The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Driving down memory lane
Looking back at an almost-forgotten British brand.
Acentury ago Hollywood and motor cars were made for each other because Hollywood made movies and cars moved.
The Model T Ford and others starred in countless silent films starring Fatty Arbuckle and the Keystone Cops. Cars helped to make funny movies and movies helped to sell cars.
In contrast, a British car, the Paramount, is reputed to have been assembled in a former cinema, starting where the back stalls stood and rolling down the sloped auditorium floor to the screen. Unfortunately, despite strenuous digging, this story cannot be confirmed: it may be a myth.
The firm began around 194950 in Swadlincote, Derbyshire, then moved to nearby Melbourne and was finally bought by Camden Motors of Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire. Most of the 72 Paramount cars were built there before the marque folded in 1956.
The cars were quite stylish, with tubular steel chassis and aluminium bodywork fixed to a beech and ash frame. Unusually, they had two five-gallon (23-litre) fuel tanks in their bulbous front wings, which fed a slightly souped-up 1172cc engine (from the Ford Prefect) or, later, the 1507cc unit from the new Ford Consul.
Available as a two-door saloon or soft-top, the cars looked good but failed to sell. The 1172 versions were too sluggish and the 1.5s too pricey compared to rivals, of which there were many.
After the last car was sold, the remaining chassis at Leighton Buzzard were fitted with glassfibre bodies from another long-vanished name in motor manufacturing annals: Rochdale. Interestingly, the two men who started Paramount had wanted to fit powerful Alvis engines, which might have given Paramounts the pep they lacked. But the Alvis units were too expensive, hence the move to the two Ford engines.
There are very few Paramounts left, although I have occasionally seen one listed at classic car auctions or on specialist websites. As they were aluminium-bodied, corrosion – the bane of thousands of classic cars left to decay in barns and back yards – should not have been too big a problem. But getting spares of any kind would be difficult.
A pub called The Paramount, named after the car, opened in 2007 in, or close to, the former Empire cinema in Swadlincote. Perhaps it isn’t a myth, after all.