THE COMPTROLLER
In conversation with Alan Smith, former financial director at AFN
He spent two decades as a senior manager at AFN and Porsche Cars Great Britain. Alan Smith also owned half a dozen 356s, drove various company Porsches, owned an Alfa Romeo Giulietta and was the proud possessor of a Ferrari 250GT Lusso which he kept for fifty years; he was also a friend of Dickie Stoop, raced in the Targa Florio and became financial director at Aston Martin. Here we look back over a varied career where Porsches were never very far away…
Alan Smith’s parents hailed from Sussex, but when Alan was small they moved to Tolworth. His mother worked at Croydon airport, then the world’s biggest, and his father, an engineer, was passionate about Scott motorcycles. Within sight of the new Kingston bypass, this was the brave new world of the motor car and race engineering. Such firms as Fox and Nicolls, HRG and Alta, to name but three, were within a couple of miles, and AC at Thames Ditton was not much further; up the A3 in Putney Vale was the striking art-deco KLG factory, maker of sparking plugs for racers and aviation engines; Alan’s uncle was an apprentice at Napier in Acton and would regale his nephew with tales of rebuilding the famous radial Sabre engine.
Opposite the Smiths lived well known amateur racer Dick Richards and in the house behind resided the Cooper family, Charles Cooper and son John who built the eponymous racing cars. With cars and engineering in virtually every direction it would have been very hard to remain immune and Alan Smith did not remain immune: before he was ten he had become what today we would call a petrolhead.
A bright boy, he went to St Paul’s School and won a scholarship to Oxbridge, but at eighteen, he says: ‘I couldn’t afford to go,’ which is no doubt true, but he was also keen to get out into the world and earn some money. Training as an articled clerk (‘for twenty-five shillings a week’) would establish him in accountancy and a profession which was to serve him well. But that would be his day job and often as not he would find other sources of income.
However, the prevailing engineering influence was apparent even before he had left school: a keen cyclist, he drilled the pedals and frame of his pushbike to lighten it. For his twenty-first birthday, his mother bought him that symbol of fifties youth, a Lambretta, but this was soon exchanged in favour of a rather more sporty two-stroke Maico, and although Alan did not know it, also the first transport of Wolfgang von Trips, the man who so nearly became Germany’s first F1 champion.
As a young teenager, Alan was already going to ‘500’ events with Dick Richards who raced among others against
Stirling Moss; Alan’s abiding memory of the JAP is the noise – ‘I hated the raspy sound of those 500s.’ His lightweight bike got him to Alta where the proprietors were pleased to show this budding enthusiast round its workshops.
He took it all in: Today he says Alta engines got an unfair reputation for being unreliable, adding with feeling, ‘but they weren’t: people just didn’t understand how to maintain them. The Carrera four-cam had a similar undeserved reputation.’ Always fascinated by aviation engines, he also has views on Charles Cooper: ‘Ferrari called him a “garagiste”, and this too was unfair. Cooper designed and built a proper aero-engine. I’ve seen it in a museum.
In 1954 he toured Europe on the Maico and the following year, he joined a firm on Southall trading estate by the name of Southwood which made high grade corrugated cases: ‘It was a go-ahead company – it pioneered colour printing on its packaging.’ Smith certainly did well there as before long he was able to buy his first Porsche: ‘I preferred the chassis engineering of Porsches to MGS, Jaguars, even the TR2, which was a good car.’
Again unknowingly emulating von Trips a few years previously, his Porsche budget would stretch only to a nonrunner. ‘It was a 356 which I found at Syston near Leicester. It had a VW engine and was in dreadful condition, but the important thing was it was a Porsche and I knocked it into shape. The fellow I eventually sold it to put me in touch with a steel broker and through him I acquired a 356 Berlin show car’. Other 356s followed, and after his disapproving father had died Alan even got his mother to race one of the 356s at Lydden Hill.
His Porsche career was crowned ultimately by a Carrera: he recalls a ‘great engine: by then I knew how to work on Porsches and it gave me no trouble.’ This of course was at a time when many, if not a majority, of motorists did their own maintenance. Already a Porsche Club GB member, in 1966 he wrote a piece for Porsche Post about the adventure of driving the four-cam Carrera to Sicily for the Targa Florio. Indeed he had even hoped to compete, but the scrutineers decided that the Carrera was a year too old, recalls Alan.
