130th anniversary special: a new home for the Autocar archive

Hello, welcome to the AutoCard podcast, brought to you in association with Anderson EV, makers

of top quality home chargers. Anderson-ev.com for more details. Morning, Steve.

Morning mate, how are you?

Very well mate, tell me where we are and why?

Well, here we are in the British Motor Museum, in the boardroom thereof,

in the company of Stephen Lang, who's the head of collections here, so main man in effect,

apart from the CEO of course. And we're here on the occasion of AutoCard's 130th anniversary,

aren't we? It's official 130th birthday is 2nd of November, but I think this is going to go out

on the 5th or something, am I right? Yes, yes, that's my understanding. So yes, Stephen, welcome

to the podcast. Thanks for having us. It's AutoCard's 130th. There's something else to say

about this week, what's happening with the AutoCard physical organ?

First of all, welcome to the British Motor Museum. I know it's a favourite haunt of yours,

so I'm glad to see you back. And for us, AutoCard's so relevant because our collection charts the

motor industry and the motor car, and alongside it, AutoCard's done exactly the same thing. So

it's two stories in parallel and a lot of overlapping. So it's very much the story of

the motor industry, like we like to talk about here. And we're delighted that the archive here

will become the official home of AutoCard's paper archive. So I know your listeners love

delving through the digital archive, but we will be home of the paper copies from now.

As long as they continue to be produced, which I hope they do because I love

reading a theme rather than watching it on a screen. Yeah, there's still something special

about the paper, isn't there? Especially the old ones. We've just been looking at a few of them and

we're going to look at some more in a minute. And yeah, they're great to hold in your hands,

aren't they? Yeah, and they're slightly distracting as well because you go online and you're kind of

looking for a specific thing, although sometimes you can go down a rabbit hole. But when you kind

of feel the magazine and turn the next page over, there's something else there, or there's an advert

or an illustration and that gets you interested in something else. So they're very of their period

inserted texture really, I guess. No doubt. Yeah. And we are, well, we've just had a quick,

because we can't help it every time we come here, we get sort of distracted by some exhibits.

We're going to have a look around some and chat to you about some of the significant ones

in a moment, but it's quite the place here, isn't it? I love it. I've been here quite a few years

and there's still something new for me. We have around about 400 cars here from all different

areas of Britain's motor industry, all fascinating in their different ways, whether they're

worn-offs or something you'll see in the street. And behind that, we've got this amazing archive,

which has been talking about where the auto car archive is going to live,

which is the history that goes behind it in papers and pictures and film. So it's fascinating for me

every day I walk to work. I didn't know, because I've been around the museum a lot,

I've never been in the archive room before. And when you just opened the door, I had a bit,

one of those sort of, well, you know, moments that sort of rated the lost archive for a moment.

The old vanishing point, yeah. Yeah, just a big long corridor of stuff,

like, wow, goodness me, there's a lot, there's a lot in here. That's a moment that always gives me

some amusement, because everybody kind of has an idea about the museum. I'm not sure they

necessarily have an idea of the scale of what we've got until they walk into the door.

But I think people have no idea of what's in an archive, certainly one of the scale of ours.

So I love the wow moment that people have, just like you've done when they walk through the door.

Stephen, you've been here a good long while, you didn't expect to be here this long. Just tell

us the story of your involvement with this place, will you? I'm not sure I expected to be here at

all, Steve. By background, I'm a material scientist. And just before I joined, I was doing

research at Imperial College down in London. And I kind of fancied to change, really, and

to get out of London. So I cast about thinking, well, what kind of things do I like? Well,

I quite like museums and archives. I wonder what a career in one of those would be like.

So I wrote to a few museums, including here, and said, how do you get into it and what does it

involve? Can you give me any tips and that kind of thing. And really fortunately, the curator

at the time here said, well, we're pretty new, because it was about 11, 12 months after the

museum had opened here at Gayden. Come along, I can give you some work for a short amount of time.

And the kind of stars aligned, really. And I decided, well, let's let's take that opportunity.

So I first came here just helping out with curatorial things and collection things. And then

after a few months have turned into a few more months, the curator decided she would like to go

on to pastures new. So I was at the right place and the right time and was able to kind of carry on.

It's a really different place now. It's the same building, but it's a really different place in

terms of what's in our collections and how it looks. Well, you've expanded it deliberately,

haven't you, to encompass as many British marks as possible? Yes. Originally, when the museum was

first opened, it was fairly much a collection to do with Rover Group and British Leyland. That's

where our collection started out in the 1970s. You might like to say a lot of things about Beale,

but one fortunate thing was that somebody had the idea that they should keep all of their corporate

history. So we're very lucky because other big companies haven't done the same thing. So that's

the basis of our car collection. Since then, the whole motor industry is very different and we

wanted to live up to our name. And now we're the British Motor Museum and really make sure we

represent lots of different marks. Yeah, lots of forwards, lots of voxels. Yeah, and other things

that have come in more recently. You will see some lotuses in a little while. We've got some

Roots Group cars that we didn't use to have and some of the smaller manufacturers, the Caterons,

the TVRs. So we've really in the past few years made it our mission to fill in the gaps. Of course,

if something from the Beale sphere comes along that we haven't got that we think we should have,

that still gets its place in the museum. Places are always short, of course. We've got 400 or so

cars here and slightly bursting at the scene. But that's, you know, it's a big industry and

there's lots to say and lots of people are interested in lots of things. So how did it

start? How did the museum come about? Well, it goes back about 50 years. Actually, the original

exercise was an auditing one. British Leyland had got a lot of old cars and heritage stuff around

all its businesses and somebody was sent out to find them all. So the very first makings of the

collection were way back in 1974 or 1975. And over that time it grew and eventually we had our own

museum in London and now this fabulous place in Gayden. And today, of course, it's very different.

It's not just the British Leyland marks. It's actually all of the motor industry. We've begun

to acquire all sorts of different marks to make us live up to our name, British Way to Museum,

I guess. And also our collection is now in the Charitable Trust. So we are an independent museum

that has to make its own way. So whether you support us by visiting or joining us online,

adopting one of our cars, or even coming to a conference here, you're all helping to support

the trust that looks after Britain's motoring heritage. You were in London first?

