Incredible story of the Murad
In 1947, inventor Wadia Murad came to Sheppey to create a car that was set to take the world by storm - only that never happened. John Nurden reports on how an automotive dream went on to become a nightmare...
It was a cold February day in 1982 when I gingerly knocked on the side door of what appeared to be an abandoned factory. “Come in,” beckoned an elderly man. He was huddled in an old overcoat at a dusty desk trying to glean what warmth he could from a tiny oil heater.
Inside, the factory was dark and cold. A burst water tank had knocked out all power. Wadia Murad, pictured right, who was then 81, sat in silence. A photograph taken at an office party some 30 years earlier was a reminder of happier days when he had a vision of building cars on the Isle of Sheppey.
This was how one of Britain’s top war engineers had come to spend his days, in a deserted factory off Montague Road, West Minster, Sheerness, now home to Pacific Double Glazing.
Eventually, Mr Murad stood up and led me slowly to the back of the building where, in the gloom, I could just make out the ghostly shape of a vehicle. It was surrounded by discarded bits of old machinery and hidden under a giant tarpaulin in a forlorn bid to protect it from dust and pigeon droppings.
The frail pensioner struggled to heave the heavy cover out of the way and then stood back so I could take in the awesome sight of the “car which never was”.
This was the vehicle which had made its sensational debut at the 1947 Earls Court Motor Show in London and ran up advance orders worldwide of £5.75 million. It was lightyears ahead of its time with its aerodynamic design, fitted radio, integral oil-cooler, rear rubber-bonded springs, independent front suspension and air-conditioning.
The leather upholstery and noiseless door locks - said to be the envy of Rolls-Royce engineers - would have made it a winner for Britain. Its £2,000 price tag put it in the Rover and Jaguar class.
But the production lines never ran. Only one prototype was ever built and that was the one I was looking at. It had been used by Mr Murad until the early 1970s, when he was too old to drive.
He stared at it and whispered: “It was beautiful to drive and so quiet. Wherever I went, crowds would gather.” His only wish at that time was that his dream would somehow be turned into reality and the car brought back to life.
Wadia Halim Murad was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1900, the son of a Lebanese Arab millionaire. When I met him, he was trying to live on a £30-a-week pension.
“Of course I’m bitter,” he said. “I once had a very substantial business.”
At 16, the young Murad, a firm believer in the British Empire, was playing for the Kingston Cricket Club. But his overriding ambition was to play for an English university. So he was delighted when his father shipped him off to Manchester University, renowned for its engineering, with a sheaf of £20 drafts. He landed in Bristol on January 15, 1921.
By the 1930s he had begun working in the wireless industry but his chief love was engineering and in 1936 he set about producing a more accurate capstan lathe. Within three years he had amassed orders for 200 machines worth £68,000. The Murad Machine Tool Company was set up and production rose to 40 lathes a week.
There were few factories or school metalwork shops which didn’t have one. During the Second World War they were used to make the 20mm shells needed for arming the British war birds of Spitfires and Hurricanes.
According to Mr Murad his innovations brought the cost of a shell down from four shillings and sixpence (22.5p) to seven-and-a-half pence - a saving of 80%.
He also helped produce carbide armour-piercing shells used by British tanks against Rommel’s forces in North Africa.
Other triumphs included the production of spot-locating fixtures for fitting de-tuned Rolls-Royce Merlin engines into tanks.
The idea must have saved the nation millions but Mr Murad never asked for a penny himself, content to think that this was his contribution to the war effort.
But after the war his troubles started and dogged his dream car.
Government wrangles over permission to build a factory in the late 1940s saw costs for the new site, in Aylesbury, rocket from £43,000 to £103,000, leading the banks to call in a receiver. Mr Murad sold the building and was left with just £40,000. But he was determined to bounce back.
