KIWI ORIGINAL RESCUED FROM OBSCURITY
1919 TO 1930: THE FIRST ALL–NEW ZEALAND MOTOR CAR
This story is about a near-legendary car that I have known about and searched for, for about 20 years. It was so lost in time that I couldn’t even find a picture of it. I knew of it only as the ‘Marlborough’ and that it was built in New Zealand during the 1920s.
I was researching my book New Zealand Manufactured Cars: A Cottage Industry, and I desperately wanted to feature the Marlborough in the first chapter, as it was almost certainly New Zealand’s first locally produced car. In TVNZ’S video archives, I discovered a 1978 TV programme called Sunday’s World, which featured a car called the ‘Carlton’, also manufactured here in the 1920s. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, it was the key to unlocking the mystery of the Marlborough.
The revelation began last year when I wrote a story on the JC Midge belonging to Graeme Crimp of Blenheim. Looking for a nice spot to take photographs, Graeme suggested we go to the Marlborough Vintage Car Club Museum at Brayshaw Park in Blenheim. The curator
offered us a free tour of the closed museum. And lo, there on display was the Marlborough engine, albeit without the car. It turns out that the Marlborough was originally built by John North Birch, who was known then as William Birch. Later moving to Gisborne, he preferred to be called George and then ‘Old Bill’. The curator then told me that the Carlton and the Marlborough were made by the same person — and that the Carlton still exists and is owned by the Gisborne Vintage Car Club (VCC).
This opened a new line of enquiry, and finally all the pieces started to fall together. What follows has been derived from various sources but substantially from a story that appeared in Better Business magazine in 1968 and the help of Rodney Clague of the Gisborne VCC.
Ambitious safety-bicycle maker and inventor
John North Birch was born in England in 1867 and grew up in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. In 1884, after completing his apprenticeship with a company making steam engines,
he started work with Starley Bros making safety bicycles. The ambitious Birch was soon designing and building his own bicycle — including the wheels, which he hand rolled — first called the ‘Foleshill’, then the ‘George Eliot’, probably after his father. It contained the first ever oil-retaining hub, one of the few inventions that Birch bothered to patent. Demand for the bicycles was such that Birch started mass-producing them with a workforce of about 20 workers. The bicycle by itself was quite profitable; however, as an engineer, Birch was fascinated with the internal-combustion engine, and, with his brother and friends, he worked out a way to build a self-propelled bicycle, devising and building an engine that could be brazed to the chassis of their existing pedal bike. Not long into the new century, the George Eliot motorcycle was born.
Fortune before family
In 1904, a year before he headed to New Zealand, Birch proved the George Eliot’s reliability by riding it the length of Britain from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. A year earlier, he had sold the rights to the design to Bradbury, a manufacturer of sewing machines. Bradbury started production of its own bike, the better-known Bradbury motorcycle; it was almost an exact copy of the George Eliot, which continued to be produced.
After Birch left for New Zealand, his brother Fred took over the business, and George Eliot motorcycles were manufactured for a total of 25 years. The company closed down when Fred retired.
Birch arrived in New Zealand in 1905, leaving behind a wife and three daughters. It is not known why he left his family. “He left us in February 1905,” said his daughter, Gladys. “He intended to stay for only five years. He was always in communication with us, saying he was coming home, but unfortunately he never did. My father was terribly ambitious, and was filled with the desire to make a name for himself in the motor industry.”
Birch was 38 when he arrived. He settled in Blenheim, where he worked in a garage until he had raised enough money to start his own business, the Marlborough Engineering Company. Within three years, he had built it up to be the biggest business in town. Then he decided to create his own car.
Seven years of labour
Starting from scratch, Birch built almost every part himself to his own exacting standards. If it was not going to be reliable, what was the point of building it? Birch took the patterns for the engine components to the Anchor Foundry in Nelson for casting. The patterns were so intricate and delicate that the foundry was not very happy about doing the job, so Birch offered to do it himself using their equipment. The job took him four days. After that, the Anchor Foundry was confident that it could reproduce any engine block that existed.
