Everyone knows Detroit as the centre of the US motor industry, it’s motor town – it’s even had a record label named after it. Of course, it’s no longer what it was, but then, what is?
In the UK, many people think of Birmingham as the UK equivalent of Detroit, principally because of the huge – at the time – Longbridge manufacturing facility that was one of the two main BMC/BL sites (the other being Cowley, near Oxford). Besides being the home of Austin, the Longbridge factory was one of the largest in Europe, churning out Mini’s and later, Metro’s by the hundreds of thousands, as well as Austin-badged versions of the 1100/1300 and many others. In my time at BL in the early 1980’s the plant was said to employ 14,000 people directly.
However, it’s the nearby city of Coventry – about 20 miles east on the A45, with two cathedrals (one in ruins), a very average football club, two universities (albeit one of them is named after Warwick) and a population of a little over 360,000 – that is really the UK’s Detroit, in ways both good and bad, and I’ll explain why in the next 1500 words or so.
The city was already known for its expertise in sewing machine, bicycle and watch manufacture making it as well prepared as any city to make the transition to car manufacture. So it was that Henry Lawson founded the Daimler Motor Company in 1896 at The Motor Mills, from which emerged the first British car the following year. Lawson’s involvement in the industry was soon to be curtailed, however, as he was found guilty of conspiring to defraud and was sentenced to a year’s hard labour. Nevertheless, it could be said that he was the founding father of the British motor industry.
Over the next few decades Daimler was to be followed by numerous other motor manufacturers, some of which had lifespans only marginally longer than a mayfly, such as the Dawson Car Company (1919 – 1921), or Iden, which only lasted for three years from 1904, as well as a host of minor players like Calcott Brothers, Cluley, and Crouch – and that’s just the C’s – all since consigned to the pages of the history books.
However, while some companies failed to stay the distance, others grew, and Coventry became the base for many of the motor industry’s most famous names – Jaguar and Daimler being perhaps the best known. Jaguar as a company started life in 1935, having previously been known as the Swallow Sidecar Company (the name came from the SS Jaguar car) and has gone on to become one of the world’s premium car brands, having introduced (among other fine cars) the XK120/140/150, the XJ6, the MK 2 and most famously, the E-Type to the world, as well as having enjoyed significant motor sport success, most notably at Le Mans with the glorious C-and-D-Type Jaguars.
Daimler itself was a part of BSA (the Birmingham Small Arms Company, makers of motorbikes and as the name implies, guns, among other things), who had acquired the car maker in 1910, before it was sold to Jaguar Cars in 1960 and production moved to Coventry, where it suffered the fate of many assimilated companies and became simply a badge and trim level on various Jaguars.
Between the wars though it was a story of continuous growth, as by 1939 some 38,000 people were directly employed in motor car manufacturing in the city, and names that became central to the UK motor industry, and to the lives of millions of drivers and their families such as Armstrong Siddeley, Singer, Humber, Alvis and others established factories there. Indeed, during the decade before the war, some two million cars found their way onto British roads, and a significant number of those were built in Coventry.
And it wasn’t just cars being built in Coventry, but motor-cycles too, with long-vanished names such as Coventry Eagle, Excelsior, Grindley-Peerless and – still with us today – Triumph.
Of course, these car and motor-cycle factories needed suppliers, and a vast array of subsidiary companies involved in general engineering, metal casting, forging, tool making, instrument manufacture and more sprouted up around the city, and Coventry became known as the “British Detroit”.
During the war, many of these companies turned their energies to supporting the war effort, getting involved in military vehicle and aero-engine production and as such became a key target for the Luftwaffe. As a result, Coventry suffered more bombing than any other UK city (than perhaps London) – indeed, the bombed-out ruins of it’s 14th century Gothic cathedral stands as a stark reminder of the war years, contrasting with the modern cathedral built to replace it.
Nevertheless, in the post-War period, Coventry rebuilt its industrial base and a dozen motor manufacturers had their factories in or around Coventry by 1950, as Coventry became a boom city, attracting workers with higher than average salaries as its car companies expanded. One newcomer was Sunbeam-Talbot, who moved its manufacturing from London to Ryton-on-Dunsmore, just outside Coventry, to produce its traditional middle-class 80 and 90 saloons and coupés; in 1954 the Talbot name was dropped altogether and the Sunbeam Rapiers, Alpines, Tigers that followed were all assembled at the Ryton plant.
