History of Austin Documentary

[Music] the shape sort of has this cuddly appeal to its they've got a cult status you can all have rubbernecking as you're driving along people said oh gosh what's that it looks like a funny little naughty car one could probably describe the steering as Vegas opposed sits the car of the century they often make more situation or her but often he was an engineer he was born in 1866 and as a very young man he emigrated to Australia what happened then was that he got in touch with a man who was called warm flea and he gave Austin a job to try to improve these mechanical cheap shares which is a bit like a hair clip were actually and Austin did so much for the company that he was actually asked in 1892 to return to England to take charge of the Wall Street company's factory in Birmingham the big calming thing walsim intercom and Austin paid a visit to Paris in call about 1894 1895 where he sought first motorcars and that inspired him in 1896 to built his first own car it was followed by a second three wheeler a year two later by a four wheeler four-wheel car in 1899 I think also that Austin was ambitious and he wouldn't have been happy going on just as being an employee or Water Company he preferred to strike out on his own and I think he very badly wanted to see those every successful motorcar is fundamentally Lord Austin wanted to design a car motor for the millions to achieve this he picked out a a young Jaspan from the in office who had done very well at college and wherever and it took him up to his own home the the drawings and everything are reputed to being done on the billiard table this is a 1927 Austin 7 tour it was nicknamed in the twenties by the press as a austin 7 show me probably because it was everybody's pal and good friend at the time [Music] [Applause] the car came into a family in 1935 my stepfather moved up from Kent to Darby have found the climate very cold up here and he had a rich wit with motorbike which he was going to buy some motorcycle boots and gloves for it and where he was lodging at the time the landlady's brother had got this car and he offered it to him for four pound because the gloves and boots were going to cost him five pound and that's really how he came to own it and then one day I was at work it was about 1972 time and my stepfather had then retired and the wife phoned me up and said that Bob had decided that it was going to burn the car because he thought it was too dangerous for modern roads and that so that no I don't Brown to see him and he agreed to give it to me Hildur austin seven that we've got in the family is 1933 saloon now the wife uses that every day as a runabout car does everything really you would do in a modern car where you go out normally and nobody talks to you if you're going in Austin seven people seem to become friendly all of a sudden and talk to you driving on austin 7 is quite enjoyable the main difference is that they don't have stoplights or indicators so to try and communicate with other road users and drivers you need to do hand signals unfortunately most drivers don't seem to understand hand signals that well nowadays so you have to try and highlight the hand signals a little bit so to do that I wear this yellow band on my arm [Music] oil pressure has got a button rather than a gauge that comes out as as the pressure increases and you can tell what the pressure is by the how much this book comes out of the dashboard for the petrol quantity is a simple or dipstick that was made so that it fitted on the petrol tap and it was so designed that you could only remove it when the petrol was switched off so there was no chance of losing this dipstick the temperature is read by a thermometer that actually fits in the top of the radiator which is known as a Boyce moto-meter being the company that patented if you're going to get major problems on austin seven it will be on the number four journal on the crankshaft this is because of the whipping of the crankshaft there's a lot of metal fatigue there and it eventually creates a crack and breaks rewar aston started this tradition for dealing with language and slogans which austin who were very keen on so you get the wordplay of you invest in an austin and you also got the beginning of the slogan britain's dependable car which carries on after the war but austin will also want the first manufacturers to be interest in naming their cars and although the original austin seven clearly had no name by the mid 30s they were trying to make it more appealing perhaps to women and they began to call their cup models too chummy the pearl the ruby and in their advertising material you will find women standing alongside these cars it was also imitated abroad and it was built under license in America in France and most famously was built on license Germany by none'll and BMW it really became a famous car throughout the world Lord often was useful known as par often to his workforce and that perhaps tells you something about what he was like when next you buy a car you will find it easy to decide which car you will by having seen for yourselves our British cars are made and now motoring dependability is a short he continued at the head of the company up until 1941 when he died at 75 years of age often had chosen his own successor he in 1938 employed a man called Leonard Lord then at Lord is alleged to have set as he came in to Longbridge that up until now the Austen company has made some very good cars now we'd better see about making some money the Austin i-40 Devin endorsed it was the first totally new family cars to be launched in post-war Britain they appeared in autumn of 47 at a time when petrol was still being rationed and most cars were black they started looking to stylee's in 1946 and