Yeah. So we had a museum down in Sion Park in the 1990s, which was the London Transport Museum

before it moved, wasn't it? And then it was taken over by, was the Fairly New Trust by then,

and we lived there for a few years before moving here to Gayden.

And this building that we're in now, so there's two big buildings here. This one was built first,

I guess the one we're in, the big round... So the original museum building, the main museum

building was opened in 1993 with support from Rove Group at the time. So they invested quite a

lot to set it up with the trust at the time. And the second building we built about 10 years ago,

mainly because we had lots of cars in storage and we wanted to group them all together. But in

that process we thought, well, let's let people look at what we do behind the scenes, if you like.

So we also have our workshop there now, so you can see my team working on the collection every

day, all sorts of... It might be one day, something that's 1900 and something that's

2016, the next day. And you've got the first Morris mine, haven't you? Yeah, the rest is history.

Yeah, and that's got a fascinating story too. I really love the story about that car.

Yeah, it went off when it got returned to you just after many years. Yeah, so when the millionth

miner was launched, the lilac ones for those who are aficionados of Morris miners, Morris ran a

competition to find the oldest Morris miner and a chap wrote in and said, oh, I've got this really

old Morris miner. When it arrives and we've got pictures of it, looked a bit of a wreck really,

it turned out to be the very first one. So it was an amazing coincidence. So he got a new

Morris miner million and the company got the first Morris miner, which is a proud part of our

collection today. Fantastic. And again, you asked me, why have I loved this collection for so long?

Well, those are the little stories that are always fascinating. Yeah. All right, well, how about we

go and look at some stuff? Yeah, let's do it. Super. So Stephen, here we are at the entrance to

the BMM. Well, two things. Picture of the founder, Peter Mitchell, who deserves all of our admiration,

doesn't he? Absolutely. The building we're standing in opened in 1993 and it was Peter's vision.

We'd had a museum before that, but it wasn't as grand as this or able to accommodate the

amazing collection we've got. So Peter, still a patron of ours, was very much the vision between

the old Dusty Museum and the fantastic bright, architecturally amazing place we've got there.

And they're rather, also rather fittingly by a bicycle, which is, I suppose, where cars came

from in a sense. Absolutely. I think it's fascinating to see how, in particular places like Coventry,

which had a strong manufacturing industry in the bicycle, spawned the companies that would make

motor cars. So we're standing in front of a rover safety cycle. And in the 1880s,

Rover were the first company really to make the, what's called the safety cycle. So the cycle we

know today with two wheels the same size rather than the kind of penny farthing design into a

successful model. And in fact, Rover were one of the world's leading manufacturers of all kinds of

cycles. Their Thoraners had made machines for people like Queen Victoria a few years later

than this machine, which is 1886. They won all sorts of titles in the 1908 Olympics at London on

racing cycles. And that, of course, that curiosity for the cycle made them curious about their

motor car when that. Now there's something in this entrance that you particularly wanted to see.

What was that? Well, this is, this means something to, well, lots of things mean something to me

because I've driven them, but we're just around the period of the London to Brighton run, the

veteran car run, which is really an international motoring institution. And this car in front of

us is a, is a three wheeler is a Wallsley tricycle built in 1896 designed by Herbert Austin, who

designed the first Wallsley cars. And it's a little single cylinder thing with a few horsepower.

And we were just talking about Peter Mitchell. Peter Mitchell and I shared this car on the London

to Brighton run a few years ago when I was much lighter and fitter really. And we kind of managed

about just over 60% of the run before it had enough. So the seat's only about one and a half

bums wide. You must have been pretty squint in there. I had the job of largely facing backwards

when I wasn't driving, which is quite entertaining when you can see the rights of the modern driver's

eyes directly. But for the listener, it's got a kind of tiller steering. So there's no steering

wheel or it's got a single wheel at the front. And the gearbox, like another of his early Wallsley

cars is by tightening and loosening a belt. So that's the effectively the clutch.

And this foot and this large lever pedal on the sort of on the footrest goes all the way across.

Is that the brakes? So that's one of the brakes. So it's actually quite advanced because it's got

two brake shoes on each wheel, one of them operated by the the foot brake. And then it's also

got a handbrake that you can push as well when you're getting slightly frightened. I'm interested

to see that this is called Auto Car Number One. Our editor, Henry Sturmey, decided that cars were

going to be called auto cars. And they've come to be called motor cars or automobiles. So he was

wrong, wasn't he? But that was his his view that he christened the porcelest carriage and auto car,

didn't he? The other thing about this is because there weren't really any motor shows per se or

there were only one or two really for the pioneer motorists. This was exhibited at the National

Cycle Exhibition. So it was trying to appeal to people who were buying things like that

rover cycle over there. The other fascinating thing was Austin himself was quite adventurous

and he took this car 250 miles from the factory in Birmingham to Rill. It was a kind of test drive,

which is quite a thing. And he made it back again.

Let's just wander along here. There's one of your star exhibits I think is this Land Rover

registered HUE 166. Famous. Why famous? So there were 48 pre-production cars and this is the very

first of those pre-production Land Rovers. So this is the genesis of all the work that went from

those wacky sentistier things into what became one of the most enduring, I think, British

notary icons really. And we've got the Defenders today, which was a very much more complicated

thing, but deliberately designed for the farmer or the tradesman. But it's still quite believable,

isn't it? I mean, you see cars like this driving around all the time. It's just a series one Land

Rover. So they were right quickly, weren't they? And right up until the kind of final Defenders,

old school Defenders, more recently, visually, you could see the kind of the whole heritage of

the car and its design really. I think the other really interesting thing about the Land Rover is

that Rover designed it just to be a car that would last a few years to get them over that post

World War II period and then they could go back to making cars. So it's designed to outdo the jeep,

because the Wilkes Brothers had a jeep, so they kind of thought we can do this better.

It made use of aluminium, of which there was a supply just after the Second World War.

And I think it surprised them how popular it was, because it soon outpaced their car

production and became a model that they would continue with. I mean, this starts on the key

and you get it out quite often, don't you? Absolutely. It's very popular in the kind of

top 10 most popular cars in the museum. This is definitely it. People make a pill,

Dravidge, to come and see it. Amazing. I think the other great thing about this car is

it had a little bit of foresight by the Rover company to find it and buy it back.