With the castings in hand, Birch headed back to Blenheim to machine them, along with the crank and camshafts. The pistons and valves were turned from rough stampings. He bored out the blocks, cut his own gears, which he embedded in clay and then heat-treated to white-hot in his furnace for days. Then, he quenched
ELSEWHERE IN THIS ISSUE, PATRICK HARLOW DESCRIBES A CAR THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE NEW ZEALAND’S FIRST PRODUCTION CAR. HERE, HE TELLS OF AN EVEN MORE REMARKABLE CAR — MADE ENTIRELY IN NEW ZEALAND NEARLY 50 YEARS EARLIER
them with water, making them diamond hard. He also made the body frame and all the steel panels by hand, and even taught himself how to sew so that he could do the upholstery too.
It would take Birch seven years to produce this first car, as he had to keep doing other jobs to keep the money rolling in. World War I called a halt to any work being done on it.
The car that was presented to the public for the first time in 1919 was called the ‘Marlborough’. The 5.7-litre, four-cylinder engine had a claimed top speed of around 99mph (160kph) in an era when only a few New Zealand cars could do more than 31mph (50kph). This hand-built car had been built to last. James Fuller of Seddon bought the first Marlborough and used it for many years; his only complaint was that occasionally the car was hard to start.
“Then my conscience smote me”
It was not old age or difficulty in getting spare parts that eventually put this car off the road but World War II. As petrol and tyres were proving hard to find, the car was put up for sale. Even with a price of only £10, there were no takers, so it was given away and broken up for scrap. The only part that was sold intact was the engine, which was bought by Ron Osgood, one of Birch’s apprentices. He bought it to fit into his launch, but, eventually, he acquired a lighter engine and fitted that, and the Marlborough engine was left to rust.
“About 1951,” said Osgood, “I decided to break her [the engine] up for scrap, which was bringing a good price at the time. I could not get one of the bolts off the sump by the flywheel, so I used an eight-pound sledgehammer. The hammer bounced off the aluminium crankcase without effect. Then my conscience smote me and the hammer fell from my hands.”
It was a complete turn-around for Osgood. In the years following, he slowly rebuilt the Marlborough engine. In 1968, he donated it to the Marlborough VCC, where it remains to this day.
So, why was the Marlborough a one-off? Actually, it wasn’t, but it would be the only car that would bear that name. There were two other cars under construction, but Birch got himself into a bit of trouble. Between 1912 and 1919, he built several engines for marine and stationary use. One such engine intended for a cruiser was 1.5m high by 2.4m long. At the end of World War I, raw materials were hard to come by, and the price to build this particular engine escalated. Birch refused to release the engine until the owner came up with the extra money. The owner took Birch to court, and Birch lost the case — but not the battle, as, when the owner tried to collect the engine, it was missing. Birch was told that he must either give up the engine or go to prison for nine months. He went to prison for nine months.
After his release, Birch decided to leave Blenheim. He sold up in 1922. Taking the two unfinished cars, along with a load of machinery, he headed for Gisborne, where he became foreman for Collett Motors.
Another new car: the Carlton
Even though Birch no longer had his own business, cars were still his passion; he would spend all his free time
working on his automobiles. The second Marlborough would take 14 years to build, even with the help of his enthusiastic friend Jack Loch, who built most of the body and did the upholstery. Finally, it was finished, and, to demonstrate its reliability, Birch drove the car from Gisborne to Muriwai for a trial run, a distance of around 1000km.
While working on the two sister cars to the original Marlborough, Birch had also designed a small car to compete with the Austin 7. He believed that this car could be produced in large numbers, with most of the parts being manufactured locally in Gisborne. Others thought so too, and the Carlton Car Company was formed. The second Marlborough was renamed the ‘Carlton’, but it’s probably best to call it the ‘Marlborough-carlton’, as the new, smaller car was known as the ‘baby Carlton’. The prototype for the baby Carlton was completed in 1928 and driven around Gisborne for potential investors.
