The Protea six decades on
ALONGSIDE CAR, ANOTHER SOUTH AFRICAN AUTOMOTIVE ICON CELEBRATES ITS 60TH BIRTHDAY THIS YEAR. WE CAUGHT UP WITH JOHN MYERS AND THE CAR HE HELPED CREATE
IT’S A POIGNANT SCENE
His blue-grey eyes light up as they take in the bright yellow sportscar neatly parked next to the racetrack. For a fleeting moment, the 94-year-old John Myers is once again a selfassured, proud young man, confidently striding towards his beloved creation; ready to fire up the Protea and take it for a blast around the track.
Leaning on his walking stick, Myers’ gaze remains steadily fixed on the two-seater beauty. He is deep in thought and you can only imagine the memories flooding his mind, going back to the days when he dotingly put it together, raced it and cared for it.
“She is beautiful, isn’t she,” says Myers, voice filled with warm pride and, as he walks towards the piece of South African automotive history he created, there’s a slight lilt in his step and an extra flourish of his cane.
We are at the Franschhoek Motor Museum at L’ormarins wine estate, where curator Wayne Harley has kindly arranged for the museum’s Protea chassis number four to be present at this special meeting. The last time Myers saw the Protea was five years ago as a special birthday treat when he reached “four score years and ten”. Back then he was still able to get behind the wheel and slowly potter round, but now he is content to ride shotgun while Wayne takes him for a couple of laps around the facility.
Myers’ body may now be frail, but his mind is still sharp and, while we all peer under the fibreglass bonnet (like all petrolheads do), he recounts, in astonishing detail, the trials and tribulations of bringing the Protea to life.
SOME BACKGROUND
John Myers was born in India but went to boarding school in England before he qualified as an engineer shortly before the outbreak of World War Two.
He was drafted as a motor technician for the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) regiment, and was sent to India and the “Eastern Theatre”, as that particular slice of WW2 was called, to maintain and develop tanks and armoured cars in Burma, as well as help with the development of ideas for amphibious tanks. It was in the steaming Burmese jungle that he initially hatched the idea of building his own car.
Myers’ war stint ended when he contracted malaria and, after his discharge from the army, he decided to return to India, but en route his boat docked in Durban. There he enjoyed the local hospitality and the fresh fruit and veggies so much he decided to stay. As luck would have it, with skilled engineers in short supply, there were many job opportunities and Myers quickly landed a position with Lawsons Motors in Johannesburg. It was there where he met Bob Fincher and Dr Alec Roy, and together the three of them founded the company GRP (Glass Reinforced Plastic Mouldings) with the aim of building their own car.
They established a small workshop among the mine dumps in Booysens Reserve, south of Johannesburg and started with the
development of their perfect vehicle, a modern sportscar that would be competitive in its class but also affordable and easy to maintain.
To do this, they needed funds and the British light railway supplier Robert Hudson and his wife, Miriam – both racing aficionados – became their biggest benefactors, investing £10 000 (a huge sum in those days) in the start-up operation.
Thanks to Myers’ engineering background and motorsport know-how (he raced a self-built Hudson 8 Special, partook in hotrod racing at Wembley Oval in a 1936 Ford, and also competed in the Lourenço Marques Rally with a Peugeot), he was tasked to establish the production line.
Initially, he was the only partner working full-time at the factory (the others helped after hours) and toiled alone in the workshop. “I had only an SPCA special mutt keeping me company, but after a while he was so traumatised by the rowdy neighbourhood mongrels he also left,” Myers remembers. Fincher was responsible for the technical aspects, while Roy was the alchemist experimenting with a new material called fibreglass.
“Initially, we battled to find the right mixture and sometimes it went terribly wrong,” says Myers. “Once, the whole messy thing started smouldering inside the shop. Nobody could help us and there were many times we just wanted to give it up, but we persisted on our own and eventually found the right formula.”
Meanwhile, Roy designed an athletic but graceful bodyshell of flowing curves that reminded of the Austin Healy 100-6 and the later AC Ace, progenitor of Carroll Shelby’s legendary AC Cobra.
At first, they experimented with chicken wire and cement to build the full-size model’s shell. “It was a helluva challenge to create a shell that satisfied us all and we struggled for six months before we were happy with it.”
SPACE FRAME CHASSIS
Myers and Fincher built a spaceframe chassis with independent front and rear suspension, but the initial frame wasn’t strong and stiff enough, so they redesigned it. Most mechanical parts, such as the 27,4 kw 1,2-litre side-valve engine, close-ratio three-speed gearbox, wheels, brakes and rear axles, were sourced from the Anglia/prefect E100, with Ford South Africa supplying the components through intermediaries. The Ford worm-and-roller steering system did not want to fit in the frame, though, and in the end Myers nicked the steering system from a crashed Vespa 400 and fitted it upside down. Somewhat surprisingly, it worked.
The engine appears particularly puny by today’s standards, but the Protea weighs only 630 kg with a full fuel tank and stands around 810 mm tall. It could reach 136 km/h.
The Protea made its debut at the 1957 Rand Spring Motor Show at Milner Park – about two months after the inaugural issue of CAR magazine – and a full six months ahead of the iconic Dart built by GSM in Cape Town.
When reminded of this, Myers shakes his head. “We actually had no idea what we let ourselves in for. We also did not possess all the right skills and it was only passion and enthusiasm that drove us. Just think what we could have accomplished if we were aware of what was happening in the Cape,” says Myers, with the implication that co-operation between the companies back then could possibly have led to much bigger things.
SIX SURVIVORS
Over a period of 18 months, from 1957 to ’58, a total of 20 Proteas were built: two prototypes; 14 with Ford engines (the true Proteas); and six customised models with Singer, Triumph, Lancia, Chevrolet and Volkswagen powerplants.
The Protea also established itself as a worthy track contender, with Myers and John Mason-Gordon in an aluminium-bodied Protea-triumph winning the 1959 Six-hour Endurance Race at the old Roy Hesketh track in Pietermaritzburg.
Unfortunately, soon after that, production ceased. “It just wasn’t sustainable,” recalls Myers. “We had to pay £100 custom tax to the government on every car produced and this meant there was no profit margin.”
Only six Proteas are known to have survived, including this yellow number four; it’s a Protea that also has something of a racing pedigree, as Myers himself drove it at the Grand Central track’s final race.
Like John, Protea number four is now retired and carefully looked after by the passionate car people at Franschhoek Motor Museum, ensuring that the brainchild of three great pioneers in our motoring heritage is preserved for posterity.