So in the days when these things were made, they were saleable things and this ended up

with the farmer and it spent 10 years doing what it was designed to do. It was only in the late 50s

that it was bought back when the Land Rover was around about 10 years old and restored and became

something that was important to the company. And now they use the HUE 166 on labels

all over the moderns, don't they? Absolutely. Do you know how different the

production series one was from these pre-production? There were some chassis details

and body panels and that type of thing, but largely it's pretty much close to

as the first series one cars would have been. Yeah. It's amazing to walk into this place because

just from the Wallsley that you were talking about to HUE, we've walked past a Model T Ford,

a Fox old 3098, the first MG. Is it the first MG or not quite? So not the first one, but

back to Cornwall to re-enact it is trial at Blue Hills Mine on the Land's End trial,

which was great fun. Yeah. And then opposite is a bunch of a dozen Fords that Ford has a deal

with you to supply about a cold clump of Fords and renew them every so often. Yeah. So they've

got a fantastic collection. We've got some of our own Fords, but it's great to have the benefit of

of the things that they've got kept away that people don't see very often. And we haven't mentioned

we just walked past two brand new lotuses, more about Lotus later perhaps, but that shows you

the contrast of what we do here. History doesn't stop. So what we have in the museum has to be up

to date as well as something that's from the 1880s or the 1890s. Yeah. Are you running out of room

to put new things? Yes, very much. So 10 years ago, we built another building, which is kind of more

of our storage building where our workshops are with some expansion space. But of course, as we've

broadened the collection, we've got more stuff. And of course, people are interested in different

things. So we're now having to collect the things that people are interested in seeing.

Yeah. Let's go somewhere else in the museum. You can show us another favorite.

So Stephen, here we are amongst quite a big selection of prototypes you've got here,

all kinds of things, sports cars, off-roaders, concept cars of various kinds, little cars,

all kinds of things. One of the brilliant things about being a museum that's related to the motor

industry is we've had this access to the things that were designed but never made or the things

that were nearly made, but then didn't quite get there. And that's one of the unique things really

about our collection is the variety of contexts and engineering cars. And they're all fascinating

in their ways. You say what we have, and this is just a small selection,

and ranges from lots of different dates, but lots of different types. So we've got

Road Rover, for example, which was the kind of first thought about it would eventually become

a Range Rover, but very different thing, but a slightly more road-going

Land Rover project. It's pretty ugly, let's be honest. It looks like a caravan on wheels,

and they were fascinating because they gave them to employees to test out. So they really

had a number of cars and they lent them to people. And we actually had a couple of people visit in

the last couple of years whose families, or they, had them in their families, and they were people

who worked for Rover. Isn't that amazing? We have some absolutely bonkers cars. The part of the

Vauxhall collection, which we look after, Vauxhall's heritage collection, is the Wayne

Cherry Era SRV, which is, it slightly reminds me of the Pink Panther car.

But it's a silver thing. It's very wedge-shaped, very off that kind of 70s period. But it's quite

a trick car, you know. So there's a lot of thought given to the aerodynamics. And if you open up the

door, there's all kinds of gauges to do with airflow and all that kind of thing as well. So it's quite

a sophisticated thing. And yet 1970. Do they conventionally open doors? They are conventionally

opening doors, but they have a lot of stuff in the panels. Oh, it's a four-seater. Good, not great.

You can see all the kind of switches and dials. So I think it still looks futuristic,

in the way in 2025. Can you imagine 50 something years ago? It would have been

startling. And I think it shows the strength of British car design. And people say to us,

oh, what's happened to the Britain's motor industry? But this is the kind of thing we're

still brilliant at in this country, whether it's... Vauxhall design was a really big deal,

absolutely, absolutely. And then we have more quirky things, but

a real contrast is the Crompton Leyland electric car. So that's an early 1970s

idea for an electric city car built on a mini subframe. Looks quite credible, doesn't it?

But designed by Crompton for Donald Stokes, who was the boss of the company at the time,

and then they sent it to Italy to have this body made. And we've got some great pictures of it in

Italy having its body made by Michelotti and then sent back. So when people... We've got all the

discussion about the electric vehicle and that kind of thing. It's not really a new discussion.

In fact, some of the cars in the early 1900s were powered by electricity as well. So it never quite

goes away. Yeah, there was chat in the early copies of the auto car about the problem would be the

availability. There wasn't widespread availability of petrol, but there was electricity. So it was...

I remember finding in an auto car, I think it was 1912, there was a little cartoon of the car

of the future, and it was somebody filling up a car with hydrogen out of that car. How interesting.

That's interesting. Show us the jet cars. I love this place for the Rover jet cars,

which never went anywhere, but you've got a wonderful collection, haven't you?

I mean, I'm looking at four of them, aren't I? Yep. So we have pretty much all of them apart from

Jet 1, which was the very first Rover gas turbine car, which is in the Science Museum in London.

So Rover did a lot of work on jet engines during the Second World War,

and whilst Rolls Royce then took on the kind of aircraft side of that after the war,

the Rover guys with all the things that they learned about it said, could we make this into the next

form of propulsion for our passenger cars. So Jet 1, which was a total experiment,

which is a kind of convertible version of a P4, was powered by a Rover gas turbine engine in 1950.

So essentially it was the world's first gas turbine powered car, so it won a lot of awards.

A quite handsome looking car, actually, isn't it? It's quite good, it's nicely done.

Kind of broke a 75 in their roof. Yeah, well, I mean, rather than the

the gas turbine base unit we have in front of us, which is a slightly more rudimentary looking

piece of kit. Yeah, so they did a couple of versions that were largely based on P4 models,

slightly uglier version of the Saloon. And then the next car, T3, which is in front of us, is a

really pretty looking in-house designed coupé with the gas turbine in the rear. For me, it's still

stylish today. Compact as well. Compact four-wheel drive, interestingly. Oh, really?

