At all of last year’s major car events, wherever you went, you were bound to be reminded that 2019 marked the centenary of Bentley. Such adulation was by no means undeserved, but it does seem somewhat unfair that the same attention hasn’t been given to this year’s centenarian which, although now confined to the vault of lost marques, made the red triangle a very prestigious symbol over 47 years of car manufacture.
Thomas George John was born in 1880 at Pembroke Dock in Wales, and by 1904 was a qualified Naval Architect. He worked his way up the dockyard hierarchy and by 1911 was Manager of the Shipbuilding Department at Vickers. Following the outbreak of war, John transferred to the aviation industry and became Works Manager and Chief Engineer at the Siddeley-Deasy Motor Company in 1915, which was then busy supplying Puma straight- six aero engines to the Royal Flying Corps for the Airco DH9 bomber.
Godfrey de Freville supplied Siddeley-Deasy with aluminium pistons and castings for its aero engines; that his and John’s paths should cross would prove fortuitous. In 1919, John decided the time had come to be the head of his own business and, with his savings and a £3000 loan, he bought the Holley Brothers Co Ltd, a small engineering firm on Hertford Street in the centre of Coventry which undertook general work for the city’s motor industry.
Immediately, John renamed it T G John & Co and began building scooters for Stafford Auto Scooters Ltd. The Stafford Mobile Pup was a 140cc, single- cylinder affair that amounted to little more than a child’s scooter with an engine and seat. However, it was his intention to build his own cars and he began by buying the rights to de Freville’s design for a 1460cc, four- cylinder side- valve engine and the name Alvis. Thus, the Alvis 10/30 hit the market the following year.
Although John could manufacture engines and other mechanical parts from Hertford Street, chassis and bodies had to be bought in. John bought a new machine shop on the Holyhead Road (now the A4114) halfway through 1920 to make it easier for the company to cope with volume production and, by September, around five 10/30s were being built each week. There followed the purchase of a foundry on Lincoln Street, from where Alvis would make all its aluminium castings, and another plot of land opposite the Holyhead Road machine shop.
Alvis débuted at the London Motor Show at Olympia in November, 1920, exhibiting four 10/30s: two alloy-bodied Morgan ‘Zephyr’ twoseaters, one Charlesworth- bodied tourer and a bare chassis. Meanwhile, R E Jones of Bond Street, London, had become the official Alvis distributor, with subsidiaries in Wales and the West Country. Morgan & Co was one of Long Acre’s old-established coachbuilders and in 1919 it had been bought by R E Jones, hence the Alvis connection.
Full-scale production became more realistic with the completion of a purpose- built factory on the Holyhead Road site and it vacated Hertford Road in 1921. Coinciding with the move was the change of the company name to the Alvis Car & Engineering Co Ltd, and the 11/40 and 12/40 were introduced as companions to the 10/30. The Alvis badge was an upward- pointing winged triangle; Avro complained that this too closely resembled its own logo and so the famous downturned red triangle came into use in 1922.
While Alvis will primarily be remembered as building solid, medium-sized cars for the well-heeled, it did flirt with the affordable cyclecar boom before cyclecars were killed off by the Austin Seven. Alvis modified the Buckingham cyclecar, which used a 1096cc V-twin, but certain senior staff disapproved of the venture and production was over before the end of the year. Alvis’s first ohv engine was developed from the original 1460cc four and it went into the 10/30 Super Sports and then the 12/50, which would become Alvis’s most popular model until the 1930s and remains a popular Vintage choice today. The 12/50 gave Alvis’s reputation a great boost when C M Harvey won the Junior Car Club’s 200- Mile Race at Brooklands in one in 1923.
Despite steady sales of the ohv models, Alvis went into liquidation in 1924 after it had been unable to make payments for bodies from other coachbuilders. Alvis wriggled out of this hole and continued making the 12/40 and 12/50 into 1925, which would be the last year for side- valve engines.
While road car production ticked over steadily, Alvis remained active on the competition circuit and famously entered a run of pioneering front- wheel drive racing cars in sprints, Grands Prix and the 200- Mile Race in the late 1920s, achieving a few speed records on the way. A handful of FWD Alvises would be built for the road and entered into Le Mans and the Tourist Trophy races several years before Citroën introduced the FWD principle to the mass market with its Traction Avant , but the venture did not survive to see the 1930s.
