campbell motors
From 1918 to 1975 the name of Campbell Motors was at the forefront of the New Zealand motor industry. Starting with selling Dodge and Maxwell, they later imported Hudsons and assembled Ramblers and Peugeots, among others, at their purpose-built Thames plant, introduced Daihatsu to the New Zealand market and this is only part of the story. Classic Driver spent a fascinating morning with Hugo Bedford, descendant of the founder and a company director for much of his working life, as he recounted the story of the family firm. George Campbell and Les Bedford (my uncle and my father’s elder brother) started the company in 1918, selling Dodge and Maxwell cars. My father was working in the oil-fields in California at the time and when he came home he joined them. They stared selling Dodge and Maxwell cars. I’ve got documents and pictures of them visiting the Dodge plant and their diary of the early trips. They went broke and came back as “The New Campbell Motors” and then “The Campbell Motor Company” and then finally “Campbell Motor Industry”.
George Campbell, who gave his name to the company by the toss of the coin, had some disagreement and he left in the mid 20s. At that time Harry Turnbull, the accountant for Winstones across the road, joined. So it was then Les Bedford, V.C. Bedford and Harry Turnbull. Later on in the 20s, J D Webster took an interest and then his son, T C Webster, so we had two Bedfords, two Websters and Harry until the 1960s”.
“Later we took on Durant, Marmon and Roosevelt. We got Studebaker in the early 30s and then Willys. The Willys 77 was a funny looking thing. I have seen one recently at a car display. My cousin had one; they are the most amazing cars. I’m exaggerating but it seemed to fire about once every lamp-post, the slowest-running engine I have ever seen.
“In our building in Stanley St we actually assembled the Willys 77 which arrived CKD. The cars were already painted and we just had to screw them together.
“That carried right through the war and when my father died in 1962 there was a clause in the franchise of Willys which said if the principal dies the franchise is finished. They wrote straight away and said it was over and they gave it to someone else, who I don’t remember but then later on we got it back again.
“The Willys was quite successful for us. Hudson came in the early 1950s, around 1951 or 2. We didn’t get any cars for a while but we had some import licence from Studebaker, which we had lost to Northern Automobiles in 1948. In those days, import licence belonged to the company, not to the franchise. It was bizarre, we had the licence and they had the franchise but no licence to import them.
“We got Rambler in June 1954 when my father and I went to the States and we
ordered the first Hudsons, which were 42 Hudson Jets.
“There was a guy there called Eddie Nowack who was in charge. I was only a young fellow and I loved the one which had the external spare wheel. He said “I’ll throw in one of those for you on one of the cars”, so one came in with the fantastic external wheel, which we sold to a doctor in Auckland. It was six inches longer than the others; it was a lovely car.
“We also imported a few of the Wasps and Hornets. I’ve never known a car with such wide seats. You could sit four people comfortably across the front. They were an incredible car, they had that marvellous seat trim, you sank into it and the car wallowed along, typical yankee car and ironed out all the rough parts, a great car.”
I asked if Campbells had also imported Nash, but Hugo put me right on that score. “Seabrook Fowlds had Nash, they brought in the Nash 600, an awful looking car!”
Getting back to Hudson and later, Ramblers, Hugo continues;
“Then in the 60s we brought in the small Nash Rambler, the one with the funny body, before we got the Classic in 1966, a little round bodied job which was dreadful. We got a few of those after the Hudson Jet. The one from the song with the line ‘How do you get this car out of second gear?’
“I went to New York in the early 1960s and we introduced the Classic which we assembled at Thames, six of them with the V8 engine then later on they had the ‘Now’ model range. That was a short, stout, quite bulbous car but quite nice. Hudson and Rambler were good to us; we didn’t bring in many but it worked well. We started to build them here in 66 and 67 and we had them right through until the early 70s.
“Rambler had terrible trouble, they had never heard of CKD of course, so I had to go and explain to them that they had to almost build the complete car, then take it apart, which they didn’t think was a particularly great idea. They had a problem with the particular plant which did our cars, the workers obviously weren’t happy with the job they had to do
and we used to open the packing cases up and there would be bits of their lunch and god-knows what amongst all the parts.