And we're just talking about the base unit. So we have next to that, essentially, the car that

did all the tests. So it's a running gear for the T3. And the idea was that they tested everything

out on a base unit, which has all the running units and a kind of just some seats and some

basic panels around it. And that car has been stored away for more than 50 years. And a couple

of years ago, I have a very dedicated team of volunteers who are experts in gas turbine,

they refurbished the whole car. And it hadn't run since the 1960s, under the 1960s. And it

pretty much ran straight away. They're a big part of this place, aren't they, volunteers?

Yeah, we have 100 or so volunteers. We couldn't work without them. And they do everything from

being guides in various bits of the museum, to working on projects like this, to working in our

archive, or doing community programs. We just couldn't function. They're really interesting

people, aren't they? I've met a few of them. One of them was a big boss at Ford of Britain.

And another one was the local MP, until he retired. Yeah, they have a fascinating background.

And not all of them are car nuts either. Some of them have just come because they wanted the

space to enjoy and they like meeting people and that kind of thing. And so we've got a really

great mix of expertise. So these jets go on through a car that looks a lot like a Rover 2000

into a racing car that race at Le Mans in the 60s, isn't it? Yeah. So this is in front of us,

which is 1961. So kind of 11, 12 years into the program. This is what Rover wanted to do. They

wanted to produce a family car that looked like one of their range. In fact, this was shown before

the P6 was shown to the public. So they had a sneak preview. So T4 was a Rover saloon that was

powered by gas turbine. It had two drawbacks. One is the fuel consumptions appalling. But the

second thing is if they wanted to produce it, it would cost you about three times the cost of a P5,

which was the model they were still selling at the time. But the great thing about gas turbine is

it's really smooth, no gears to change, fewer components in all of the transmission and the

turbine. So in a way, it's much more unsophisticated and supposedly more reliable, but quite hot.

Is it noisy? It is when it starts, but then it's surprisingly quiet once it gets going.

If you're in traffic, it just gets mixed up with other stuff. Yeah. The famous

Rover BRM racing car. This race twice, am I right? That's right. This is the gas turbine that

probably everybody knows. This is the Rover BRM, which raced at Le Mans in 1963 and 1965.

Currently, it's in its second kind of generation with a body built by William Towns,

who built things like the Aston Martin Lagonda and lots of well-known car designs. But originally,

it had a different in-house spider body, not an enclosed coupé like this. And we've got the bonnet

is the only piece of the original car that still exists. Hanging on the wall. And it's based on

a Rover BRM, forming the one chassis, which was Richard Ginther's car from the 1962 season,

which was crashed. So it was a great donor for them to rework into what needed to be a slightly

wider Le Mans car. So the underneath the frame of the car is based on a BRM formula on car.

And then everything else is bespoke. The gas turbine is all Rover designed. So all the work

again was done by them. How fast was it? So it had a top speed of around about 150 miles an hour.

Okay. In 1963, it was raced by Richard Ginther and Graham Hill, because they were the BRM

team drivers. And in those days, if they were asked to drive something else for the team,

they kind of just did it really not like Formula One today so much.

And it had to start at the back. And it was a non official runner. So you can see on the original

bonnet it's 00. It finished quite respectably. It was the first gas turbine car to finish Le Mans.

And it won a special prize. And I see this has got a sticker on a windscreen that says Entrant 2025.

So you obviously so we keep so we keep we've done a lot of work to make sure this car keeps running.

And between 63 and 65, it had a new body. And the big advancement was that they put

heat exchangers on the gas turbine was again, the fuel consumption of this is pretty low.

But they wanted to see how far they could get in Le Mans. So I put heat exchangers on it really

stretched the range of range of the car. And in that year 65, when it was Jackie Stewart and Graham

Hill, it was the highest placed British car in the race to finish. So it had a really respectable

finish that year. And it averaged about 100 miles an hour, which is pretty impressive.

It's pretty good, isn't it? And you've got, thankfully, because I don't know my way around

gas turbines very well, you've got things telling me how it works, which I'm going to come and read

in a minute, because I can't quite I can't quite fathom the Le Mans. That cutaway is great.

So essentially, it's if you imagine a jet engine, but the jet stream is then turned through another

rotor into something that can go through a gearbox and drive the rear wheels of the car.

So at full chat, it's the turbine goes about 50,000 rpm. So it's quite a step down between the

between that and the road wheels. There's nothing mechanical between the turbine and the the rotor

that was connected to the gearbox. So again, there's no clutch. It just goes faster and faster.

In fact, essentially, to start off, you unbreak the car. So it's already driving. And as soon as

you lift your foot off the brake, it will start. It will start going. It will start going. So it

with no throttle, it does about 80 miles an hour. So it's got some serious breaks because it has to.

And then in terms of like throttle response, are you waiting for it to school up a bit? Is it

got like a lot of turbo lag? If you imagine the worst turbo lag and then expand that quite a lot,

that's what it's like. So effectively, Graham Hill apparently raced it pretty much with his foot on

both the brake and the throttle all the time because you it takes it's quite hard to slow down

because there's no engine braking or anything like that. And it doesn't pick up. So effectively,

you're breaking into a corner and you've already got your foot on the throttle to anticipate that

you've got the boost when you come up. Yeah, I neither driver liked it particularly. No,

Stuart was rude about this car. He told me that that they had a wager that one of them should

put it in the gravel early on in the race, and then they didn't have to do it anymore. And actually,

Graham Hill went off the circuit, not intentionally, and did some damage to the turbine, which they

didn't fess up Rover realized what had happened, but they didn't fess up to the VRM technicians,

and it carried on doing the right but with reduced, reduced power. Why don't we go on to

another one of your favorite dropping off spots? Just as we walk by, one of the great things about

this collection is not just the weird and wonderful prototypes or gas turbines we've just been talking

about, but there are lots of everyday cars here. And what we find with visitors is they'll spend

some time looking at, I don't know, C-type Jaguar or RS 2004, whatever their real fancy

desire car, Aston Martin DB5, they spend more time with things that mean things to them personally.

