CHARLES THOMPSON
Charles was the man who gave the world the Ford Corsair… as well as the Cortina Mki’s CND tail-lamps
QTell us about your early days, and what got you into cars in the first place?
‘I was born in Pune in India, in 1931. My uncle was a railway engineer and always used to give me lovely toys, like cars. He had a six-cylinder Talbot tourer that he got from a Maharaja – that impressed me. But when my family came to England in 1949, my instinct was to go and find a place to work on aeroplanes. I was always an aircraft nut, more than cars. I started as an apprentice at de Havilland and was going to move to Bristol. But then a trainee draughtsman job came up at Briggs Motor Bodies at Dagenham, which was only a 7d bus ride from where we lived in Ilfold. So working on cars was the much cheaper option.’
QFord took over Briggs in 1951, and made Colin Neale there its chief stylist. You two became very good friends, I believe.
‘Styling was a very new thing. I don’t think it existed in any other UK car company at the time. If it was engineered right, it didn’t matter what it looked like, especially if it had the word ‘British’ on it. That was the thinking at the time. I first met Colin at engineering night classes – he saw I was artistic and said he’d get me into the styling department after I did my National Service. Which I finished in 1956. My department boss wasn’t terribly impressed – the engineers looked down on stylists, dressing in all the latest gear like Chukka boots, mustard-coloured waistcoats and Fair Isle sweaters. Outrageous, it was. But there was always conflict between engineering and styling.’
QSo, what were the projects you got involved with?
‘The MKII Consul/zephyr/zodiac had just been released, so we started on with the MKIII. But Colin Neale soon got fed up about the situation with engineering, and left. We were headless. Frua of Italy was brought in, but it didn’t do a great job, so Roy Brown of the USA came over – because he wasn’t so popular over there thanks to designing the Edsel. We’d do sketches, then scale models, then full-size clay models. When the chief stylist was finally happy, it was all smoothed down, painted and then shown to the management. Entire months would go by with just little changes. When you’re spending thousands of pounds on tooling, you don’t just go: ‘Yes, we like that. Make it.’ It was a long-winded process.’
QAnd then came the Cortina?
‘Well, Ford decided it wanted a world car. It went to Germany and they came up with the Taunus. Sir Patrick Hennessy, the boss of Ford of Britain, got quite peeved with this, and ordered us to do our own. We had a lot of catching up to do. Roy got to work on the shape, but I was given the role of looking after the design details, such as the grille etc. The problem we had was with the tail-lights. I was told to put circular ones in. And that was the Cortina’s most famous trademark.’
QIt’s often been claimed that was influenced by the CND symbol. Was it?
‘You know, the thing that management was really worried about was Mercedes-benz objecting. But it didn’t. It was nothing to do with CND though. It was simply that I didn’t have much time to spare because I was due to go into hospital for an operation. So I divided a circle into three segments. It is funny how things like that happen. There was no real thought to it at all.’
QWere you indirectly responsible for the Cortina changing its identity from a Consul 225?
‘Well, sort of. Somebody in management had got the bright idea of calling everything Consuls, because that range was doing so well. The Cortina was going to be the Consul 225. They had two prototypes up in Scotland on a big photoshoot. Somebody decided to end the 225 nonsense and they were going to stop the shoot. Instead, I did a chrome-plated rendering on cardboard of a Cortina script and was sent up to put them on. I had a lovely weekend up there, beautiful spring
weather in the Highlands. Good food, too. One of the photographers did say to me ‘I don’t know why you wasted your time. We could have changed that in our photo labs.’
QAnd your most famous piece of work was, of course, the Corsair. Tell us about that.
‘Due to the Cortina’s success, I was asked to make an upmarket version by stretching it. I had to carry over the windscreen and the doors, but that was it. Otherwise, make it as look as different as possible. That meant doing something with the front, the low droop look, plus I removed the fluting down the side. That worked so well that management agreed to remove the Cortina fluting from the doors.
‘Styling was a very new concept when I started out in the car industry’
I did want to make a concave rear at one time, but that proved too complicated.’
QWe have to ask. Was the front of the Corsair inspired by the Ford Thunderbird?
ÔIT wasn’t conscious. If anything, there was the German Taunus 17M. The headlamps were vaguely similar but it wasn’t as pointed. There’s always ideas in your head and, seditiously, they get affected by what else is going on. It did successfully translate the Cortina upmarket, but it didn’t quite succeed engine-wise, or so I’ve heard.’
QAnd what of your career with Ford after the Corsair? What else did you have a hand in designing?
‘There was some work on the MKIV Zephyr/zodiac, but I can’t really jump up and down about that. It got interfered with somewhat unfortunately. That wasn’t my idea, putting the spare wheel at the front. They sent me to the States for a year in 1966, to Detroit, to see how the ‘experts’ did it. It was a huge operation out there, far bigger than over here. When I came back, I moved into interiors. I’d had no involvement with that up until then. I had to start learning about fabrics, vinyls and colours, and the Ford names of the colours, too. That bit was good fun but…’
QIt sounds like you weren’t that pleased to be moved from exteriors to interiors?
‘Not really. It was alright, but I was not a manager by any stretch of the imagination. I was happy to be left alone, come up with ideas and design things. And now I was running things and writing performance reports etc. I was climbing up the ladder, but the styling ideas were being done by others, and I didn’t like that at all. I ended up running the design surveillance department, checking on manufacturers and their tooling methods. I used to fly from Stansted to Germany at least once or twice a week. Then in 1982, I was walking past the Qantas Airlines showroom in London and they had a lovely exhibition of aviation art there. That inspired me to start painting aircraft. In 1986, I was offered the proverbial golden handshake by Ford, came out and discovered that there was a whole world out there that had nothing to do with cars. After 37 years at Ford, now I had a chance to do something for myself that I enjoy.’
QSo out of everything you’ve done, what are you proudest of?
‘Oh, that will be Corsair. I was given complete leave to do what I wanted with it, there was no messing around. And I felt I met the brief right from the start. In retrospect, if I had to do it again, I would have made the chrome at the front just a bit thicker.’