TA350 would have been revolutionary, had it made it to market. (Pic: Sam Skelton)
For many years, the work of Alec Issigonis at Alvis during his Morris/BMC interregnum was something of a mystery - however we've put the pieces of the jigsaw together to produce the definitive development story of another of the great man's un-produced masterpieces.
Robert Leitch tells the story of the TA350's birth and painful death before it ever made it into production.
Issi's missing link
TA350 would have been revolutionary, had it made it to market. (Pic:
Sam Skelton)
OR a few late-night drivers on
the roads of Warwickshire, Worcestershire, and Gloucestershire in early 1955,
the occasional sighting of an unbadged medium-sized saloon car, invariably being
driven hard, would have made little impression, looking, as it did, rather like
a Nuffield product. The maroon car’s surprising turn of speed may have
surprised, as would the unfamiliar beat and burble of a V8 engine.
Despite appearances, the mystery car was no Morris, Riley, Wolseley or MG, but the product of a bold, and ultimately doomed bid by one of Britain’s most august car manufacturers, to regain their place at the leading edge of automotive technology, guided by Morris’s former rising star.
Other than a collection of drawings and sketches, the Alvis TA350 prototype, long since destroyed, was to be the only material artefact to remain as evidence of Alec Issigonis’s three and a half years at Alvis, variously described as an interlude and an exile. For the proudly independent Alvis company, the project Issigonis masterminded brought little other than a dent in the balance sheet. For Alec Issigonis, however, the ideas, processes, and people involved in his years at Holyhead Road formed the foundation for the inspirational BMC designs which consolidated his reputation as one of the heroic figures of modern automotive design.
Making the break with Morris
In his autobiography Auto-Architect, Gerald Palmer recounts an unexpected conversation he once had with Alec Issigonis, his then colleague at Morris.
"It was in June 1952 that Alec Issigonis asked me one day what it was like to work for a small company." Issigonis was undoubtedly referring to Palmer’s years at Jowett, where he enjoyed extraordinary freedom in realising his ideas to create the extraordinarily advanced Javelin.
"A few days later, to the astonishment of all around him, Issigonis tendered his resignation from Morris Motors, to join the Coventry-based Alvis Company as 'Engineer in charge of passenger car design'."
Alvis – Post-war success brings new confidence
The Alvis TA21 was strikingly elegant...
The start of the first post-war decade was a successful period for Alvis, their profitability largely derived from aircraft engine production and military contracts. The Alvis’ Series 500 and 520 Leonides radial piston engines began production in 1947 and were in high demand for fixed wing aircraft and helicopter use respectively. A War Office contract to develop armoured vehicles was awarded in 1947, with supply of Saladin Armoured Cars beginning in 1950.
John Joseph Parkes, Alvis’ Chairman and Managing Director from 1946, who was personally responsible for enticing Issigonis to his post, had a distinguished career in both the automotive and aviation industries, but was particularly protective of the company’s passenger car manufacturing activities, despite their questionable profitability and small production numbers – only 2642 of the staple Three Litre passenger car range were produced between 1950 and 1967.
It is a measure of the vigour of the company in the early post war era that despite intense activity on non-passenger car projects, they were able to show an all-new car at the Geneva Salon in March 1950, and fulfil the first customer orders six months later. The TA21 had a separate chassis and its bodystyles, produced by outside coachbuilders, were distinctly pre-war in their styling influences, although strikingly elegant. Beneath the anachronistic exterior the engineering was advanced by the standards of its British competitors, although nowhere near as bold and innovative as Alvis’ ground-breaking front wheel drive cars of the Twenties and Thirties. The TA21's front suspension comprised double wishbones with coil springs, at the rear live axle with a Salisbury 4HA differential was suspended on half-elliptic leaf springs. Telescopic dampers were used all round, at a time when lever arm types were the industry norm.
The three-litre engine, new for the TA21 was a moderately undersquare pushrod overhead valve unit, with a seven bearing crankshaft. Technologically the twin-cam Jaguar XK which had appeared two years previously put the Alvis engine in the shade, but the Holyhead Road engine’s bottom end with its rigid deep-skirted block was closer to modern practice than the XK’s design.