they looked at some of the American Plymouth styling and the Chrysler styling and tried to incorporate the first Austin without true running boards they tried to make sure that the wings flowed nicely and I don't say this shape is aerodynamic but they certainly rounded it off and the shape sort of has this could Lea peel to [Music] they were trying to be innovative they were trying to attack the export market so they put in all their latest newfangled inventions if you like they use the overhead valve engine independent front suspension and they try to introduce lots of nice colors which that would attract the Americans the car I mean at the moment is a convertible Dorset the Australians particularly liked Austin Devon's and Dorset's and quite a lot of Austin Dorset's were shipped over in saloon form over to Australia and when they got there Ruskin Motor bodies of Melbourne took the saloon and basically cut the top off this is one of only two that we know of in Britain that have were imported from Australia and of course with the extra weight of the roof taken off add to the performance quite a lot [Music] compared to modern cars I suppose it just trimmed us along really I mean these cars were built for the a roads they were meant for cruising through Devon and through Somerset and once you get it on a road like that it'll go on forever [Music] all day the steering once you go in a straight line it's pretty good when you come to corners you have to actually say I anticipate those one could probably describe the steering as vague I suppose but for the standards of the day it was pretty good in fact it's interesting that in mid 1940s the Austin a 40 range was produced and sold in greater numbers than any other car in Europe I Austin and be proud does also often versus more morons versus Austin it was very interesting that in 1952 those two companies decided to merge to form the British Motor Corporation however there was still an element of competition between the two old archrival Morris effectively in their range they had an mg sports car and there wasn't a sports on Austin range and that worked in law 1953 Donald Healey took the Healey hundred to the Earl's Court Motor Show and at that show there were representative of the Austin Motor Company and they were so taken by the Healey 100 that they then got into discussions and within a few days the badge changed from Healey to Austin Healey my Kaiser austin-healey sprite its 948 CC and was manufactured in 1959 when they designed these they want to do something which was going to be a little bit different and made people look at it [Music] the idea of the headlights which as you can see are sort of right within the bonnet originally they had an idea of being able to actually get the headlights to be down in the bonnet and then flick up but I think they had problems with things like the cables and the connections to them and so I think the idea then was to change that and make them fixed I think the original concept was actually to make two molds and that was basically the front nearside wing was the same as the rear offside wing but it didn't quite work that way and so that it did have to change but that was the basic concept when you look at the period of time in the latter part of the 50s there wasn't really a car that fulfilled the actual space that this one's that seeded in doing if you look at what was available on the market such as the MGS and also the triumphs they were more expensive and they didn't fulfill a marketplace that this this bright did [Music] [Music] well I think that the the character of the car is something that really is it says it all by its shape I mean when you look at the car itself it's sort of it looks like a funny little Noddy car it's certainly a car that does attract a lot of attention and all the time when I'm driving around and even if I'm just going down to the shops to to pick something up you always find when you come back to the car there's several people standing around wanting to ask you questions about it they're very practical car to because they're very economic I probably get something in the region of 50 miles to the gallon out of it I suppose really Haley played a very very big part in this of evolution of Austin and it put it into a marketplace that it just didn't have [Music] after the merger between Austin and Morris in 1952 this was the period of what we call Batson nearing where the same basic design could be dressed up in different ways to look like an Austin or Morris O'Riley or worse Leon M gene there there was also however a man called Alec Issigonis who had already made his mark in the motor industry as the sign of the Moors my nan was busily beavering away with a few colleagues creating a new car the nippy's zippy rearing for their trippy twins the spacious gracious handsomely curvaceous twins but cars the returning mr. man in the streets into mr. men behind the wheel first in seven and morris mini-minor the challenging small cars of course it very soon became known justice and many it was a totally new departure for the Austin company it had more new features built into one car that had probably ever been seen before it's very small only ten feet long still had room for four adults with some luggage it had very small wheels only ten inch in diameter and above all it was the first car in modern times produced the transfers Indian front-wheel drive formula which since has become a worldwide standard for all of the motor industry if four hulking great six-footers and their baggage can travel comfortably in an Austin seven or morris mini-minor and they can you can be sure those amazing twins make marvelous family cars and they do with plenty of room for everyone for everyone's belongings and everyone's cases what