The cars they went on holiday and the things they learned to drive. And so we're just standing next

to a Ford Anglia. It's actually a 1-2-3E, not a 105E, so it's the posh one. But my dad's first

two cars were Ford Anglias like this. So definitely when I was in a cot, this would have been the

first car that I'd ever been in this type of car. And his car was this, his second car was this color

as well, I discovered recently, because we dug out some family photos. That's a full-ammon white

roof. So for me, those are the kind of attachments we know people like. And we're kind of mindful of

that when we're collecting, you know, when we think about what we're collecting and the more

modern things that we're collecting too. Because each car has its stories and this is a place of

stories really. Yeah, there are some sort of familiar curiosities. You know, this Austin or Nash

Metropolitan here, red and white crazy car, isn't it? Made in America. Made for the American market,

I think. Oh, it was made here for the American. Made in Longbridge, yeah. I mean, quite, quite.

So they were known as the Metropolitan in this country. They weren't a Nash, but on that design.

And I'm not right in thinking the Americans didn't take to it wonderfully that they had previously

taken, they previously liked something. So they designed this for that reason. Is that right?

Well, Austin had tried the Austin Atlantic, which is a bigger car, to again, only modest success.

But the trouble for Austin was that it didn't have a big enough power for enough engine really.

So even in a compact car like the Metropolitan, you know, quite a 1600cc engine in it is not

really for the Americans, really. But it's, you know, for some Brits, it was a good thing because

America was all the rage at this kind of point in time, wasn't it? Yeah, the old two tones.

If you like a bit of stylish American in a small car, then that's for you. Indeed.

So here we are walking past all kinds of things. Morgans. There's a intriguing looking car here with

Caterham written on it. I don't think I've ever seen a Caterham like it. What is that? So sports cars,

I mean, I guess we very much think of Britain as a sports car producing country and we've got

a whole variety of things at different ages. This is a more recent acquisition for the museum

from Caterham and it's actually a concept car called the Aero 7. So it's

effectively a 7 underneath but with a totally new enclosed carbon fibre body.

It's about 10 years or so old and it was really trying to find a more modern direction

for Caterham at the time. Yeah, it's like the sort of Tony Fernandez era Caterham. Is that right,

or am I not sure? They were in Formula One at the same time and they had quite some big,

some quite big ambitious plans at the time, didn't they, from memory? It's interesting though,

in that the Caterham had had a few goes at coming up with something completely different and

so far, if you look at the cars that they've, what these experimental cars have mainly done

is to show how good the original road is, you know, light and quick and compact and stuff.

I think at the time they were quite keen on the Asian market even 10 years ago and in spite of the

fluid dynamics design for the body to get the air flows and that kind of thing, I think people

thought that it was a bit flat, shall we say, as a design and the idea was that they would

remodel the car entirely but that never really happened. Right, where are we going now?

I just mentioned behind us on our way, a totally different thing.

What was the singer? Yeah, one of the things we recently acquired was a singer,

one and a half litre Le Mans, which is a pretty little two-seater singer from the early 1930s.

This car comes from what was the Patrick Collection and some of your listeners might

remember the Patrick Collection and all the museum in Birmingham started by Mr Patrick,

they were big car dealers in this part of the world and amassed a big car collection and had

a museum for a time. That museum was gradually closed down in the last, well probably 20 years

actually and we'd done some work with Patrick family more recently and whilst they have dispersed

all the rest of the collection, this had a real family attachment this car because it was

owned by Joseph Patrick himself and he used to take it on rallies and what have you and then

it was sold off in the 1950s and then in the 1980s the then current Mr Patrick bought it back

for his collection so it had quite a lot of attachment for the family so we said well

rather than you getting rid of it why not let it join the collection here. Yeah, looks lovely in

in this lineup too next to an MG in a Morgan with an MG on the other side as well, two MG's on the

three MG's on the other side. Well and the favourite as you can see from the visitors here is the MG

cut in half which was a motor show car from the 1960s that's probably in if not the top in the top

five most photograph cars in the collection of people standing in the middle sort of pointing to

each side of the car ends otherwise known as a divorce car internally. That's really interesting

that is a real I've got to come back and have a look at that in a minute as well that's really

interesting. You like cutaways don't you, I've known from previous conversations that if a cutaway

comes your way you're really fascinating really because it's the only way to especially nowadays

where if you open your bonnet we'll all know this there's nothing to look at really is that

so this is a great way of you know finding out how an engine works and actually

new technology aside the internal combustion engine is the same thing really if you look at

what goes on in that MGB for instance it's not a million miles away from a modern car just

less controlled isn't it. It's good that it shows you the layout too doesn't it in a nice way

and we find it's a really great family thing so we quite often get three generations in a family

and it will be generally grandfather showing his children grandchildren how a car works and

pointing it out so it's kind of by its very nature is quite an interactive thing for visitors.

There's an extraordinary looking thing over here with three wheels and a and a flat twin engine

looks to me if I didn't know this was a British motor museum I'd say that was a Leon Bollet

tricycle. So this is there's a little amusing film that goes behind it so this is Wallsley's

other design around about the same time as the tricycle which was my Brighton Room car

and Austin was inspired indeed by Leon Bollet probably to build this design probably slightly

more advanced than the tricycle with the two wheels at the front rather than at the back right there's

a little bit of a story about when it was made so Austin was very keen to be one of the first

car designers in the world so there's a chance that he tried to date it earlier than the other one

but there's not a lot of evidence for that and we've got this great bit of archive film which

actually comes from the 1920s but it was a promotional Austin film which was a kind of

Austin looking through his scrapbook at the first years of his company and making a film

about it so this was his kind of earliest designs and you can see that the tricycle's

trundling along with a man with a red flag in front of it like the pioneer days Brighton Room

things yeah actually the car didn't work and that's on a slight slope rolling down a rolling

rolling down a hill brilliant right we're next

that's a look that's a I love the the kind of casual attitude of the bloke with the pipe and

the red flag it's just great lost my he doesn't really care too much

we've got lots of other things that are not just cars or bicycles

which tell stories of the motor industry

rather nice double pedestal desk which was actually an apprentice project for

a chap that worked in Aston Martin's carpentry shop so one of the projects he had to do was

build his own and a lady got in touch and said oh we've got this desk in our shed and it's something

to do with my family and he worked at Aston Martin and it turned out that it was this

apprentice piece and we got some pictures that they supplied of Arthur Wheeler who was the lady's

grandfather working in the Aston Martin factory that's a cool not sure what it's amazingly nice

