Aston float under starter’s orders
As James Bond’s favourite car maker prepares to make its debut on the London Stock Exchange, JACKY HYAMS charts its rise from a small London garage to one of the world’s most iconic brands
ASTON MARTIN is gearing up for a “key milestone” in its history as it confirmed plans for a potential £5billion float on the London Stock Exchange.
The James Bond carmaker’s listing would involve a sale of shares by its main Kuwaiti and Italian owners, with at least 25 per cent of the stock to be offered to institutional investors.
German car giant Daimler, which owns nearly 5 per cent, will remain a shareholder.
The 105-yearold company, which made its first profit since 2010 last year, grew half-year pre-tax earnings by 14 per cent to £106million. Its improved performance was driven mainly by increased revenue from sales of special-edition vehicles such as the Vanquish Zagato. Chief Dr Andy Palmer said: “We have continued to deliver sustainable growth, margins and value.”
iT HAS become one of the world’s biggest sports car brands, is synonymous with luxury and, of course, James Bond whose model of choice most recently was the DB10.
Now Aston Martin, the highend car maker, has revealed plans to float on the London Stock Exchange and once it goes public the firm could be valued at about £5billion.
That’s some achievement for a company that was started more than 100 years ago by two men who ran a small London garage repair service, Robert Bamford and Lionel Walker Birch Martin.
The men came from opposite ends of the social spectrum: engineer Robert Bamford, born in 1883 in Lamarsh, Essex, was the son of a humble vicar and Lionel Martin, born in Cornwall in 1878, came from a wealthy family whose fortunes derived from tin mines and Lincolnshire quarries.
During his education at Eton, Martin became enamoured, like so many others, with the bicycle, acquiring his first two-wheeler, a Singer. At Oxford University he quickly became recognised as a cycling supremo, with a growing passion for speed, especially the new motorised bikes of the early 1900s. Then, while living in France in 1904, he became obsessed with four wheels, only to lose his licence for repeated speeding a few years later.
In 1910, Martin met another keen cyclist, Robert Bamford, who was working as an engineering apprentice. Thanks to their shared passion, the pair became firm friends and by 1912 they had joined forces to run a west London garage repair and sales firm, tuning and selling Singer cars as well as motorbikes.
Their company, Bamford and Martin, was launched in January 1913 and in March 1915, the firm proudly produced the first ever Aston-Martin prototype called the Coal Scuttle, owing to its shape.
The name Aston-Martin (the hyphen would be dropped in the 1930s) was derived from Martin’s own surname and his consistent success at the renowned time trial event, the Aston Clinton speed hill climb. His wife Kate also believed that the letter “A” would put the company near the top of any alphabetic list.
Development of the Aston Martin, however, was curtailed during the First World War. Both men spent time in service, Martin in the Admiralty and Bamford in the Army Service Corps. But when war ended in 1918, wartime demands for tin meant that Martin’s family wealth had increased, allowing him to partly finance resumption of his plans to put Aston Martin into production. He was helped by a wealthy patron, Polish racing driver Count Louis Zborowski, who continued to invest in Aston Martin until his death in a motorracing accident in 1924. By mid1919, the Coal Scuttle had amassed 15,000 miles in various races around the country.
In 1920 the Bamford-Martin partnership came to an end with the resignation of Robert Bamford and Lionel Martin took over the management of the brand – though he eventually left the company in 1928, after the sale of Aston Martin Motors to Renwick and Bertelli.
Yet the car was increasingly making its mark in the world. In 1922 it had moved into international motor racing, competing in the French Grand Prix. In 1928 the first Aston Martin was entered into the Le Mans 24 Hours race, subsequently winning it to great acclaim.
THROUGH the 1930s road production numbers increased, then in 1939 came the Aston Martin Atom, an avant-garde prototype developed using an early form of space frame chassis and independent suspension.
The Second World War saw the demise of both Aston Martin’s creators. Robert Bamford had retired to East Sussex at the beginning of the war. He died, aged 59, in 1942.
But Lionel Martin’s appetite for speed and motoring had never diminished – at one stage he owned more than 60 cars and he continued, in old age, to compete in cycling. He died in 1945 when he was knocked off his tricycle in a road accident in Kingston, Surrey.
It was the industrialist David Brown who rescued the business, buying it for £20,500 in 1947 and expanding production.
In 1963, the DB3 (an acknowledgement of Brown’s initials) entered production and one year later, the relationship with James Bond brought the Aston Martin global fame with the movie Goldfinger. Since then, 007 has been seen driving an Aston Martin in several Bond movies, creating one of Britain’s most recognised status symbols. The brand was awarded a royal warrant in 1982.
Since the Brown era, Aston Martin has changed hands several times: Ford took a 75 per cent share in 1987, then full ownership in 1993. In 2007 it was sold again to a consortium of Kuwaiti investment houses.
CEO Andy Palmer has overhauled Aston Martin and brought the business to profit.
Yet it should always be remembered that it was the passion and enthusiasm of two keen cycling pals, operating out of a humble west London garage, whose vision and talent first gave the world the Aston Martin.