“The car wasn’t built with CKD in mind. The lack of expertise at AMC was dreadful in that we were their only CKD customer. They had full production-lines in South America but not CKD. I think they tried very hard but it was difficult.
It was a big job to build those but they were quite successful and a very nice car. The biggest boot you have ever seen!”
The Campbell Motors assembly plant was built in Thames in 1964. At the time it was reckoned that 12 ½% of all working people in New Zealand had some relationship with the motor vehicle assembly, both in the plants or supplying items such as wiring harnesses or trim to make up the required amount of local content in the cars. Even transporting cars in and out was influenced by Government.
“The Government requirements were enormous. They wanted us to rail everything out. They put a railhead right into the plant. It must have cost a fortune. The rail went right into the middle of the plant but we used Car Haulaways and we had our own transporters when we were selling the Indian Tata trucks, for our retail side. They couldn’t demand but they asked us to do it by rail and we did try. Most things came in by rail in crates and packing cases. But often we couldn’t find some boxes, they were sitting in the siding at Waihi or wherever. It was pretty Mickey Mouse really. You’d say that didn’t matter, after ten days they’d found them, we’d found them or somebody found them and they trundled them along to the plant.
“In building that plant it was amazing because there were 17 acres altogether as far as area was concerned but less than four acres was usable. The rest was all swamp and mangroves. We bought two Bedford six-ton trucks and throughout the time we built the plant until we sold it they worked all day, every day bringing in fill.
“Eventually, of the 17 acres when we sold the plant in 1975 around 11½ acres were in use, either plant or parking or box storage. The deal they’d made was incredible. £2500 for the 17 acres and no interest over five years. That £2500, it cost that much to go to England and back, in those days it was quite a big sum.
“After my father died, Les Bedford (my uncle) became chairman and Blair Webster and I were quite young and were as keen as mustard. Everybody was going to Japan and so we said we would like to enter the market. Les Bedford was 100% against it. “We built the plant for Peugeot and that’s it!” We went anyhow with no franchises and came back with Daihatsu and Hino, which wasn’t too bad at all. The first two Daihatsus arrived but they weren’t a great success
because they were built like a shrunk Austin of some sort. I couldn’t fit in the back! They were just too small inside for the New Zealand market.
“They bought out a 4wd in military khaki and they called it the Taft. We ordered one. Coming over the Auckland harbour bridge I had to change down to third gear in it, it had no power at all, wouldn’t take the skin off a rice pudding! I bought it home and we used it for a bit but we never ordered any more. It was alright on the flat roads of Japan I suppose, they would wear a three piece suit and think they were on safari back then! We did bring in the little 360 and they were very successful. We found dealers who had licence in their own name, especially in Dunedin, Anngow Motors who had quite a big licence and converted it all over to Daihatsu and they were like ants all over the Dunedin hills! All the Daihatsus were brought in CBU.
Then they had the little utes, like a current Toyota ute but about ¼ the size, with the same little engine as the 360. They would carry about 400cwt which wasn’t so bad, with quite a good-sized tray.
They all sold for £1945 , which was a very good price. Mechanically they gave us no problems at all. We still had the franchise in 1975 when we sold the business”.
The plant was initially built for Peugeot assembly, but Renault and Rambler soon followed, along with others.
“We assembled the Isuzu Bellett for Moller Motors. We used to call Russell Moller’s mother ‘Blossom’ so we called it ‘The Blossom Project’. We had a lot of fun. The Mollers were very honest and very good to deal with. We assembled the Bellett for three or maybe four years for them, until the brand was bought by General Motors. It was a nice car, but had a terribly small cabin.