pieces of archivary are interesting yeah lots of lots of period video as well

I always stop and bore people with this this is a pressed cold fridge from 1935 so if you can

imagine it has that really 1930s fridge design slightly a kind of American looking um I happened

to be at Cowley the the old Morris factory and in a break room was this fridge and it was still

had milk in it they were still using it how long ago so this would have been sort of I don't know

mid 90s late 90s something like that it had been in use 60 years it had been being used

so I said this has to be in the museum really yeah you know if I have to buy you a new fridge

they had a new fridge and this this came here so this was rescued from a break room

that's sensational in I wonder if the one you bought them still going I don't I didn't have to buy

a fortunately they saw that and it still got the accoutrements with it that is extraordinary

it's surprisingly like a fridge isn't it yeah and it's got absolutely in the archive we've got

absolutely fantastic adverts for things that are not cars oh yeah so we have this brilliant

brochure picture of a family gazing into the most well-stocked pressed cold fridge you can imagine

listen I'm going to put a photograph of the pressed cold fridge on our social channels because

we'll take some photos of cars on the way around but I've also made sure I get the fridge

we're walking past an amazing wooden back of a bristol aren't we has this come to you

all the assets of Bristol was sold off only a few years ago

the sorry the Bristol Heritage Trust which is allied to the owners club

made a pitch for a whole collection of the buddy books that were still stored away

underneath the factory as it was all the headquarters they were just kind of in an

underground car park everything from quite early stuff to this which is a 411 so 1970s

so these are the books that the coachmakers the body builders would eat all the panels over

yeah and hand all hand all hand for amazing so fortunately they offered one to to us

poke trick it and I think for me you can you can look at it and it kind of has all the tech

you can imagine the people making the panels on it yeah you know it's such a textual kind of object

that it you can kind of see the history in it yeah you can yeah it's done work so it's yes it's

it's an amazing thing I remember talking to Tony Crook who was the longtime boss of Bristol

and he talked about how people started bringing cars back to be restored

and they'd go back to the factory in Filton and just there were plenty of occasions when

the car restoration was in the hands of the people who built it in the first place oh really

I think the the lattice place they were stored was beneath what is now Gordon Murray design HQ

yeah exactly yeah and where he keeps his car collection yeah yeah so there was when I went

and looked at them there was a whole row of these body books like that fascinating and a lot of

kind of spare parts and things for Bristol's that were part of the part of the sale it wasn't

because now it's been cleaned up and his tidy and his closed and air conditioned and everything

else remember it looked a little bit exposed at the time is that because it's down underneath that

underneath the molecule building I think it's fascinating piece of architecture the whole

building isn't it so now we're walking into your I guess your racing car collection don't

we there's a there's a Mansel Formula 3 car there's a Jackie Stuart Tirol there's a there's a mad

TVR here that is that the thing with the with the fabricated engine I think it is yeah yeah

so really the last foray in to do in the morning for for TVR there's a very early

MG Kimber MG I guess this is actually a Morris special Morris okay big it's pardon

so this was designed by a dealer in Cardiff oh and he used to Morris Oxford red flash special

yeah so you know very much the the fashion of the 20s to have your racing car special

and he used to take it to places like Brooklyn's drive it there and do his racing and come back

home so and luckily we met some of the family in recent years who told us some more stories about

the the car and well-steed the name of the guy was with sort of racing exploits I think it was

quite a successful car for effectively a souped up souped up Morris Oxford with a bit of a

streamlined nose on it looks very fit presumably this one runs as well yes it does it does work

yeah absolutely anyway right next door to it is what I understand to be a favorite of yours

tell us about it yeah it's very people that probably the most asked question I get is what is

your favorite car in the museum and it can be different things on different days depending

on what I've walked past and got interested in again but there are a few cars the gas turbines

definitely some of those that I always come back to and we're standing in front of an Edwardian

Austin 1908 Austin which was built as a drompery car in that year so take part in the 1908 french

drompy so um Austin had a Porsche for racing and would later on in the 20s and 30s do more

successful racing been a particularly with his little Austin seven single-seater racing cars

but this was a kind of world stage thing so the the 1908 french drompery was on roads around Dieppe

and one lap was about 50 miles so it just kind of took all days the team was built out of four

cars but actually by the time they got to the race day there were only three cars left so they

had to kind of cannibalize some bits and bobs to make it and interestingly some of the cars were

prop shaft driven like this car and then other ones were chain driven so he was kind of hedging

his bets about what kind of technology um that um that he would use um this car was sort of modern

in a sense that great big engine in the nose yeah convent controls the way we would understand

them steering wheel and pedals and so on yeah and uh quite the driver's backside quite close to the

rear axle the sort of 1908 catering yes something like that very much of its period obviously if we

can open the bonnet so this would have been based on a standard Austin car of the time but you could

buy a 60 horsepower which was quite a big car Austin so they upgraded it big car to 100 horsepower

which all right if you work out what the power is it's roughly 150 160 horsepower which is amazing

for a big car like this with brakes on the rear wheels only so it must have been quite entertaining

to drive so the little strap is just coming off the bonnet and steven is just going to

unclip two catches oh to reveal things like it belongs in the power station interesting looking

engine so it's a six cylinder nine and a half liter uh lot of brass amazing pair cast so it's

uh each cylinder's the size of your family car i guess yeah something like that and two rather grand

um carburetors yeah yeah they look like they should be sitting on the shelf of your front room

didn't they yeah the sort of that's from a science lab don't know what that's sort of

spherical thing about them a bit of jules verne trapped in yeah exactly god that's really good

that's a really good looking thing and this car runs does it so this is a working yeah this is a

working car it's a magnificent thing to drive but again one of those things that you traffic

no good you need to know for this car well presumably two wheel brakes can't be good yeah

brakes on the back brakes on the back down you have to pump up the pressure in the fuel tank

every so often so it's got a hand pump to oh no fuel pump to pressurize the fuel tank um this really

wasn't up to the job in terms of competitiveness so um people like sades were ultimately won the race

were uh much more uh race ready really for a thing like the the grand prix but two of the

cars finished 17th and 18th overall which was quite respectable and a thing that austin went to town

with in terms of publicity this particular car was raced by a guy called moore brampton

