The J40 story
The title of 'Smallest Austin' does not belong to the original Austin 7 as many would think, but to the Junior pedal cars built in a special factory in Wales.
It may have been a toy, but there was a serious purpose behind this pedal car.
The venue is Goodwood and the drivers are lined up for the Le Mans start. The cars were all built between 1949 and 1971. The flag drops, drivers rush to their cars and they’re away. The race only last about 90 seconds, but the competition is furious. There is a fair bit of jostling for position and some exciting passing through the chicane, even though none of the drivers are older than 11 – this is the Settrington Cup and the cars are all Austin J40 pedal cars.
While the idea of Austin building pedal cars for children may seem of minor importance or even laughable, there was a very serious side to the enterprise. Not only were more than 30,000 built in a dedicated factory, but that factory played an important role in the overall Austin and BMC empires, and revealed a side of Leonard Lord rarely seen. In the dark days of the Second World War, when the coal industry was crucial to the war effort, serious concern was given to the number of miners succumbing to the insidious lung complaint Coalminers Pneumoconiosis – known to the miners simply as The Dust – a blocking of the lung tissue from inhaled coal dust. The more advanced form of the disease is called Complicated Pneumoconiosis – or Progressive Massive Fibrosis.
To indicate the seriousness of the problem, by 1945 some 5000 Welsh miners had been diagnosed. The British
government established a special department, the Ministry of Labour Rehabilitation Unit, to find alternative work for miners no longer able to do manual labour. Part of the scheme was for the government to subsidise the building of factories in those areas with the highest unemployment. These new plants would then be leased at attractive rates to encourage companies to bring new industries to the area.
While this scheme was in its infancy, Leonard Lord, then Managing Director of Austin Motors, conceived the idea of making children’s pedal cars and for the work to be done by disabled Welsh miners. Lord negotiated the lease of a factory built by the Welsh Estates Corporation in the Bargoed area of South Wales, about ten miles north of Cardiff, with a 50% reduction in the rates because it was planned to employ only disabled miners. Although almost universally referred to as the Bargoed factory, the site was actually located at Pengam, a small village about a mile from Bargoed.
Meanwhile, Lord pushed forward at Longbridge to have a pedal car designed and ready for production once the factory had been secured. In April 1946, he seconded two workers from the Forward Planning Office (concerned with the development of the Longbridge factory after the war), Jim Blakie and Ron Phillips, to design the prototype pedal car.
According to David Whyley in his book Austin Pedal Cars: ' Jim and Ron were sent away for a think and were not sure how they were going to set about the project, having never seen a body drawing in their lives before.' To overcome this shortcoming, Alf Ash – who had worked in Body Assembly and in the Body Assembly Planning Office – was appointed as the third member of the team. They worked in a disused workshop in complete secrecy, not even being allowed to tell their families about their work.
The brief from Lord was that the pedal car had to be effectively 'like dad’s car,' but in miniature. It had to have opening boot and bonnet, a dummy engine, proper seat upholstery, plus working lights and horn. After looking at some pedal cars already on the market, the team was so unimpressed that they decided to ignore anything from competitors and work from a clean sheet of paper.
The car was to be suited to children from the ages of five to nine, and Alf Ash was the only member of the team with a child the right age. He measured his daughter Marcia and made a cardboard scale figure with moveable joints, which was used to get the size of the car, the position of the pedals and clearance for the knees as they came up and down.
The pedal car had to be a reflection of a current model, and the front was originally
designed along the lines of the then Austin 8/10/12 family, with headlights mounted in separate pods and a fairly tall slatted grille. The first prototype, built by Longbridge panel beaters Bill Avery and Jack Turton, used a bicycle-type chain drive and was completed in June 1946 – fewer than three months after work began. It was Lord himself who came up with the name for the car, which went onto the dummy number plate, calling it Joy 1 because it was 'going to give joy to one or two kids.'
A second prototype, Joy
II, followed soon afterwards, which was more suitable for production. A backwards/ forwards treadle motion for the pedals replaced the cycletype on Joy I, and the car was considerably lighter.
A third prototype, Joy III, was Jim Blaikie’s design, based on the pre-war twin- cam Austin 7 race cars but drawn completely from memory. This was completed in March 1947. A very different car in appearance, it had the advantage for production of being easier to build, with the body simply being pressed in two halves. At this time the group started calling themselves The Joy Car Department.
In order for the design of the pedal car to be contemporary, a fourth prototype, Joy IV, was built, with the front styled on the then still secret A40 Devon, which itself was only in the prototype stage. By this time the Pengam factory was coming together, with presses no longer required at Longbridge being transferred over and new tools made for the pedal cars. Because the factory was to be staffed by disabled miners, other companies got behind the project. Jim Blaikie approached Lucas and Dunlop to supply electric components and tyres at very reasonable rates, Champion donated faulty spark plugs to give an element of realism to the dummy engines, while Clifford Coverings, which had the contract for the A40 Devon steering wheels, provided the steering wheels for the pedal cars too.
The factory officially opened on 5th July 1949, with the Pathfinder Special – based on Joy III and named by George Harriman. Production of J40 pedal cars, derived from Joy IV, began later in the same year, with the first recorded sale in October. The 40 in the name came from the A40 on which
the pedal car was styled, but the J stood for Junior, not Joy as on the prototype.
The delay in J40 production was due to its more complicated nature over the Pathfinder for production. In total, some 112 pressings were required for the J40 pedal car. Of these, 108 were pressed at Pengam, while the remaining four – all large body panels – were pressed at Longbridge.