Introduced as an option in 1924, all Alvises received front- wheel brakes in 1926 and, the same year, the first straight- eight Grand Prix engines were built. The first production six-cylinder made its début in 1927, an 1870cc unit destined for the 14/75.
The Firefly replaced the long- lived 12/50 in 1932 but the real character of Alvis through the 1930s would be defined by the long, low, six-cylinder Speed 20 and Speed 25 which naturally all received very elegant coachwork. Throughout the decade, the range of six-cylinder models became very broad, including names such as the Crested Eagle and Silver Crest and spanning engine sizes from 2148cc to 4387cc.
Although it had developed a firm reputation for quality, that hadn’t been sufficient for many other manufacturers to survive the onslaught of large companies such as the Rootes Group and the Nuffield Organisation whose primary income came from Pressed Steel saloons churned out en masse. Coachbuilders and the car- makers who still relied on them were rapidly being consumed or else they fell by the wayside. Wishing to avoid this fate, John secured extra income by building aero engines and military vehicles for other companies. While aero engine work was performed for de Havilland and Rolls-Royce, Alvis wouldn’t receive much interest in military vehicles until the war. John’s wise decision to add some extra strings to Alvis’s bow put his company in good stead to survive the war and it continued making cars, aero engines and military vehicles into peacetime, as well as bomb trolleys and printing presses. This extra work was crucial to Alvis’s survival during the age of ‘Export or Die’ and the new purchase tax.
The first post- war model was the TA14, which like so many new cars was really just a tarted- up pre- war model and relied on the now slightly inadequate 12/70 four- cylinder engine, but work was underway on an all-new three- litre model, which would appear as the TA21 in 1951. This was updated to become the TC21 with twin SUs, and a tuned version with higher rear axle ratio called the TC21/100 ‘Grey Lady’ was one of the first post- war saloons to hit 100mph. The remainder of Alvis’s production cars would all be built around the same 2993cc six that appeared with the TA21. By 1955, the TC21 looked heavy and quite archaic, but a beautifully elegant body built by Swiss coachbuilder Graber on a TC21/100 chassis showed Alvis the way ahead and from 1956 the TC108G, TD21, TE21 and TF21 were all clearly influenced by its design.
Sadly, more and more car- makers were being absorbed by the conglomerates and the demand for individually made, coach-built cars had virtually dried up by the 1960s. As before, Alvis may have pressed on regardless thanks to its other concerns, but there was trouble with aero engines, too, as the jet age ended the demand for the piston engines made by Alvis. Rover bought Alvis in 1965 and was itself bought by the Leyland Motor Corporation in 1967. The same year, production of the TF21 was halted and Alvis as a car- maker was no more. It could face the curtain with a bow, though, as all its post- war cars had been proudly coach-built until the end, firstly by Mulliners with the TA/TC cars and by Park Ward with all later models. In its time, they were good enough for some very distinguished clients – Douglas Bader, Nicholas Parsons and Prince Philip have all been lifelong Alvis owners.
As well as the standard Mulliner and Park Ward cars, Alvis’s post- war history is peppered with interesting diversions down other paths. The TB14 was an ill-judged attempt to break into the sports car market while Ian Duncan sought to mate the TA14’s traditional front end with a sleek, modern pillarless coupé body in the Duncan Coupé. The Alvis-Healey of 1950- 54 was an unsuccessful attempt to market a sports car in the States and Graber would continue to reinterpret Alvises in its own wonderful way until the very end. Rover made two concepts intended for Alvis, the fastback, P6-based GTS and the mid-engined, V8-powered P6BS, but neither saw production.
Happily, as a manufacturer of military vehicles, Alvis survived a bit longer. Having built the impressive FV600 six-wheeler family of Saladin armoured cars, Saracen armoured personnel carriers, Salamander fire tenders and Stalwart load carriers, in 1967 it was awarded the contract for production of FV100 tracked reconnaissance vehicles. British Leyland sold Alvis to United Scientific Holdings in 1981. In 1998, production moved to Telford and the old Holyhead Road factory was demolished the following year and replaced by the Alvis Retail Park. Alvis Vickers Ltd, as it had become, was bought by BAE in 2004 and the red triangle would be seen no more, or so it seemed – the recently revived The Alvis Car Company is building small quantities of a few Alvis models, including the exquisite Graber, and in common with other similar “continuations”, the cars are hand-built recreations sold at eye-watering prices…but they are beautiful.