who was a pioneering motorist racing driver and aviator as well and he became very senior in the

motor industry the chairman of thorny croft for example oh so he was he was quite a senior

motor industry bot and we've got a lovely picture of him in the paddock

surrounded by renos and what have you rather more haphazard than a general formula one paddock

and you can see they've just obviously finished a practice or race because they've taken their

goggles off and there's just this kind of white outline from from the from the dirt from the dirt

from the car but then the other really fascinating thing about this car is it had a kind of second

life quite in fact you might say the museum is its third life but they were sold off by austin

these uh big cars and um jack johnson who was a championship heavyweight boxer had one of them

but this car sold to a baronet in lincolnshire called hickman bacon and he was again kind of

pioneer motorist and he had a convertible body made for it in other words he could have it as a

two-seater like the racing car or he could lake it into a four-seater tourer for when he wanted to

take the the family around um and then later on around about the war time uh second world war time

he donated the car back to austin and said this is a great product and part of your kind of austin

history um i'll donate the car back and the and the apprentices at austin restored it into a

a working car again it is a lovely thing that's in perfect order isn't it yeah this is happening

i've just tried pacing out the sort of length of the engine and it's sort of well over a

meter long just in the engine yeah yeah and the whole car's about the well the length of a big

murk i suppose yeah yeah and it's got a it's got a quite a racing car feel when you sit in it it's

got these kind of little bucket seats and your legs are straight out yeah yeah you've driven it

sort of i've driven it yes it's quite a you need as you said you need the space you need the space

but it's um fantastic great well let's go and look at the other amazing thing the archive in this

place so steven lead us into the archive there's a buzzer on the door the archive repository door

opens perfect thank you thank you and there's a almighty chamber isn't there yeah

so you can have a second wow moment for today i know my second time i've just looked at the place

and gone there's a lot of stuff in here that's cool so join lead us down to the um lead us down to

the auto car what do you call these racks these enormous racks of shelves these sort of library

things which have got the spinny turny gear wheels on the end so you can get down some

you get more more into a smaller space can't you with these enormous movable racks

so that you can wind yourself a little corridor to get down and look at stuff so there's so much

stuff packed in here again from the very beginning of the motor industry and the cycle industry as

we were looking at the rover earlier and before i think we found a document that related to a

company that was from 1760 oh really really that was beans related to beans industry which

gives great very big early components and car maker so what do you keep in here what is what is in

here so we have everything from books magazines we have production records so all types of records

and we can talk about one more specifically a minute for the cars that were made in a whole

variety of factories factories again from the very early 1900s up to pretty much 20 or so years ago

and we still have access to some of the digital records for new things we have brochures we have

sales aid so things where dealers or car salesmen would be given material so they could actually

talk about the cars and sell them we have business records press releases and we have drawings and

then we have a big collection of photos about a million photos again video as well and film and

video too and then we have some documents relating to not the motor manufacturers but the supply

industry so we have a very big collection for example of the lucas company we have some dunlop

stuff etc etc etc so all of the things that feed into the motor industry right in a way

they're fascinating things are the internal documents or the internal magazines because

you can see what made the industry tick or the you know the stories of the people as well as

the kind of brochures and photos that everybody expects that we might have

and you've got a reasonably good run of the auto car we've got quite a comprehensive run

certainly from the kind of 20s onwards but there are some gaps so with the help of auto car and

auto car readers we aim to make that a completely comprehensive collection of magazines and of

course kindly the good people at auto car are going to keep giving us the magazines as we

go along this is in fact this is an important moment for us and hopefully for you as well

because this is going to be the from now on from this moment from this 130th anniversary

this is going to be the home of the auto car printed archive isn't it yeah well we're delighted

to to have it because it is the it's the weekly description of what's going on with cars and

in the world of motoring so it's a perfect complement to the things that we're collecting

and the great thing about museums and archives is that you've got to carry on collecting

not so great when you've got to try and find space in this archive it might be big but you know

it's every every shelf is precious yeah in our four miles of shelving or whatever we've got in

amazing yeah we were making comparison with that that a view final view in the

movie the Raiders of the Lost Ark where there's this kind of corridor fading into nothing

amazing and here of course is a a collection of stuff that you've pulled out just to show us

the variety of bits and pieces can can we just describe some of it yeah so as you asked about

we've got all sorts of everything in that archive and these are just a few of the

huge amount of things that we've we've got so we've got a couple of drawings here from

Mitchell Otty they're both triumph projects but neither of them are projects that actually went

into a production car so one of them is a GT version of the Triumph 2000 and another is for a

kind of probably what would have been an early 1970s version of kind of GT car GT6 kind of car

but you know they are from the pen of the studio in Turin that's amazing and they are beautiful

things these these renderings are just so evocative aren't they you know it's it's got not only get an

idea of the shape but it it really tells you about the the dynamic of the the dynamic of the car

and it's great because you can see here we can see everything from

a design rendering a stylist's drawing to a blueprint to the real thing in the museum

and then of course all the brochures and pictures and whatever that go around.

They're wonderful just to see these prominently signed Michelotti drawings too amazing.

We've got a few here press cuttings and internal papers from when the Goldfinger DB5

did its grand tour of course we're in an anniversary year for the whole DB5 and James Bond

so we've got a little letter that describes the car going to Tokyo in the early part of 1965

and but it's got some really interest as well as all the work that they've done on the car

it notes that when it arrived in Yokohama the clutch was slipping and the exhaust

silencer had fallen off and somebody had nicked the gear knob in the talk at Tokyo auto show

and we've got a we've got a picture of it somewhere yeah just a bit sitting around

all in there on a sort of bonded warehouse you know so these give you a kind of fascinating

backdrop to the car and then we've got a really nice set of contact prints of Harold

