graduate executives, to be perpetuated by BMC’s management throughout the 1950s and 60s. The company steadfastly believed in the blinkered precepts that educated people were more trouble than they were worth, that the best route to the top was from the very bottom, and that training was a dirty word. British car makers were thus intellectually ill-equipped to deal with the difficult years following the oil crisis of the 1970s, with the result that the nation’s auto industry began to implode.

  Ford refused to be outmanoeuvred by the Mini. Their Anglia of 1959, while it always remained overshadowed by the appeal of the Mini (which consistently outsold the Anglia by three to two), was itself no mean achievement. Its 998cc engine delivered far more than the basic Mini’s feeble power plant, its suspension was superior, and its handling was more than a match for the Mini’s. Even more importantly, each Anglia made Ford a tidy profit.

  Ford of Britain had been tightly managed since 1956 by its chairman, Patrick Hennessey, an Irishman who had run away from home to join first the British army and, after the First World War, Ford’s new factory in Cork. In 1931 Hennessey was moved to the new Dagenham plant as purchasing manager; by 1939 he was general manager, and during the Second World War he proved so helpful to the Ministry of Aircraft Production that he was knighted in 1941. When Ford of Britain’s chairman retired in 1956, the easy-going Hennessey – whose inclusive and respectful managerial style was far removed from that of his abrasive contemporary, Leonard Lord – was the obvious candidate to succeed him. Hennessey in turn promoted his young protégé Terence Beckett as styling manager, purchased the important supplier Briggs Motor Bodies, increased capacity at Dagenham, and introduced the American idea of ‘product planning’ – a methodical system of developing not just individual models but a whole car range, which was still a bewilderingly foreign concept to most British car makers.

  Hennessey’s British Fords of the 1950s, such as the Consul and the Zephyr, were still unmistakably American in their styling, although they sold respectably. Now, 1959’s Ford Anglia 105E combined European and American elements, to far greater acclaim.1 The Anglia’s wide, grinning front grille, muted tail fins and flat roof-line were distinctly American, as was the backward-slanting rear window – a feature imported, implausibly enough, from Ford’s giant Lincoln Continental of 1958. But the Anglia’s size and compactness were emphatically European. So, too, was its impressive, 997cc Kent engine, a vast improvement on previous wheezy power plants. While it may not have lived up to Ford’s billing as ‘the world’s most exciting light car’, it was certainly among the best.

  Like the Mini, the Ford Anglia – particularly the 1198cc Anglia Super variant, introduced in September 1962 – proved an excellent rallying vehicle. It also became a frequent performer on the big and small screens, even though it never attained the filmstar status of the Mini. By 1965, 105E Anglias were being used to supplement the Zephyrs and Zodiacs in BBC TV’s popular police series Z-Cars, enhancing Ford’s already remarkable exercise in product placement.2 The Anglia survived endorsement by the Conservative Party’s new shadow transport minister in 1969 – Margaret Thatcher declared that she drove an Anglia to demonstrate that she was ‘not a car snob’ – to become an iconic model thirty years later when Anglias were driven on British television by Heartbeat’s Yorkshire policemen, the Young Ones’ Vyvyan, the puppet Roland Rat, and on film by J. K. Rowling’s character Ron Weasley in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. By the time of its Hogwarts stardom, the Anglia had not been made for thirty-five years, having been replaced by the Ford Escort in 1967.

  BMC and Ford were not the only British car makers in the limelight in 1959. Standard-Triumph, too, produced something very new: the Triumph Herald,1 a small model designed to be easily assembled both in Britain and, in kit form, abroad. The Herald was put together in as simple a way as possible: the main body was bolted on to the chassis, and the whole front end hinged forward to allow access to the engine. As a result, different body styles – saloon, coupé, estate, van and convertible – could easily be built on the same chassis. Like the Mini and the Anglia, it also looked very different from its curvaceous predecessors. It was sharply styled by the diminutive Torinese stylist Giovanni Michelotti, who introduced American-style fins projecting above the vertical tail lights and pointed chrome headlamp hoods. The Herald’s rack-and-pinion steering (similar to that of the Mini) also gave it an enviably tight turning circle, of 25 feet.

  Michelotti was not only hugely gifted but also quick, turning round styling projects in as little as three months – a timescale then unheard of in Britain. His contribution to Triumph’s success in the 1960s was fundamental; he gave the firm not only the sprightly Herald but also the timeless Spitfire, the later marks of the successful TR sports car, and its classic, fast executive saloon, the Triumph 2000. The 2000’s sleek body style anticipated the second-generation BMW 3 Series of the 1980s and showed just what Triumph could have achieved had it not tumbled into the frigid embrace of British Leyland.