a boon the letdown bootlid is the mini was launched on 26th of August 1959 very mixed reception des prés liked it a lot the public were very wary because it was very technically advanced they didn't know how reliable it would be it had problems with water leaks when they first came out so it's very very shaky start until it became a fashion fashionable to have in London because of its size its ability and I just took off [Music] my car's a 1964 Austin Mini Super Deluxe to give it his full title this car lion-hearted off my grandmother thirteen years ago she got to the age of 82 the car needed some work on it and she decided it was about time she gave up driving [Music] the mini was on the perfect car for the time it just fitted right into the 1960s as a period when suddenly London became the fashion capital of the world and think about peoples of time of the miniskirts it was time the Beatles but as so many things happen about them at the time and the meaning was actually derived this is the millions many that I won in February 1965 anyone who bought a BMC car in December 64 was eligible for the competition I entered not thinking I'd win but I did and I've had it ever since it's been the family car children learn to drive in it and until the last five years it's always been in daily use but compared with modern day cars it's when you've done 200 miles in the meaning of no you've done 200 miles it's exciting and rather bumpy a bit noisy but it's still a mini I recollect an early Austin mini brochure which has a mother loading her car full of shopping and says the mini mum has the maximum which is continuing the tradition of wit and slogans [Music] well this is a 1965 Mini Moke they designed it with the military in mind they let's the army use it and test tested but sadly its ground clearance wasn't high enough and the military drop did well you could a lot of rubber necking as you're driving along people sort of gosh what's that and well you don't learn to live with it you look at the road and you think you're doing a hundred and sixty mile an hour and you look at the speedo and you're probably clocking 40 miles but it's just a wonderful feeling and especially on a day like today what more could you ask for John Cooper developed the Mini Cooper which became famous as a competition car and BMC after winning for rallying and very big scale the mini amazingly to sink now he'd won them under Carlo Rally in 1964 65 and 67 this is a 1965 Mini Cooper S that I use in motorsport I compete with this because it's a vis age the technology isn't in the suspension so it's hard work it's physical hard work for the driver you don't find a lot of ladies driving them very quickly there are some we were quite physically strong you need to be physically strong to drive it a lot of the Cooper asses have gone to Japan an awful lot have been exported there aren't that many left in Britain to be honest not love the classic Cooper asses the new 1275 carried on where the Mini Cooper left off British Leyland decided that they didn't want to pay John Cooper royalties so they decided to call it something else and the name they decided on was the 1275gt the main difference between this car and the earlier minis is the fact that it's got larger wheels and it's got different back lights but the front end - this one has got what they call a mini clubman front which is a squared off nose [Music] I like to refer to the mini as Britain's best-loved car ever the production fee goes now 5.7 million and rising steadily and I think that it is like that the mini will certain celebrated his 40th birthday in 1999 before it finally goes out and that must make a record of some sort it's the car of the century 37 he knows is still going the everybody says well I used to have a mini and everybody loves it and they're there they'll never die they just keep going on and on and on it's just part of the magic elfin minis aren't easy to drive quickly they're quite difficult you need to be dedicated girl I think it's a shame it's a classic shape they've got a cult status [Music] sadly although the cars were technically outstanding they were not so profitable it's been estimated that every single mini sold in 1960s costs the company quite a bit of money and sadly the company eventually got into a situation where it was making a loss and that led to 968 reformation of what became critical and they decided to built a new corn which had to be a popular family car and they got a new styling crew to design [Music] it's interesting to realize that it came out in the same year that for pardon water to golf which has perhaps become a design classic of the seventies there were lots of unkind stories about La Trobe they said that it was actually more aerodynamic if it went backwards it's become known as the often a crow I don't know that it Gabe returned as much a crow he was just it was a bit of an oddball in the market and it was made for the best part of 10 years and was finally they twist about 1982 and 2 to be replaced in turn by Boston maestro there was nevertheless in 1986 and change the direction again and it was decided that the new cars from now on would be called robot well living near to Longbridge as I do there's a lot of pride still in the name Austin you get to talk to a lot of the ex employees and they've got a lot of pride in the standard of engineering that they achieved when they worked for the company and it just seems to be a bit of a forgotten name amongst the marks now and that's a shame [Music] [Music]

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Views: 32,386

Rating: 4.8315787 out of 5

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Id: HWlpts5NR7c

Length: 23min 57sec (1437 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 01 2018