The engine was the work of Chris Kingham who had joined Alvis in 1946 from the Midland Motor Cylinder Company in Birmingham, after serving an apprenticeship with Thorneycroft in Basingstoke. As engine designer for the TA350’s V8, Kingham would face a far more challenging brief and impressed Issigonis so greatly that their working relationship was to continue over the twenty years which followed.
High ambitions at Holyhead Road
The objective set by John Parkes in 1952 was to move Alvis’ newly-formed Vehicle Division into the heart of the British luxury saloon market, with a technically advanced product combining class-leading performance with good fuel efficiency. A production volume of 5000 cars per annum was used as the basis for costing.
The coachbuilt, separate chassis Three Litre cars, now in their TB21 iteration, were low volume products, near hand-built to order for discerning connoisseurs, but the nature of their production process meant that they would never be competitive on crude value for money comparisons with the products of Jaguar, Rover, Riley and Wolseley. The challenge was to produce a unitary-bodied saloon to compete with the Riley Pathfinder, Rover 90 and Sunbeam Talbot 90, able to be sold profitably at a list price of around £850.
John Parkes must have considered himself fortunate to have secured the talents of the charismatic creator of the Morris Minor, who had already achieved media recognition as Morris Motors’ semi-official design spokesman. A small team was assembled under Issigonis, with Chris Kingham taking responsibility for engine design.
Other members were:
Chief body engineer
· Harry Barber – Ex-Austin, joined Alvis in 1945.
Barber had already demonstrated proficiency as a stylist with his 1948 design
for a ‘full-width’ pressed steel body for the TA21. Both Briggs
and the Pressed Steel Company were approached to build the bodyshell, but were
unwilling to consider a contract for fewer than 5000 units per year, and only
one prototype was built. The company resorted to a more traditional labour-intensive
manufacturing process for the production TA21, but the episode would return
to haunt the TA350 development.
Assistants:
· John Sheppard – chassis specialist. Ex-A.P. Metalcraft. Joined
Alvis in 1946.
· Fred Boobyer – bodywork specialist. Ex-Austin.
· Bill Cassells – transmission specialist. Ex-Standard. Joined
Alvis in 1952
· Harry Harris - suspension and running gear specialist. Joined Alvis
in 1952
Hugely significant was the co-option of Alex Moulton as a Specialist Consultant on suspension design. Issigonis first met Moulton in 1949, but prior to developing the Alvis the two had not worked together commercially on a live design project.
Such was the diversity of carmaking activity in England’s Motor City in the mid 1950s that an easy half-dozen potential competitors for the TA175 / TA350 were being produced within a few miles of Alvis’ Holyhead Road factory. For inspiration, however, Alvis’ designers looked not to Coventry, but to Chivasso, near Turin. Introduced in 1950, the Lancia Aurelia’s engineering highlights included the first series production V6, built in light alloy with a 60 degree vee angle and hemispherical combustion chambers, a rear mounted transaxle incorporating the clutch, gearbox, differential and inboard drum brakes in one unit, and all-round independent suspension.
Challenging orthodoxy
Notwithstanding the clearly evident homage to Vittorio Jano’s Aurelia, Issigonis’s design challenged convention in virtually every area of design. The principal elements are described here, with reference to the development process where appropriate.
Body and interior
The TA350 was fully designed and was the embodiment of 1950s Issigonis thinking...
(Picture: Gillian Bardsley)
The choice of unitary construction was an indication of the ambitiousness of Alvis’ plans. Chassisless construction was largely the preserve of the volume manufacturers, and in 1952, even Jaguar and Rover were three and five years respectively away from producing their first unitary bodied cars. The perceived benefits of unitary bodywork were reduced weight and production cost. The straight-six 3 Litre cars weighed around 30cwt (1500kg), around the same as a 2008 Ford Mondeo – yet the weight target for the V8 engined TA350, apparently achieved, was 21cwt (1050kg).