“We also built the Datsun 260 and the smaller one, the Bluebird. The 260 was good news for us and I think good news for them. We made some money out of the 260, the six cylinder four door. All the commercial vehicles and the Coronas were done by Steel Bros in Addington. We were appointed to the Mollers’ Board and I used to go down every two months for a board meeting. We used to laugh because over six or seven years I never went into the city. They used to pick us up at the airport, go to Addington to have the meeting, put you back on the plane and I said at the time ‘Blimey, I wonder if the city is still there?’ They did a good job down there, that time was good.
“We assembled Hino at the plant as well but not Fiat, that was stolen from us in 1960. We were selling Fiats. The extraordinary car was the 600 Multipla. I sold one to the Headmistress of the Diocesan School for Girls and I had to deliver it and show her how it worked. The first thing she did was mount the kerb with the rear half of the car! We sold quite a few but they were all CBU. We had Fiat right back to just after the war. We started with the little Topolino, the wagon and a car. They were tiny things, I remember my father came home in one and drove it right around the side of house to the front door just for fun.”
While Campbells lost the Fiat franchise, Hugo Bedford was appointed to the board of the new franchisee, Torino Motors, as he explained “When we lost Fiat we were given an extraordinary arrangement; the board included Noel Barclay as Chairman, who was a friend of the Turners and Bob Elliott, who is still around, later on the the other son-in-law, who’s name I can’t recall. I used to go along, I didn’t say very much but we used to get a cheque every year and I would have a look at the accounts to make sure we got our 10%.
“I have never heard of such an arrangement before or since. I don’t know the full details as my father was still alive then but I know Bob Elliott came up to see him in the showroom in Queen St and he roared out from his office declaring ‘I’m not going to see you in the public area.’
“That was 1960 and I joined the Torino board in 1961, I was there until 1975. The Annual meeting was all I went to. We talked about everything and I picked up the cheque for our part. They did quite well, they brought in the 125 and then the big car – the 2300. They never seemed short of import licence, unlike everyone else and since then I’ve read that the licence they had was extraordinary. When everybody else had 300 cars, they assembled 14 or 1500 VWs. God knows where the licence came from!
“We had VW assemble the first of our Peugeots before we had our own plant. We were getting nowhere as we had very small import licence and everybody was getting into assembly so we talked to the Turners and they agreed to assemble them for us and did a good job of it. They also built Fiat for us, before doing it for themselves, for us, Peugeot 403 and 404.
“Going back to the CKD side here, a company called Allied made the wiring harness for all the CKD cars. Everything we did was difficult. With the Peugeot 504, the first 84 cars we couldn’t for some reason get the trimming organised so
the Government agreed the first 84 could come in with the factory trim and the seats so they had French seats and trim. From then on we had to have local trim.
“The CKD thing was a disaster really. It took us 124 hours to build a particular car (it might have been the Corolla or the Renault 12) which the parent factory could do in 26 hours and they would allow us for 26 hours in the CKD parts deletion allowance. 26 hours is not 124 so everything you did was totally uneconomic but the Government wouldn’t give it away because it created an industry.
“It was interesting, one year we would do well with assembly, the next year we lost money, the following we made money... but we had one interesting thing. Having Sir Clifford Plimmer on the board of the Toyota company we had the plant here and we had the paint shop there, at least, we were going to. We didn’t have the money.
“It sounds funny, it was around 1.6 million we needed to connect the paintshop so it was all one building. We used to push the bodies across the carpark and down to the paintshop. He was chairman of the AMP society and we applied for a loan for the full amount and we got it.
“I said to him ‘Did you have much to do with that?’ and he said ‘Funny enough, I didn’t. I didn’t need to say a word because it’s about the same (at that time) of 600 housing applications and the board said “One application compared to 600 all on one package?” They approved it straight away!’ We couldn’t believe it. It was easy.
“The early days we had a great time with some of those marvellous old cars. I vaguely remember a Studebaker straight 8 President. It belonged to a guy
in Remuera and my father twice a year on his way to work would pick this car up (he was a good customer) and take it in to get a WoF. It was the first car I had ever seen with the Studebaker ‘Hill Holder’.
“I used to go to work with him as I was still living at home. We’d stop outside his house and bring this huge car out. I was fascinated by the hill holder. There have been others since who have tried something similar. That was the most magnificent car for its time.”