  Michelotti’s flexible design for the Herald worked just as he had envisaged. Soon there were, in addition to the original, twodoor coupé and saloon models, a van, a convertible, an estate and, in 1962, a sports saloon version, the Vitesse, redesigned by Michelotti to incorporate raked quadruple headlamps under a dihedral bonnet. Like the Mini, the Herald was an androgynous car which appealed equally to both sexes. But the Herald was not the overnight success that the Mini and Anglia had been. While its engineering and looks were innovatory, its high price, lacklustre performance, poor reliability and poor handling meant that initial sales were sluggish. Thankfully, in 1961 the ailing firm of Standard-Triumph was bought by the commercial vehicle manufacturer Leyland Motors, which shrewdly allowed the car maker comparative autonomy while providing badly needed cash to iron out the Herald’s teething troubles. Quality control was tightened up, a more powerful engine was added, and the suspension improved. Sales of the Herald picked up, and by 1965 Triumph could barely keep up with demand.

  The BMC Mini, the Ford Anglia and the Triumph Herald represented a new generation of radical, chic small cars. Not all of Europe’s revolutionary new models for 1959 were as petite, however. In Sweden, Volvo unveiled something completely different. Having been previously known for safe, robust cars like the successful Volvo 121 saloon of 1956 – popularly known as the ‘Amazon’, it combined American looks with Swedish style and ruggedness – Volvo now unveiled a stylish, sporty model. The P1800 of 1959 was a low, sleek sports car of a sophistication hitherto not associated with the resilient Swedish car maker. Created by consultant engineer Helmer Petterson, it was designed by his son, Pelle, a boat designer who at the time was working for Italian stylist Pietro Frua. It suited Volvo’s marketing executives at the time to attribute the car’s astonishingly innovative design to the renowned Italian master Frua; only in 2009 was it publicly acknowledged that the now 77-year-old Pelle Petterson had been the car’s actual stylist.

  With its racy looks and sporty performance, the P1800 was a great success. Its Europe-wide appeal was, admitted
ly, at least partly due to its being driven by actor Roger Moore in the popular British TV series of 1962–9, The Saint. The series producer had originally wanted Moore’s character, Simon Templar, to drive a Jaguar but, with typical British shortsightedness, Jaguar told him that no cars were currently available. He turned instead to Volvo, and with the free advertising provided by The Saint, P1800s soon became very popular – especially in Britain, where they were soon being assembled by Jensen at West Bromwich.

  While Jaguar lost out to Volvo in providing a vehicle for Roger Moore, it did manage to produce one of the classic European cars of 1959. As we have seen, in 1955 Jaguar had launched the impressive Jaguar 2.4 litre. The fastest four-door saloon in the world, its advanced styling was the result of the firm’s first foray into the world of unitary body construction, while its engine was derived from that used in its legendary series of XK racing cars. In 1959, however, the car was comprehensively updated by inserting a powerful 3.8 litre engine, creating what Jaguar confusingly called the Mark 2 (although there had never officially been a Mark 1).1

  The Mark 2 was an instant success; beautifully proportioned, and given more chrome, tighter curves and bigger windows than its predecessor, its combination of speed, comfort and style made it one of the century’s most impressive cars. Sculptor Henry Moore called his much-loved Mark 2 ‘sculpture in motion’. The car dominated saloon car racing from 1959, and there was nothing produced either in Europe or America that could rival it. Like the contemporary Citroën DS, the Mark 2 Jaguar was recognized even during its production lifetime as an evergreen classic. A cherry-red Mark 2 was still being driven by the TV detective Inspector Morse as late as 2000.2

  In 1959, Jaguar had established itself as Europe’s premier manufacturer of luxury and sports cars. Its models were selling well on both sides of the Atlantic, and its future as an independent car maker seemed assured. Yet in the last month of 1959 an event took place in Germany that few outside the industry remarked upon at the time, but which was to have significant repercussions for Jaguar, and indeed for all of the world’s premium auto manufacturers, some twenty years later. On 9 December 1959, a general meeting of the shareholders of BMW was called in Munich to decide whether or not to liquidate the company. Pressure from Daimler-Benz’s largest shareholder, Friedrich Flick, to dissolve BMW – then mostly known for its impressive motorcycles and comical bubble cars – seemed irresistible, with Flick apparently intent on making BMW part of his Mercedes empire. But at the last minute a white knight stepped in to rescue the ailing firm: the retiring but determined Brandenburg businessman, Herbert Quandt. That BMW would, in Quandt’s hands, become an unstoppable global force in car making in less than two decades would never have occurred to anyone in 1959.

  1 The model range from which the Impala had sprung the previous year.

  1 The Humber marque, associated in the postwar years with solid, well-built executive saloons, was inexplicably slaughtered when Chrysler took control of Rootes in 1968.

  1 Though only in 1959; the Mini soon caught up in that area, too.

  1 The timeless strength of the brand was also to enable BMW to describe their up-to-date 2004 version of the old classic merely as the Mini.

  1 There had actually been Ford Anglias for twenty years; the name had been invented as a patriotic gesture in 1939.

  2 Ford of Britain had achieved a huge coup by providing Roy Brown’s Mark III Zephyrs and Zodiacs for the BBC’s new series in 1962. The programme’s title implied that Ford had even dictated the series’ name; in fact, the repetition of the ‘Z’ was coincidental. The top of the range Zodiacs, which sold well as a result of their TV exposure, were never actually used by the police.