Unit costs, presented a harder balancing act as the pressing and assembly methods entailed much higher front end costs for tooling, and higher production volumes to achieve profitability. The latter was to be a major challenge to the project given that Alvis were entering an unfamiliar market sector, and the 5000 per annum production target was more than ten times that of the existing separate chassis cars.
Assessment of the TA350’s appearance was for many years frustrated by the astonishing fact that no photographs of the TA350 were thought to have survived. This, and the destruction of the prototype in 1964, meant that descriptions and artists’ impressions of the car were conjectural and generally rather unflattering, suggesting awkward proportions, and an uninspiring appearance closer to some volume-produced family saloons than the Alvis’ intended competitors. With the publication of newly-discovered and very clear photographs in May 2008, we at last have the opportunity to assess the design with some degree of informed objectivity.
The recurring point of comparison is the Morris Oxford Series 2, on which Issigonis worked before leaving Cowley. The TA350’s turret is certainly similar, but the low waistline and wide-tracked stance, along with the tombstone grille forced on the unwilling Issigonis by Alvis management, give the car poise and a presence suggestive of real power that is far removed from the benign countenance of the utilitarian 1954 saloon from Cowley.
Both Lancia influence and future Issigonis thinking are evident in the wheel-at-each corner location, with the rear wheels positioned well outwith the passenger compartment. The large, radiused rear wheel arch openings go against the semi-enclosed fashion of the time, and the possible reason for this will be described later.
The reported dimensions vary between descriptions, but it is certain that the car was relatively compact by comparison with its rivals. Part of the reason for this is that a four cylinder derivative, codenamed TA175, using an in-line engine developed from the V8 was planned from the start, and both versions would used the same body.
Based on the composite general arrangement drawing by John Sheppard, now in archives of the Heritage Motor Centre at Gaydon approximate dimensions are:
Length: 4420mm
Width: 1675mm
Height: 1430mm
Wheelbase: 2770mm
Front and rear track: 1370mm
As noted previously. the weight of the prototype was reported as a remarkably light 21cwt (1050kg). This was significantly less than any competitor and a considerable benefit in achieving the required 110mph performance with a relatively softly tuned engine.
For comparison, Oxford Series 2 sizes are:
Length: 4343mm
Width: 1651mm
Height: 1600mm
Wheelbase: 2464mm
Front track: 1359mm
Rear track: 1347mm
Weight: 1067kg
Although reduced height is the thief of interior space, Issigonis’s packaging genius came into play, and the car was configured as a six seater with bench seats front and rear with the handbrake and gear selector to the right of the driver. Accounts of the prototype’s appearance prior to the availability of photographs make mention of the starkness of the interior, but this is not borne out in the images which have now been published.
The wooden plank dashboard has relatively minimal centrally-placed instrumentation but the impression is of uncluttered functionality combined with quality materials rather than an inappropriately utilitarian design. Even in 1955, the four-spoke steering wheel with its laminated wood rim appears anachronistic, yet the design recurs in some later BMC-era sketches as an idiosyncratic Issigonis motif. The same is true of the prototype’s far from vertical steering wheel angle.
The unadorned external appearance reflects Issigonis’s contempt for styling. Always ready to find technical justification for his personal prejudices his notes refer to “Avoidance of fin areas at rear for good control in cross winds.”
The first design proposals showed a horizontal grille with a raised centre section echoing that of the 1951 Ford Zephyr. The frontal appearance of the car became a battleground with the Alvis’ more traditional board members. In 1953 Stanley Horsfield, Alvis’ sales director since 1933 had said “it wasn’t an Alvis at all”. In a rare capitulation, Issigonis’ team bowed to the traditionalists with a slightly raked horizontal shell resembling Gerald Palmer’s frontal treatment for the MG Magnette and Riley Pathfinder.
The newly discovered photographs lay to rest the notion that the TA350 was an unattractive car. Unlike the Lancia Aurelia, it may never have taken its place among the great post-war design icons, but in its time the low-slung, purposeful, yet graceful car depicted would not have been disgraced beside its rivals from closer to home, Gerald Palmer’s Riley Pathfinder, the 1955 Jaguar 2.4 litre saloon which we have come to know as the Mk.I, and the Rover 3 Litre, which was to appear in 1958.