Sockarta who was odd job in Goldfinger of him so say doing some welding work I think at Newport

on the car lots of staged shots so you can see him there with his acetylene torch

he seems more capable of smiling than he did yeah well he's acting here so that's fascinating

and then we've got lots of interesting things here's one for you Matt that are to do with the

process of designing an engineering car and we've got quite a bit of collection of material from

pressed steel who made their car bodies largely and things like the press called fridge we saw

earlier and this is an engineering port for the test of the apex saloon in Kenya in 1962

yeah which of course Matt knows is the is the Hillman Imp and it was essentially to test the

performance of the body of the car so there's a nice report about how it went and the leading

line in the general comments was the general structure of the body was very satisfactory

oh very good so attention would usefully be given to the strength of the dash area

so I don't know if some of these are familiar to you well I do wonder if later

imps had a certainly somebody has told me they have a different dash design to earlier ones

but I don't know whether that was partly as a result of some testing and stuff that's really

interesting that's really interesting do you fancy taking your imp to East Africa

well I'm not sure I can't get that far if it got to East Grinsted that would be an achievement

and of course there's a bunch of letters here from from um Miles Thomas yeah various

various editors of auto car yeah Miles Thomas was the boss of the Nuffield organization in other

words Morris's organization very senior in the motor industry you know in the 30s and into the

wartime wartime period but he seemed to have had a penchant for writing to the auto cars editors

about various things and then writing back so got a whole bunch of correspondence 20 or 30

letters here yeah from around the wartime which talk about all things like advertising space but

they also talk about proposals for car taxations and why you think that wouldn't be a great idea

and auto car readers need to know all about those types of things yeah they seem to a lot of them

seem to promise to turn mr. Thomas's comments into leaders in the magazine so so as ever journalists

suggestible you know motor industry's pocket etc we have quite a comprehensive collection of

the papers from Miles Thomas he wrote an autobiography as well and we have the papers

that go with that so it's interesting to get that insight into somebody who's quite senior

and we have similar papers about William Morris for example my favorite ones of those are when he

became more famous and slightly richer he used to get lots of letters from people who said

I'm falling on the hard times mr. Morris you know could you could you send me 10 pounds or that kind

of thing all sorts of which he didn't appreciate at all but you've got that kind of correspondence

so there's that kind of correspondence similarly for people like Herbert Austin but also later we've

got papers to do with Sven King for example so there you know there's a wide variety of papers

that to do with people it gives you a little bit more insight into the personalities and we always

say here it's you know people make the whole of the motor industry and people are the people buy

motor cars so what we're all about is the stories of all those people it's not just the metal you

know everything's got a person that goes with it or a whole group of people it's fascinating

well there's a random page here that you've opened for an order order records is it for a 12 horsepower

Wolsey am I right yep so I mentioned that we've got quite a collection of production records that

go back to the turn of the 20th century and this one's from 1909 for a Wolsey 12 horsepower car

and these records are in big bound handwritten very neatly handwritten books which tell you

everything about what's in the order who it's going to go to how much it's going to cost and then

everything every date where something happens to the car is noted down but they also have some quite

novel things in these records so you often find for example it'll tell you where to find a local

chauffeur if you want to chauffeur but also some quite individual things that customers have about

their orders whilst there was a kind of model range you could pretty much have it built like you

wanted to and this particular 12 horsepower car the the purchaser has noted that he'd like the

hood three inches higher than the regular model because his wife had gone to the motor show and

sat inside a similar car with her hat on but her hat pressed against the hood so he wanted it

three inches higher so her hat would be ably accommodated inside the car and that's all

recorded in this record and the hood would have been made to fit the owner imagine if you these

days you said to some manufacturer you know the the Audi A3 is all very well mate but could you

possibly just make it three inches taller so I can fit yeah so who uses this facility Stephen who

who how's how do people get access to it and who does so you can be a researcher in anything

probably the most common researchers are people who are trying to find out the history of their

own car either through the production records or they want to know more about the specifications

or want to have more information from brochures and what have you about their whatever car they'd

like to collect and they may purchase one of our heritage certificates where you kind of get all

the details written out on a nice certificate about your individual car when everything happened to it

and the day it left the factory but we get all sorts of different research so we get people

who are interested in the history of the motor industry the history of industry more generally

or business that type of thing lots of people interested in kind of design you know looking

at the Miklotti drawings but there's all sorts of different bits of design that goes into the

industry I suppose manufacturing too exactly that manufacturing and then we have a big group of people

who are interested in the social history so this collection even though it's come from the industry

is also a highly social story so people looking at people in the industry or you know the general

world of motoring or that type of thing so it's quite a wide variety and then our film

of photo library is you know auto car maybe use old snaps in there people writing books

people doing TV programs or what have you want some archive of whatever era of British car it might be

so it's quite wide and and our research it goes around the world you know it's they don't just

come from this country real well we appreciate you showing us around it is yeah I mean it's I mean

it visitors the museum if you haven't been do come because it's ace isn't it yeah that's fantastic

it is just off the m40 yeah just off the m40 again well the thing is you try hard to make sure there's

new stuff don't you absolutely yes I mean people do come back and we want them they might come back

for familiar things but we want something extra for them to see or really just to have different

reasons for people to come in the first place yeah and also to appeal to different you know appeal to

different people's tastes really so it's good to have something that's a hook to get them in the

museum in the first place and we're coming up to things like you know we've done half to holidays

and we're into Christmas so there's always plenty on for the for the family so if you think it's a

place just for the car nuts think again because there's plenty to entertain you or you know find

your own story with a bit like my Ford Anglia Stephen Lang thanks everyone thanks so much for your time

our thanks to Stephen Lang and the British Motor Museum and there are two more things to tell you

here firstly our thanks to Anderson the designer ev charging brand its charges are packed with smart

tech from solar compatibility to a state of the art app to a market leading seven-year warranty

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extending its exclusive 50 pound discount throughout November simply mention my week in cars and their

team will take care of the rest for more meanwhile on that auto car archive you just heard so much

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130th anniversary special: a new home for the Autocar archive

About this episode

Rover Group

British Leyland

Lotus

Caterham

Morris Minor

safety cycle

London to Brighton run

Walsley tricycle

tiller steering

gearbox

brake shoes

motor cars

automobiles

test drive

pre-production cars

Land Defenders

Land Rover Series One

Land Rover

Ford T Ford

Ford Model T

MG

Range Rover

Land Rover Range Rover

Vauxhall SRV

aerodynamics

gas turbine engine

Rover BRM

Aston Martin Lagonda

turbo lag

Jaguar Ctype

Aston Martin DB5

Ford Anglia

MG Mgb

Audi A3

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