Believing that the girlfriend who had accompanied him on this adventure would be suitably impressed, Alan proposed to her, only to his utter dismay to be turned down flat. He already owned a Porsche, so he reacted in the only other way an affluent young man-about-town could to console
himself: bought a Ferrari, then a very rare item in Britain. As a youngster in the 1950s, he had been shown one of the very first Ferraris to come to Britain: ‘The sound of that V12 was stupendous – we’d never heard anyhing like it!’ The seed was sewn, but today on the subject of his Ferrari he is modest: ‘It cost £2550 – it was a two year old 250GT Lusso in poor shape. I scraped all the underseal off it and had Greypaul do the restoration for me.’
Accountants often have an entrepreneurial flair – witness David Richards of Prodrive – and Alan Smith was no exception: ‘For some years I had a franchise to sell a Teflon car coating: an amazing product, you only ever applied it once, but it took an enormous amount of mechanical buffing to finish. I ran this from a rented workshop at the old Woking RAF airfield. There were all sorts of interesting automotive people there and the perimeter road was always being used to test something.’
It was about this time that Smith joined AFN. ‘I’d first been to their Falcon Works premises in Isleworth in the early
Fifties when I accompanied Dick Richards, who was after spares for his BMW 328. I remember being charmed by Fritz Fiedler who took the time to show me around; later as a Porsche owner I used to go there to pick up parts.’
Then one day in 1967 he had a phone call: ‘It was John Aldington. AFN was expanding rapidly and he offered me a job as accountant. Isleworth was no further than Southall and of course I knew the company. Peter Bulbeck who was financial director was distinctly inappreciative as he thought John Aldington had appointed me to interfere in his domain. However, he later became more appreciative when he found he could off-load much of the financial admin on to me.’
Since before the war, AFN had been run by the Aldington brothers, Don, Bill and Harold John, known as HJ or Aldy. Makers of the Frazer Nash, they had begun importing BMWS in the 1930s, a flourishing business which died as a result of the war. In 1953 AFN became Porsche importers for Britain and by the 1960s this had entirely replaced the original
Fraser Nash activity. Recalls Alan:
‘HJ was the big boss, a domineering personality, he was the showman who worked the celebrity customers such as the Shah of Iran, but under him AFN was undisciplined and old fashioned. If it was successful, it was because it had a fabulous product – Porsche. Then HJ had a serious road accident, not the first, and reluctantly the brothers agreed to let HJ’S son John, then 31, take control.’
John Aldington was educated at Dartmouth Naval College and then spent two years at Zuffenhausen and, as the Porsche business took over from Frazer Nash at AFN, the Germans looked increasingly to him for decisions. Smith says that at first he thought this rather shy, withdrawn individual would not fill the role.
An only child, Alan Smith believes John was affected by the frequent absences of his father and the death of his mother when he was still quite young, but Aldington junior’s discipline and organisation would impress him: ‘HJ liked to enjoy himself, not just with cars either and he could be a bit “sharp”, as in sharp practice, but John was serious, a man of his word, certainly where I was concerned.’
Ferry Porsche thought so too and backed Aldington strongly when an acquisitive VW tried to take control of AFN in 1972. The outcome was a partnership in which John Aldington, MD of Porsche Cars Great Britain and AFN which
“IT COST £2550 – IT WAS A TWO YEAR OLD 250GT LUSSO…”
in 1966 he had established as two separate companies, held 40 per cent and Porsche through directors Ferry and Heinz Branitzki 60 per cent. In the mid 1970s PCGB moved to Reading while AFN remained in Isleworth.
‘John could be quite inflexible: we organised a race series for the 924 and there were suggestions the cars should have sports exhausts to make them sound more exciting, but he would have none of it. It had to be the standard car.’ On the other hand, and as former AFN press man Michael Cotton remembered, when Gerry Marshall, one of the invited professional drivers, complained that the 924 soon ran out of brakes, Aldington said to him, ‘I really wouldn’t appreciate it if you told the press that, Gerry.’
As comptroller, Alan Smith’s responsibilities embraced both sites and he stayed at AFN for over 20 years. Amongst his most vivid memories is a visit by Peter Schutz whose policy of volume sales contrasted with John Aldington’s approach, something of the old Brooklands ethos of ‘the right crowd and no crowding,’ which was rather to limit supply to protect prices and residual values.
