Life can be full of surprises, and certainly the motoring world has seen its share of them. One particular eyebrow-raising instance occurred in 1950, when Jowett announced its intentions to produce a class-beating sports car in the form of the Jupiter, now celebrating its 70th birthday. It’s difficult to judge exactly where a front-engined, flat-four sports car belongs in the market, but in the 1½-litre class the Jupiter sat roughly halfway between the cheaper MG TD and Morgan Plus 4 and the more expensive Porsche 356 and Simca Eight.
Willie and Ben Jowett were very much out on a limb when they began car manufacture in 1910 relying solely on flat-twin engines, and Jowetts became even more of an oddity once the use of V-twins as a motive force for certain cyclecars and light cars petered out by the mid-1920s. The Bradford manufacturer nevertheless persisted with offering solely flat-twin cars until 1936, when it brought out a side-valve flat-four for the Jowett 10. In 1947, Jowett revealed its best-known product, the Javelin, with a 1486cc ohv flat-four wrapped up very neatly in a compact body designed by Gerald Palmer. But could such an engine ever belong in a sports car?
As far as Jowett was concerned, the 1486cc four in a sports car body was a natural fit, since the Javelin had already proven itself as an able competitor in saloon car racing. In 1948, Leslie Johnson bought ERA from Humphrey Cook and it was his influence, for he was himself a Javelin driver, which led to Jowett entering a Javelin in the Spa 24-Hour Race in January 1949 where it won the two-litre touring-car class at an average speed of 65.5mph, driven by Tom Wisdom and Anthony Hume. Meanwhile, journalist Laurence Pomeroy (not to be confused with his father, also Laurence, the brilliant engineer responsible for the Prince Henry Vauxhall) had started campaigning for a British car to vanquish the German and Italian entries in medium-capacity sports-car racing. Sitting down with Johnson and Hume, the three of them hatched a plan to turn the modest little Javelin into a serious sports car. George Wansborough, chairman of Jowett, gave the project his blessing. That being granted, Pomeroy and Hume jumped into a Javelin and headed for Turin to speak with the Austrian engineer Robert Eberan van Eberhorst, then working for no less a marque than Cisitalia.
When van Eberhorst arrived with Jowett in May, plans for the ERA-Javelin had already been drawn up, and he exerted tremendous effort to increase the output of the Javelin’s engine to 60bhp through use of a special camshaft, develop six prototype chassis and see that some were ready in time for the 1949 London Motor Show. The first the public knew of the new car was a picture in the Daily Graphic on 28th September showing one of the prototype chassis sporting a coupé body by Harold Radford, but Jowett had envisaged it as an open car and were not pleased by this publicity. At October’s Motor Show, a bare chassis was exhibited and met with approval from the motoring press on account of its advanced tubular steel chassis, but Radford’s ERA-Javelin was nowhere to be seen.
The Radford coupé body and the exposed chassis upon which it sat.
The following month, Wilfred Sainsbury, acting on behalf of the Lazard Brothers, the merchant bankers who owned Jowett at the time, met with Johnson to tell him that the Lazards wished for ERA to have no further involvement with the project and that, in future, all bodies and chassis would be built by Jowett itself. Bodies would, in fact, be supplied by the English division of Briggs Motor Bodies at Doncaster, in which Ford had a significant interest, and which would prove to be Jowett’s sad downfall.
Come December, Reg Korner, chief bodywork designer at Jowett, was given four months to clothe another ERA chassis, to be exhibited at the New York Motor Show in April 1950. Of the remaining four ERA-Javelins, two were to remain as chassis, for European and American shows respectively, the third was to be entered in the 1950 Le Mans 24-Hour Race and the fourth was to be used for road testing.
The Jowett Javelin Jupiter, as it was at first called, made its début in the motoring press on 8th March, when The Autocar and The Motor both ran articles, using photographs of the chassis but relying on an artist’s sketch to show the finished car. With a claimed 65bhp, it was listed at £495 for a bare chassis, not including purchase tax. When in production, prices for a complete car would fluctuate between £725 and £895, but tax would take the total price to well over £1,000.
The first complete prototype Javelin Jupiter finally appeared on Saturday 27th March, being taken for a 22-mile test run around Yorkshire’s foggy moors on Sunday, photographed for the local press on Monday and packed into a shipping container and despatched to New York on Tuesday along with the other remaining chassis. The second finished car was driven for 3,000 miles around Britain and France in the hands of Charles Grandfield and Horace Grimley, averaging 46mph and 31mpg – Jowett might have been looking to win some renown for speed, but heaven forbid it should forget about its reputation for economy. On 18th April, the Javelin Jupiter drew much attention at the New York show, no doubt partly thanks to its attention-grabbing metallichrome copper paint.
The New York Motor Show in April 1950.