  1 The company had already decided to terminate the Standard brand, which finally disappeared in 1963.

  1 Naming cars was never Jaguar’s strong point. The large Mark Ten saloon of the 1960s was contemporary with the E-Type and the Mark 2, the designation of which implied that the 2.4 of 1955 should be regarded in retrospect as the ‘Mark 1’.

  2 The car the famed inspector had driven in the original books by Colin Dexter had been a Lancia, but the actor who played Morse on television, John Thaw, insisted on driving one of the best-ever British cars. When one of the Morse/Thaw Mark 2s was auctioned in 2005, it fetched over £100,000.

  10

  The Swinging Sixties

  In the iconography of the sixties, the automobile always took centre stage. Cars were sexy, cars were fun. They were essential accessories – or sometimes the main attraction. They were film stars: everyone recalls Steve McQueen’s Mustang in Bullitt of 1968 (in which McQueen drove himself, even for the most dangerous stunts); the trio of Minis, and the city full of Fiats, in The Italian Job of 1969; Herbie, the endearing KdF-Wagen of 1968’s cloying but vastly successful The Love Bug, who was better remembered than his driver.1 While the Triumph Spitfire of Jean-Luc Godard’s scary Weekend of 1967 may have been forgotten, James Bond’s fabulous sports cars, from the gadget-ridden Aston Martin DB5 of 1964’s Goldfinger to the racy Toyota 2000GT of 1967’s You Only Live Twice, are not.

  Cars were also rock stars, with Cadillacs, Corvettes and Ferraris symbolizing the excess and success of a defiant new generation. Elvis’s Cadillacs became almost as famous as the star himself; while the first purchase of any aspirant recording artist who wanted to demonstrate that he had arrived was inevitably a showy, top of the range auto. Famously, The Who’s Keith Moon bought a Rolls-Royce and then proceeded to daub it in lilac-coloured house paint. One of the most celebrated rock vignettes of the sixties was when in 1967 Moon celebrated his twenty-first birthday in Flint, Michigan, by driving a Lincoln Continental into the swimming pool of the Holiday Inn where the band was staying.1

  By the end of the decade, the Motor City of Detroit was itself synonymous with pop, in the shape of the soul music assembly line of the Motown studios. One of the black families who had emigrated from the south in the 1920s in search of automotive jobs was the Gordys, who moved from Milledgeville, Georgia, to Detroit in 1922. By 1950 the Gordys’ son, Berry, was working on Ford’s Lincoln/Mercury assembly line. Eight years later he launched the Tamla record label in a studio on Detroit’s West Grand Boulevard, which Gordy called ‘Hitsville’.2 Gordy’s studio mixes were aimed specifically at the car driver and were calculated to work best within the narrow parameters of tinny car radios. And Motown’s soul sound was emphatically the music of the urban working classes – a point rammed home when, in June 1965, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas filmed a promotional movie for their latest hit, ‘Nowhere to Run’, on the Mustang assembly line at Ford’s Rouge River plant.

  Two years after ‘Nowhere to Run’, Motown bubbled over. With its impoverished black downtown and its affluent white suburbs, Gordy’s Detroit was a racial powder keg. Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh, having won the vast majority of black votes, had supposedly converted Detroit into a city of racial harmony and world-famous music. Cavanagh appointed blacks to leading civic positions, instituted the city’s first income tax, and won federal funds to make Detroit a model example of President Johnson’s ‘war on poverty’. In 1966 he headed both the US Conference of Mayors and the National League of Cities, and was being touted as a future Democratic president. The National Urban League called Detroit a ‘demonstration city’ for race relations, and the US Department of Justice hailed it as a ‘racial model’. But in July 1967 it all went wrong when, after a heavy-handed police raid on an illegal downtown drinking den (which was celebrating the return of an African-American Vietnam veteran), a race riot erupted which left fourteen dead, three hundred injured and over $150 million of property destroyed. The Motor City was now renowned not so much for Tamla Motown’s hit records as for racial problems and social deprivation. GM, Chrysler and Ford executives now arrived at their downtown offices via secure car parks and covered walkways, insulated from what had become known as ‘Murder City USA’. Lured by money, and shocked by the deterioration of downtown Detroit, Berry Gordy himself
left Detroit for Los Angeles in 1973, taking the Tamla Motown label with him.1 As Motown star Mary Wilson later noted, when Berry Gordy left, ‘part of Detroit died’. When in 1998 Gordy made a TV docudrama about the Motown act The Temptations, Pittsburgh stood in for Detroit; Gordy’s long-time assistant, Suzanne de Passe, declared that Detroit was ‘too burned out’ to play itself. Motown legend Martha Reeves, though, never left, and from 2005 until 2009 served as a Detroit city councilwoman.