After a protracted exchange Alan recalls an exasperated Aldington telling Schutz ‘You’ll be having us sell Porsches from filling stations next,’ to which the inimitable drawled retort was ‘Jaaahn, I’ve sold cars from gas stations!’ Smith liked Schutz and also had time for his predecessor, Ernst Fuhrmann, for whose engineering he had considerable respect. ‘When he was at Porsche in the 1950s, he would go off to engineering companies in Stuttgart looking for parts and machine work, and even pay for them out of his own pocket. Fuhrmann was a real enthusiast.’
Then, in 1987, John Aldington suddenly sold his shares to Porsche and left the business. Peter Bulbeck took over. Aldington and Bulbeck were very different characters and Bulbeck soon began fashioning AFN to his liking: he fired the three general managers and eventually his clean sheet would extend to Alan Smith.
‘Bulbeck kept a close relationship with Branitzki (by now CEO at Porsche) and I concede he had always handled the financial side competently. But he saw me as John’s man. My job latterly had been setting up the IBM computer system. Bulbeck wanted it to link into Porsche’s massive system; I believed it was far more useful for the AFN system to be linked to the dealers.’ Smith feels this was the nail in his AFN coffin.
Always an amateur racer, Alan competed in his Carrera and also in a TR5 in the 1969 Targa Florio. The official results show he and his co-driver finished 60th, but Alan is surprised they were classified as his co-driver crashed the TR before the finish, ‘and never offered to pay for the
damage!’ In the 1970s Alan continued to compete in historic Porsche events, and after he had sold his Carrera it was usually in a borrowed car.
Although he kept the Ferrari until quite recently he owned no further Porsches, although during his two decades at AFN he drove a range of company Porsches: ‘The flat-six was a fine engine, but I always preferred the 356.’ Meanwhile, the Smith garage was home at various times to a Ferrari Dino and Alfa Romeos from the days when they were proper reardrive sports saloons.
But for a disagreement with a publisher, Alan Smith might also have added a book to his name: ‘I had an idea to write about three heroes of the 1950s, Hawthorne and Collins, who were gone of course, and Brooks, who was always rather self-effacing. I knew them all quite well, especially Tony Brooks, but the publisher wasn’t interested in including Brooks as he thought the public wouldn’t recognise him. So it came to nought.’ A book would eventually emerge, but it would be Chris Nixon’s Mon Ami Mate about the Collins and Hawthorn duo.
Through the Alfa Romeo club Alan got to know Les Paul who owned Motor Books, which would later have an outlet in Covent Garden: ‘About 20 years ago, knowing my interest in books, Les offered me the business. I was tempted, but in the end I decided against it.’
A favourite browse for enthusiasts, Motor Books in Covent Garden, alas, closed in 2014, victim perhaps of the internet. Les Paul’s offer was typical though of the opportunities which came Alan’s way: after he left AFN, he was approached by Victor Gauntlett of Aston Martin, one of the many people he had met through racing, and offered the job of financial director for Great Britain. So off he went to Newport Pagnell.
‘I was involved in the transition from the DBS to the
Virage and the development of the successor to the DB V8. Gauntlett had great hopes, but cashflow was always a problem, and then in 2003 Gauntlett died suddenly of a heart attack. Aston offered me his position, but I turned it down as I felt I didn’t have the right qualifications.’
Head hunters approached Alan with a job in life assurance, ‘but I quickly realised they were only interested in my address book,’ and instead he launched himself into selfemployment as a partner in a business maintaining racing Ferraris. ‘I still had the workshop near Woking which we used as a base.’
In 2004 he celebrated his 70th birthday, which was the last time he saw John Aldington. ‘He didn’t look well – he said he had problems with his back, but I suspected something worse.’ Aldington died a couple of years later, by which time Alan had moved to Lavant, conveniently near
Goodwood as it happens, and more or less retired.
Now 85 he reflects on a varied life and particularly on the amazing variety of people he feels he was privileged to meet: as a youngster he was introduced to Argentinian Froilan Gonzales and Johnny Lurani; in 1968 as one of Britain’s first wave of Ferrari owners he was granted an audience, as he puts it, with Enzo Ferrari and he remains an admirer. At Porsche he made large numbers of friends including the outgoing German racer Herbert Müller, thanks to whom Alan was on one occasion able to drive a Ferrari 512 around Brands Hatch.
‘I don’t think you could have a life quite like that again,’ says Alan. And he’s right…
“I DON’T THINK YOU COULD HAVE A LIFE QUITE LIKE THAT AGAIN…”