However, as night follows day, after the rise came the fall – to begin with, some of the smaller companies became absorbed by larger conglomerates, principally the British Motor Corporation (BMC) and the Rootes Group. The former swallowed Jaguar, Riley and Triumph, while the latter took Humber, Hillman, Singer as well as Sunbeam. Rootes was itself taken over by Chrysler in 1964 and in 1978, Chrysler sold the company to Peugeot, who reintroduced the Talbot brand on what were actually Chryslers made in Coventry.
At the same time, the industry suffered from disruptive worker relations, characterised by a series of damaging strikes, which, combined with poor management, internal inefficiencies, increased competition from Europe and Japan and a growing reputation for poor quality, contributed to an irreversible downward spiral.
Throughout this period of decline, many of Jaguar’s fellow Coventry-based manufacturers bit the dust, either directly or as part of a process of gradual assimilation with or takeover by other companies, many of them famous names in the annals of motoring.
These included Alvis, founded in 1919 and maker of many fine and distinguished sporting – but not sports – cars until 1967 (unless you count the recently introduced – and very limited – run of continuation cars currently being produced by The Alvis Car Company); Standard Triumph, founded in 1903 as the Standard Motor Company, with the Triumph name dating back to 1886; Humber, founded in 1887 and another name to disappear in 1967, as did Hillman.
Armstrong Siddeley, whose dignified cars such as the Sapphire were manufactured from 1919 to 1960, merged with Bristol Aero Engines in 1960 to become Bristol Siddeley, which six years later was acquired by Rolls Royce, but the last car to bear the Armstrong Siddeley name and with the company’s phoenix mascot on the bonnet was the Star Sapphire Mk II in 1960.
Riley, whose name diamond badge went from adorning stylish saloons and coupés such as the Kestrel and RM ranges to being just another badge on various BMC products such as the Mini-based Riley Elf until disappearing from our forecourts and showrooms in 1969.
Singer, founded as a bicycle manufacturer in 1874 even before the first car was built and began producing cars from 1901, made it to 1970, and Talbot also left the building eventually, checking out in 1994.
Triumph had already closed its Canley factory in 1980, and unemployment in the city was among the highest in the UK as the impact of two recessions on top of the above made Coventry a depressed – and depressing – place to be, as by 1982 more than half of Coventry’s car workers had been made redundant, and the long decline continued as Jaguar moved out of its Browns Lane plant in 2004 and Peugeot – having bought the Rootes Group companies from Chrysler in 1978, shut down and demolished its last plant in the area in 2006.
All this has direct parallels with Detroit – from being a powerhouse of motorcar and related engineering and parts production, to the closure of factories and many thousands of job losses. There’s even a musical connection of sorts – Tamla Motown deserted Detroit for LA, and Coventry (as well as a number of other post-industrial UK cities) was itself described in song by The Specials as a “Ghost Town” in their 1981 number 1 hit single of that name.
An overview of this long and varied history can be found at the Coventry Transport Museum (pictured above), opened in 1980 and which houses the largest public collection of vehicles in the UK. However, the city’s emblem is that of a phoenix rising from the flames, and recent years have seen something of a revival in the fortunes of Coventry as both a city and as a centre for the motor industry.
Warwick University is host to the Warwick Manufacturing Group, funded by JLR, and Coventry University recently opened the National Transport Design Centre. The London Taxi Company, despite its name, built that city’s famous black cabs (under the Carbodies name) in Coventry from 1959 to 1994 and is doing so again, building the modern TX4 cab.
Jaguar Land Rover – having been shuffled between ownership by Ford (Jaguar) and BMW (Land Rover) to the Indian conglomerate Tata – had, despite a continuing reputation for poor quality (it seems some things are hard to shake off), built no fewer than 500,000 vehicles in 2015, albeit not in Coventry but designed at its engineering centre in Whitley, Coventry, and the company remains headquartered there. It has to be said though that events of the last few years – the long-running saga that is Brexit and the current coronavirus crisis and in JLR’s case, very inconsistent sales in China – have put a significant dent in that revival. Indeed, a new JLR factory is also planned for the city, and hopefully, when the world emerges from the other side of this, the city of Coventry – and JLR – will be able to continue its rejuvenation.
I’ll end this (very) brief look back at Coventry and it’s major part in the history of the motor-car with a gallery of some of the city’s most famous products – this is very far from a comprehensive overview!