On May 5, 1960, he was summoned to the Board of Trade offices in Horse Guards Avenue, London, and urged to move to what was known as a Development Area to breathe new life into depressed towns. He was offered two choices: Scotland or Sheerness. He rejected Scotland and set about setting up shop on
Inside: the wooden dashboard, leather seats and car radio
Sheppey which was reeling after having its Royal Naval Dockyard closed that March. He was told 325 skilled men were waiting to help build the car of his dreams.
He says he was told his £50,000 removal expenses would be met by the State. But by the time he discovered Sheerness had been removed from the list for aid without any warning it was too late to cancel the move. He had already begun work on his
Whiteway factory in Whiteway Road (now SBS Building Supplies). His removal expenses never came and most of his promised skilled labour had been snapped up by Chatham Dockyard.
He spent more than £200,000 training 40 hand-picked
Wadia Murad posing by his one-off Murad car at the Sheerway Works, Sheerness, Sheppey, in February 1982 apprentices but could not sustain the huge financial burden. To survive, he cashed in his insurance policies and sold his opulent five-bedroom home in Hertfordshire.
But the bank stepped in again and at the end of June, 1965, unceremoniously evicted the company from the Whiteway factory. Mr
Murad managed to salvage the equipment, along with the prototype of his beloved car, to another premises a quarter-ofa-mile away - Sheerway.
There, once-valuable engineering machines ended up stacked outside where they rusted in the rain. To make matters worse, Queenborough Council, which had made many promises to entice him to the Island, then petitioned for the winding-up of Murad Developments Ltd.
Mr Murad ended up in Sheerness magistrates’ court accused of failing to stamp employees’ cards for National Insurance. He denied the charges but made the headlines in local newspapers - “Island firm chief gets prison threat” and “Isle director pocketed workers’ cash”. He reflected: “An aggressive solicitor from the Ministry of Health appeared before the local lay magistrates and bullied them into believing that I was really a dreadful scoundrel.”
By that date he had spent £235,500 “attempting to produce machine tools with thoroughly incompetent labour” and maintained he had paid £61,063 in wages out of his own pocket.
For two years he slept across two chairs at his factory.
In a last-ditch bid to stay solvent he put the 3,000-square feet Sheppey premises on the market for £90,000. Another blow came when Swale council issued him with an ultimatum: pay £2,000 in rate arrears or go to jail.
After a failed mission to sue the Department of Trade for his £50,000 removal expenses at London’s High Court in
1966, he finally gave up the fight and had emigrated to America by the 1990s.
The remains of the Murad motor were auctioned on September 21, 2016, having been found under straw at the back of a barn in the 1990s. It still had its Rubery Owen chassis, but its custom-built 1.5-litre four-cylinder engine was missing.
The new owner turned out to be Practical Classics technical editor and self-styled “odd car fetishist” Sam Glover who still has it in his “car barn” near Cheltenham, although the doors now have to be held shut with lengths of rope.
He went on to exhibit “the world’s only Murad” on the Practical Classics stand at the Lancaster Insurance Classic Motor Show.
He recalled: “I’d been searching for the Murad for many years so staying away from the auction was not an option. I braced myself to jettison my bank balance but it turned out that nobody else shared my enthusiasm. It was mine for £1,320.”
On the missing engine he said: “It’s rumoured enough parts were made to assemble 100 Murads so there’s a chance we’llbeabletopieceitback together in its original form.” Alas, some of those parts, according to John Sissons, who as secretary of the Swale Vehicle Enthusiasts Club methodically compiled the car’s chequered history, may be long gone.
He said: “There were a number of Moss gearboxes but most of them went over the sea wall and are now buried below lots of concrete and tarmac in the docks as the port expanded.”
Others, mainly young boys, found hoards of Murad hubcaps and used them for skimming practice into the sea.
In its heyday the engine could produce 48 brake horse power at 4,000 revs, although Mr Murad once ruefully remarked that it would only work with KLG spark plugs. Like its owner, even the car could prove difficult to please.