“We were New Zealand distributors for Mercedes from 1955 to 58. Our dealers were pleased because they got 1 ½ cars here and the next year they got two because they only got half a car the previous time. We had enough licence for something like 60 or 70 cars a year over 15 dealers plus we needed some for our own retail outlet. It was going well then Mercedes came and saw my father and he really made a balls-up (although he didn’t think so). He had the Diamond T truck franchise and lost a King’s ransom every year with that. Mercedes came along and said we were doing well and we would like you to take on the trucks. My father, remembering the Diamond T experience said “No way!” so a month later we had a letter saying that as from 01 January the next year they would not be renewing the franchise and it went from there to Cable Price, who did take on the trucks.
“The Indian Tata trucks came along in 1971. We had a plant in Wairau Road on the North Shore where we assembled quite a few of them. But in 1973 there was the Middle East war and oil prices skyrocketed, which had the same effect on raw materials. I had made a deal with Mahindra with their small jeeps, a five year agreement, 3½% per annum recognition of cost of living increase on our cost price. We had two years where it went well, but after the 1973 oil crisis they came back to us and said that despite the agreement, they were now selling the vehicles to us below cost and they just couldn’t continue and it fell over. The same went for the Tata trucks, they wanted a 40% increase in price which we just couldn’t handle. The trucks were good. They were really an early model Mercedes Benz in every way.
“Dealing with India was interesting. When it came to the deletions for the CKD kits, they would say ‘You don’t want the wiper switches’ and I would say ‘Of course we do, I don’t know of any local supplier’. ‘No, you don’t want those,’ he said, ‘They give a terrible amount of trouble!’ So he deleted those and he deleted the alternator and a few other things which gave so much trouble in India. We managed to find an English alternator which worked. Our trucks were more reliable than the local ones.
“They were great to deal with. They would put the boxes out and wait for shipping. What killed them the most was if we had an emergency, like no headlights or something as an example, it would take around 3½ weeks to get it here. They would pick it off the line overnight but then had to get an export authority and all the paperwork which had to be completed and it would take at least ten days to get permission to export it. Then it would go along and wait its turn for shipping. And that was at express speed! With commercial vehicle parts it wasn’t good.
“Mahindra didn’t put anything on the sheet metal panels of the jeeps we were assembling, then they would wait in Bombay for a ship, which might be three to six months in the heavy atmosphere and humidity so they would be terribly rusty by the time we got them. My second trip to India, which was 1972 I said to them the rust is a big problem. I suggested that we had discovered that putting shellac on the panels would protect them and then when they get to New Zealand we would remove it and that would work.
“We had a big talk and I cringed and asked how much extra for the shellac? He pointed out the window and said ‘See those men there?’ There were some sitting under a tree. ‘They’re doing nothing, it’ll cost nothing.’ They lavishly coated the panels inside and out, but then they stood on the wharf as before and eventually came. I will never forget sitting in my office and Tim Adams, who was our chief engineer coming in, red in the face. He had just come from the plant. ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘Nobody can get the shellac off!’ I said ‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous.’ He was wild. It had been baked in the sun and the damp.
We had to get a chemist who devised some other stuff to get it off. We couldn’t scrape or wash it off. Those were the sorts of things which would happen. It was a disaster, that shipment was 120 units and every one of them took days to clean up.
“The Indian adventure was great, the people were good to deal with but the 1973 Yom Kippur war and then their inability to provide anything in an emergency put a stop to it. 3½ weeks was super-speed and somebody who had lost a headlight in truck when we had had a bad run on headlights and we didn’t have any, they were off the road which wasn’t so funny.
“It was a marvellous job, I loved it. At the end I was the boss, we had a board of directors which was just Blair Webster and me, the grandsons of the originals. He would come when he could for meetings, I did the spadework and he did the legal side and the banking. In motor vehicle assembly we must have driven the bankers mad.