With the standard road car suitably well publicised, Korner, Grandfield and Grimley were channelling all their energy into the Le Mans car, which hit the road for testing in April. Come the 24-Hour race on the weekend of 24-25th June, the Javelin Jupiter, named Sagacious II on account of its drivers Tommy Wisdom and Tom Wise, took to the track and proceeded to win its class of five, against an MG, two Simca-Gordinis and a Fiat.
This being the age of ‘Export or Die’, the Javelin Jupiter, like so many other new British cars of the day, was introduced chiefly with the export market in mind. If sufficient cars could be sold abroad, Jowett could hope to see an increase in its meagre steel allowance caused by post-war material shortages. The first production chassis was destined for Sweden when it left the Jowett factory on 11th August, and No 2 headed for the body shop of Stabilimenti Farina in Italy. The Farina chassis, bodied as a fixed-head coupé, was to surprise visitors to the Paris Motor Show on 6th October, where it appeared as a late entry, and a fortnight later it drew similar admiration at the London show.
The Stabilimenti Farina Jupiter.
Besides the Radford prototype and Farina’s efforts, of which there were ultimately four, a number of Javelin Jupiter chassis found their way to coachbuilders to be clad with bespoke bodywork. An early example was by Lionel Rawson, previously responsible for the Healey Sportsmobile, for its owner Sir Hugh Bell, father of Derek Bell. Others included Beutler, Ghia-Aigle, Warblaufen, Abbott, Richard Mead, Coachcraft of Egham, Maurice Gomm and Charles Robinson.
The first 16 Javelin Jupiters to come out of the Idle factory were all rolling chassis. The first complete cars, starting with No 17, appeared in November. No 17 went to a garage owner in Bordeaux, 19 and 21 were factory demonstrators and 20 was the showroom car. No 18 had been intended for a Parisian importer but the sale was cancelled and Jowett retained the car for the 1951 Monte Carlo Rally. In Britain, it would not be possible to buy a finished car, only a chassis, until 1951. ‘Javelin’ was dropped from the Jupiter’s name in February 1951.
In June 1951, Jowett returned to Le Mans with the Jupiter R1, a modified example built by the Experimental Department with skimpier bodywork in the fashion of the Allard J2 and Le Mans Frazer Nash. Although both Wisdom and Wise in the R1 and the Hadley/Goodacre Jupiter retired, a Jupiter again won the 1½-litre class courtesy of Marcel Becquart and Gordon Wilkins. Two further R1s were built for Le Mans 1952 where the R1 took its third consecutive class win, though two of the cars retired with broken cranks. Meanwhile, in rallying, the Jupiter was campaigned in the 1951-53 Monte Carlo Rallies, most successfully in 1952 when Marcel Becquart placed second in class and 13th overall. Only closed cars were allowed on the 1952 Monte Carlo, so the four Jupiters entered were specially built as saloons for the purpose.
The 1951-52 financial year was very good for Jowett, though exports had dropped off quite sharply towards the end. Development of the Mk. Ia began in 1952. When it appeared at the end of the year at the London Motor Show, it picked up a silver award for coachwork.
Sadly, the Jupiter’s glory was to be short-lived. When Walter Briggs died in 1952, Ford moved towards a controlling interest in the Briggs Motor Bodies’ English operations, which was effected in 1953. Seeing the writing on the wall and owing a debt to Briggs, in December 1952 Jowett’s Arthur Jopling requested for Briggs to end production of Javelin bodies and to continue building Bradford vans at half the usual rate, but this latter request was refused. In January 1953, Briggs ceased building Bradfords entirely. Interested only in the plants at Dagenham, Trafford Park and Southampton, Ford allowed Fisher & Ludlow to buy the Doncaster factory, but Fisher & Ludlow would be taken over by BMC months later. Grandfield, who had contributed enormously to Jowett’s competition successes, left the company in April.
With production of Jowett’s staple models so abruptly terminated, work began on revising and improving the Jupiter platform in the hope that a new version could be rolled out quickly and effectively enough to save the company. This version, known as the Jupiter 100 and latterly the R4, developed from sketches in March 1953 to a finished prototype in July, appearing at the London Motor Show in October. It never made production; a total of four were built. Although the debt to Briggs was paid off, Jopling failed to convince them to restart Javelin production and, in July 1953, a financial statement was published revealing a loss of £286,353 for 1952.
By the end of 1953, International Harvester had moved its production planning department into Jowett’s old Experimental Department buildings at Idle. Talks went on throughout 1954 with International Harvester and the Blackburn & General Aircraft Co, of which Jopling was a director and which undertook some subcontracted work for Jowett, but Jowett was forced to sell its flagship Albemarle Street showroom in March 1954 and remaining Jupiters ended up being sold at knocked-down prices. By September, International Harvester had full control of the old factory, the last all-new Jupiter was built, bringing total production to 831 complete cars and 68 rolling chassis, and the factory turned instead to the new International Harvester B250 light tractor. What was left of Jowett was bought by Blackburn Aircraft in 1955 for the sake of tying up financial ends.
With that, the life of yet another independent British car maker came to an end but, with the Jupiter at least, it left a proud legacy.