Based on the proof offered by both the Marlboroughcarlton and the prototype baby Carlton, Birch raised the capital required, and planning was under way to put the prototype into production when Gisborne got caught up in the Great Depression in 1930. The Carlton Car Company was one of the many casualties of that era. This was followed by a fire in Birch’s workshop that ruined the body of the Marlborough-carlton and destroyed the still-uncompleted sister car. The fire also destroyed all the patterns and tooling that Birch had made for the new baby Carlton.
For Birch, it was the end of the road. The undamaged prototype Carlton was sold. The Marlborough-carlton was converted into a truck by Collett Motors and sold to a farmer. Birch never attempted to build another car. He lived out his life in Gisborne, gaining the nickname ‘Old Bill’, and died in 1945 aged 78.
‘Mrs Mccafferty’
Little was known about what happened to the sole surviving Marlborough-carlton until registration papers turned up identifying it as a truck, first registered in 1946. It is now accepted without a doubt that this is the surviving second car, sold by Collett Motors over a decade earlier. It was bought by Bob Power, who knew nothing of its history. When asked about it many years later, Power said that he remembered it had Rushmere headlights, a chrome head, and a beautiful instrument panel. At some stage, he had acquired from Collett Motors the third sister car to use as parts, many of which ended up at the
Little was known about what happened to the sole surviving Marlborough-carlton until registration papers turned up identifying it as a truck, first registered in 1946
tip when he no longer had a use for the Marlboroughcarlton — or ‘Mrs Mccafferty’, as the Power family referred to it. Mrs Mccafferty was a faithful workhorse for the Power family for many years before being parked in its final resting place under a tree on their Te Aute farm.
Sometime in 1960, Charlie Black, a member of the Gisborne Car Club, stopped his car on the
Te Aute Trust Road to take a look at the derelict truck. He recognized it for what it was and negotiated with the then-owners of the farm to have the car/truck returned to Gisborne as a project for the Gisborne Car Club. The club then challenged its members to return the truck to its first incarnation as a car as Birch had driven it out of his shed in 1929. The cleaned-up and running chassis was displayed at the Gisborne Industries Fair in 1961. In 1975, the Gisborne VCC came into existence and, with the other club’s agreement, took over the restoration of the car.
A hand-built masterpiece
Working bees were held one night a week in a member’s home, but, over time, interest waned and work virtually ceased for many years. At that point, a lot of time had been spent making a frame for the body, using the only known photograph of the original Gisborne car, which had been taken at an A&P Show in the late 1920s. Later, a new group decided to take over the restoration, and it was then that the task was completed. The original body of the Marlboroughcarlton was based on the 1924–’26 Studebaker Duplex top, which had a solid tourer top with roll-down side screens. On 7 October 1998, the Carlton was issued a new warrant of fitness and new registration.
Unfortunately, a few years later, the car developed an engine fault, blowing copious amounts of smoke. In 2014, the decision was made to remove the engine and dismantle it to find the cause of the problem. The engine was taken out and repaired, but, as of the time of writing, it is still waiting for reassembly. Once this has been done, the front half of the car will also have to be reassembled. Rod Clague, the current secretary of the Gisborne VCC, hopes that this will be carried out in the near future.
These days, John North Birch is hardly remembered in New Zealand, yet this amazing engineer built the first all–new Zealand motor car: engine, gearbox, and all the mechanicals. For 40 years, from his arrival in 1905 until his death in 1945, John Birch designed and built sophisticated machinery. His ambition was to produce cars on a large scale, and, to this end, he painstakingly created several prototypes, each one a hand-built masterpiece. Only a few accessories were bought off the shelf.
Some of Birch’s innovations are standard equipment in modern cars, but, because he failed to take out patents, he has received no credit for them. Similarly, he was a pioneer in bicycle manufacture and later with motorcycles, and although he played a part in their development, his specific contribution may never be fully appreciated.