“We had a meeting every day at 2 pm and look at the accounts. We would shuffle money from one to the other so there would be some roughly in the right places within the limits. We had at one time over 500 cars at the plant which we couldn’t deliver. For example, Renaults came in lots of 50, Rambler in lots of 8, Peugeot in lots of 12. All were different. If we doing a run of Renault 12s, it was quite common that there were no dashboards in the boxes, we were 50 short and we couldn’t deliver the cars. So we would have an enormous overdraft to cover hundreds of cars.
“Then there we were, the week after next, in credit again. In the meantime the bank manager would get a few grey hairs and so would I!
“We were the biggest customer for UTA Air France in New Zealand. Container loads of short parts would have to be flown in. It must have cost Peugeot and Renault a fortune. At one time we had two packs of 50 Renaults with no dashboards.
As soon as we opened the packs we had to pay the tax, which on a pack of 50 cars was tens of thousands of dollars so we were reluctant to open any more packs. This was very much a major problem and I think the bank eventually did quite well from us! We had to sometimes show them orders from dealers and in one case we were in the poo, we got dealers to write letters to the banks saying “Look, I’ve got three cars on order and I desperately need these cars” and the banks let us go. We were hundreds of thousands above our overdraft.
“Everything was financed through TKM (Tozer, Kemsley and Millbourn) in London. After 120 days we had to pay them, whether they were built, still on the water or wherever. TKM in the 1950s, when my father was the boss, got in touch with us and said they had a French company (Peugeot) looking for representation in New Zealand and wondered if we were interested? Of course we were and that was when we ordered the first Peugeot 203s. They were exactly twice the price of a Ford Twin Spinner. We went on our honeymoon around the South Island in one. Peugeot were wonderful really. Every year, in the beginning of December we would receive the contact in the mail, it was only for a year. We would sign it and then the next year, in December another big package would come again, exactly the same year after year.
“In the early 1970s (unless you were selling Lamborghinis or similar) and you wanted volume, if you didn’t have an assembly facility available, forget it. The assembly plant was our great asset. In late 1972 Ron Trotter from Challenge Corporation, which had been Wrightsons, talked to Blair and me and said they were very serious about the car business and wanted to buy us out. He was very honest and said ‘We want the plant.’ At this time the Government had bought in a regulation which stopped the building of any more assembly plants. There were seven at this time and they decided that was enough. So unless you bought one you couldn’t get involved. At that time we were building Toyota and they didn’t tell Cable Price, who were building the other third of the Toyotas.
“We started assembling Corollas in the late 60s, which we retailed for £2460. My wife Helen had one of the first of them and we should have hung on to it. Mr Uchi from Toyota came to New Zealand and he pushed the company to give us 1/3 of their business and they went along with it.
“Roly Crowther and I were in business on the marine side of things with Rotary Power New Zealand Ltd, the directors were Roly and me. We had a (Toyota) board meeting and Sir Clifford said ‘We should register the name Toyota New Zealand Ltd.’ We were calling it Consolidated Motor Industries at the time. We left Blair Webster as the lawyer to fix it. Blair went to register it and was told that the name had already been taken, in 1960 by a Roland Crowther, did we know him? Of course we knew him, so we got in touch with him and it cost us five big ones to buy the name off Roly. A lot of money!
“We had Challenge come and look at everything. Ron wrote down a few notes on a piece of paper and I said ‘Yes, that would be ok,’ as did Blair. We didn’t hear anything for quite some time. It took two years and then they came back and said based on the notes from Ron, this is the deal. So that is how it happened, Challenge Corporation bought us out. They were 2/3 of Toyota in New Zealand and Cable Price were the other, and they were very unhappy. I think (but it is only rumour) later on it was so unpleasant they went back to 50/50, where they had been before we were involved.”
The Campbell Industries plant in Thames still stands, today it is the headquarters for the Toyota Signature Class used import operation, and the Queen Street, Auckland showroom is now the home of Real Groovy Records, both buildings testament to the constantly changing face of the motor industry in New Zealand and ties to the past when the car was an important part of the industry of New Zealand.