Glory days of the coachbuilt estate car

Busy with Ford and BMC convertibles, Crayford turned to its friends at FLM (Panelcraft) Ltd to build its various estates and hatchbacks, initially the BMC 1100 and 1800, a handful of Austin 3 Litres (see Gallery) and from ’69 a run of 400 Mercedes W114s, which perhaps encouraged Stuttgart to go ahead with its own W123 model. Certainly Mercedes, after some reticence, was impressed enough to officially sanction the W114 wagons. Crayford and Panelcraft also produced estates based on the W108/W109 S-class, at least one of which was a 300SEL 6.3.

For the W116 S-class, which appears to have been an entirely Crayford production (above left), the faithful Maxi door was abandoned because it was too narrow. Boss David Mcmullan sent his wife off into Gatwick airport car park with a tape measure in search of a suitable replacement, which turned out to be the Ford Granada tailgate.

The late-’60s Rover P6 Estoura was the idea of Panelcraft’s Nobby Fry; Crayford only agreed to do the marketing if he altered the bizarre sloping roof on the prototype. He agreed, and it is thought that as many as 400 were sold, mostly V8s, via HR Owen and Hurst Park Automobiles. The rear door was off the ADO16 estate.

There was an estate adaptation of the firstgeneration Audi 100 by Crayford – plus it did one-off three-door oddities on the TR7 and Mercedes 450SLC – but by the ’80s there were plenty of factory-built executive hatchbacks that squashed the demand for bespoke makeovers.

Having said that, Jaguar had not succumbed to the idea of an XJ estate; it was left to established coachbuilder Avon to produce its odd-looking wagon version of the new Series III (above right) in 1980, complete with a Renault 5 tailgate.

More successful, and much prettier, was the XJ-S Eventer by Lynx. The firm stitched itself up, though, by choosing an obscure donor back door: there weren’t many Citroën Ami estates in breaker’s yards even in the early 1980s!