The sign over the front of the factory proudly proclaimed it as the Austin Junior Car Factory. The factory also boasted a fulltime doctor and nursing sister, who monitored the health of the workforce and assigned the former miners to jobs within the factory according to their level of disability. Apart from a few in management and trainers from Longbridge, the factory was considered unique in the world at the time for having a workforce that was 100% disabled – 60% of whom suffered from Complicated Pneumoconiosis.
An important aspect of the factory was that, as much as possible, it was to operate like a full-size car factory. The same processes for stamping panels, welding bodies together, painting and final assembly were to be followed. To tie in with this, Carrier Engineering donated a scaled- down version of its patented Rotodip pretreatment plant, which would serve as a test bed for the system prior to full-size Rotodips being installed at Fisher & Ludlow in Castle Bromwich, Austin at Longbridge and, later, other BMC factories. The fact that every Austin Junior pedal car until 1962 went through the Rotodip has helped in preserving many over the years.
Operating as a scaled- down car factory had a number of advantages beyond the obvious. Up-and- coming executives from Austin, and later from BMC, were sent to Pengam, usually on a tenure of two years, to learn about running a car factory, before returning with promotion to Longbridge or other plants within the Austin/ BMC empire. Most notable of these was Harold Musgrove, who ran the Pengam factory from 1954 to 1956 and later went on to be Managing Director of the Rover Group.
As with full-size cars, each pedal car had a chassis number.
On the Pathfinder it was stamped into the seat support under the seat cushion, while on the J40 it was stamped into the boot floor near the catch for the lock. It is not known exactly when Pathfinder production finished or when J40 production began, as records only go back to 1955 according to Whyley. However, he quotes Dr Stewart (presumably a medical officer at the Pengam factory), that up to the end of 1949 some 3155 Pathfinders and 1454 J40s were built. It is believed that Pathfinder production ceased around this
time, with the highest chassis number recorded by Whyley being 3678. The J40 continued on as the sole product from the factory for the time being.
The first J40 chassis number listed for 1955 is 16001, which suggests an annual production of around 3200 units. This ties in with the first year’s figures according to Dr Stewart, but is quite a lot more than later figures show, and it is unlikely that chassis numbers began at 001. It was normal practice in Austin at the time to start production at chassis 101, and it is very possible that this was the case with the pedal cars as well. The last recorded chassis number is 32,098.
Although the factory opened with about 110 workers, in 1953 this increased to around 150 and kept growing to peak at 514 in 1965. The reason for the increase in the workforce was that a growing number of small components were made at Pengam for the Longbridge production lines. These included seating for commercial and CKD vehicles, fan blades, Mini Pickup tilt covers, battery straps, plus timing and rocker covers for A and B-series engines. Meanwhile, J40 production remained steady at around 1110-1200 per year from 1955, peaking at 1353 in 1959.
Then at 10pm on Thursday, 11th January 1962 disaster struck – there was a massive explosion at the factory, apparently caused by leaking gas in the paint shop, which blew off half the roof and destroyed the Rotodip. Fourteen workers were injured, six seriously – of whom four were still in hospital at the end of the month, according to the South Wales Echo newspaper.
A small number of workers were back cleaning up the factory within two days, and production got under way again within a week after a partition had been erected to close off the damaged area. However, because the gas had been switched off until repairs were carried out, the factory was to be a very cold place to work for some time. As full-size Rotodips were installed in most BMC factories by this time and there was no longer the need for a scaled down version to test the process, what was left of the Rotodip at Pengam was dismantled and not replaced.
From 1962 onwards J40 production steadily declined about 10% per year, apart from a slight improvement in 1969. However, only 268 were built in 1971, with production ceasing on 15th September. Throughout this time, though, production of small parts for the main factories increased, and continued until the Pengam factory finally closed on 30th May 1999. By then the workforce had shrunk to a mere 44 employees, with their main output being rocker and timing covers for the A-series engine.
The South Wales Echo gave a very brief announcement of the closure, stating: ' Rover car parts plant at Bargoed in the Rhymney Valley was closing its gates for the last time today. Despite a battle to save the plant – set up in 1949 – and its 44 jobs after closure plans were announced in January, Rover announced last month it would close for strategic reasons. It said it would not be producing in-house small components of the type manufactured at Bargoed in future and added the decision did not reflect the quality of the workforce.'
Although it is not clear if the remaining workers were sufferers of Pneumoconiosis, the last sentence suggests that they may have been in some way disabled, though this is not confirmed.
The J40 had been arguably the best pedal car on the market in its time, built from automotive grade steel, painted in the same manner as full-size cars, with working lights and horn, opening boot and bonnet, a dummy engine, working hand brake, pneumatic tyres and fully-trimmed seat. J40s were sold in many countries, through Austin and later Leyland dealerships. Although initially priced at £20 (which equated to about the same as three weeks’ average wages at the time), the J40 was very popular, particularly in North America. It was soon found that many were being bought for use on fairground rides, such as merry- go-rounds or coin-in-slot rides, where they were stripped of their pedal mechanism. To cater for this market, some examples were built without the mechanism, though it is not known how many. They also proved popular with children’s traffic schools, to teach road safety from a very young age in at least the UK, Canada and some European countries, and were often seen in circuses as clown’s cars.
At the Austin Jubilee event on 9th July 1955, a special race was held for 20 of the J40 pedal cars, driven by children of Austin employees. The race was won by Alan Swadling, who was awarded a brand new