Graham Robson

COVENTRY – MOTOR CITY

When Coventry was UK’s Motor City.

It is now more than 60 years since I first set foot in Coventry. I promise to list them only once, but in 1957 there were ten private car marques in the city – Alvis, Armstrong-Siddeley, Daimler, Hillman, Humber, Jaguar, Singer, Standard, Sunbeam and Triumph. Oh yes, and Ferguson tractors, a BMC engines plant, the Carbodies bodyshell plant which made London taxis, plus the BMC/Morris Bodies, while Land-Rover and Rover were just over the horizon in Solihull.

Nowadays they have all gone, and all the historic factories have been flattened, replaced by housing or modern light engineering facilities. Jaguar- Land-Rover still has a design and development operation in Coventry, but the cars themselves are assembled many miles away.

Coventry, in fact, seems to have changed completely, but it always struggled to modernise in period partly because of restrictive government policies. For example, in the 1960s Standard-Triumph and Rootes both wanted to expand, but both were denied permission. New Rootes factories ended up being built in Scotland, and Standard-Triumph expanded to Speke near Liverpool – in both cases with disastrous commercial results.

Yet way back in the late 19th Century, Coventry had been the home of the pedal cycle industry, encouraged the fledgling motorcycle industry to join in, and when the first four-wheeled machines took to the roads, it was almost inevitable that they came from Coventry too. Now for the statistics. In 1920 more than 100 British companies had cars to sell, with an incredible 59 of them being based in Coventry! The no-hopers soon fell by the wayside, but the Second World War saw vast new ‘shadow’ armaments factories erected, so tens of thousands of Bristol aero engines, hundreds of De Havilland Mosquito aircraft and fleets of armoured cars were produced in the city.

For the next 40 years Coventry was still the motor industry’s boom town, even though Rover moved to Solihull, Riley to live alongside MG at Abingdon, Lea-Francis collapsed, and Lanchester died a graceful death. None of the big companies had its own proving ground, but the industry’s own test site at MIRA, near Nuneaton, was just ten miles away.

Yet the 1960s was the decade in which pure, basic economics began to affect the city. Jaguar’s Sir William Lyons moved to expand by buying up Daimler and Coventry-Climax, while Standard-Triumph sold their tractor interests to Massey Harris of Canada, but soon had to be rescued by the truckmakers Leyland, who also absorbed Alvis and Rover. There was more to come though, for Armstrong-Siddeley decided to stop making their own cars, although they did embrace sports car production and engine design on behalf of the Rootes Group.

At about the same time, the British government forced Rootes to build its new factory near Glasgow. Enter, in an expansive strategic move, Chrysler of the USA, who soon took a controlling stake in Rootes and re-named it Chrysler UK . Even Jaguar changed hands, when Sir William Lyons, who was looking to retire, sold out to the Birmingham-based BMC empire.

By the early 1970s, British Leyland had stumbled into being, and soon acquired much of Coventry’s industrial life. In Coventry alone it now controlled Alvis, Coventry- Climax, Daimler, Jaguar and Triumph, along with the huge engine-making division which we always called Morris Engines, plus the Morris Bodies Branch (which made MG shells among other things). For their part, Chrysler expanded the Rootes Group, established a big new R&D plant in the city (Jaguar-Land-Rover now own it) and seemed determined to get Simca of France more and more involved with their UK colleagues.

It all came crashing down quite suddenly. British Leyland hit the skids, while Chrysler was forced to abandon its plans to stay established in Europe. Hit hard by the energy crisis, cost inflation, and by truculent labour unions, Britain’s economy subsided, and Coventry’s motor industry was progressively hit harder and harder. Through all this, only the Massey-Harris-Ferguson tractor business still seemed to be prospering.

Under new management led by Sir Michael Edwardes, British Leyland closed down Triumph, killed off the engine-manufacturing business, divested itself of Alvis and subjected Jaguar to a tough regime, while Chrysler sold off its entire European holdings to Peugeot of France. After that, only Jaguars and Peugeots were being built in Coventry. That was a big shock which Coventry did not deserve, but in the 1990s it got even worse, for the government sold off Jaguar to Ford (who held on to it until 2008), while Peugeot gradually ran down their presence in the ageing Rootes/ Chrysler premises.

There was no coming back, it seemed, for nothing has happened in recent years to reverse the trend. Peugeots are no longer built here, all that remain of Standard-Triumph and Rootes are memories (and acres of new housing!), while Jaguars are now built at Solihull and in Birmingham. In the 1950s and 1960s it was a great and exciting time to be living and working in Coventry, but all that has now gone, and only some fond memories remain.