Engine
Accounts of the project do not record why a 3.5-litre V8 was chosen as the power unit for the TA350, although the choice appears to have been made by John Parkes and, along with the use of a chassisless steel monocoque, preceded Issigonis’s involvement in the project. Even in the early 1950s British engineers were looking enviously across the Atlantic and seeing the future of large capacity engines as V-shaped, even though the side-valve Ford Pilot, the car which had introduced post WWII Britain to the V8 experience was a short-lived commercial failure.
The design of the V8 was arguably more advanced than any contemporary series production passenger car engine. Both the head and block were aluminium alloy, with the cylinders formed in cast iron wet liners. A crossflow arrangement was used with the inlet manifold in the centre of the vee. Shaft and bevel gear driven single overhead camshafts per bank operated valves through bucket tappets. A radical “closed tunnel” camshaft carrier was considered but rejected in favour of a more orthodox arrangement.
The sophistication of the new engine was perhaps indicative of a certain corporate hubris in the early 1950s following the successful introduction of the Leonides engines.
The bottom end was equally advanced but, in its first form, more controversial. Inspired by Leo Goossen’s Miller 91 racing engine, Issigonis chose a barrel crankcase which required the insertion of the crankshaft endwise with main bearings pre-fitted into disc-shaped cast iron carriers.
Issigonis was fortunate in having in the team Chris Kingham, an expert in the true classical sense – one who has done it before. The challenges of the unknown were, however, testing the abilities of the designer of the relatively straightforward Alvis ohv six to their outer limits. As late as early 1955, with the engine running in a prototype car, the decision was taken to abandon the barrel crankcase imposed by Issigonis. Problems of differential expansion and contraction of the iron and alloy components, and structural weakness of both crank and crankcase had proved insurmountable, so, with the help of Alvis’ in-house foundry, Kingham designed and had constructed a conventional arrangement in heroically quick time.
At the top end, early problems of tappet adjustability and noise were addressed and work progressed on bench testing of three prototype engines. A design brief to achieve a fuel consumption of at least 27mpg had led to the adoption of valve sizes smaller than might be expected, and a single 2 inch SU carburettor on an eight-branch manifold. Peak power was 100bhp, well short of expectations, and so twin carburettors were adopted. By the end of 1953, 124bhp was being delivered at 4000rpm, and in April 1954 estimated road load economy was tested at 29mpg at a constant 50mph.
As the year drew to a close, the engine was installed in the prototype car and was running up to 895 miles per night at MIRA’s test track at Nuneaton. The revised engine was fitted in the car when it was registered for the road on 12 February 1955, and testing on public roads commenced without reports of any further alterations to the engine design.
By the time production facilities for the engine were under consideration, the success of the Leonides engines and a large quantity of sub-contract work for Rolls Royce were stretching Alvis’ engineering facility to capacity. This resulted in a proposal to sub-contract engine manufacture to the old-established Maudslay company, by then a subsidiary of Associated Commercial Vehicles.
Transmission
Given the Lancia influence – Alex Moulton was an Aurelia owner – it is perhaps to be expected that a transaxle featured in the design from inception. The Alvis drivetrain differed radically from its Italian counterpart, and comprised a Smiths Selectadrive electromagnetic clutch, with a propellor shaft running at engine speed to a Laycock overdrive unit under front seats. Drive continued to an Alvis-produced two-speed transaxle giving a range of four speeds.
The choice of a semi-automatic system is possibly the least unexpected part of the transmission design, given that by the mid-fifties almost every car and major components manufacturer in Britain was developing some sort of clutchless or fully-automatic gearbox. Nearly all were characterised by jerky changes and unreliablity problems, and two-pedal fans would, in the main, have been delighted when Borg-Warner’s dominance of automatic gearbox production became near-absolute as the decade drew to a close.
With little in the way of engineering precedent, the drivetrain seems to have evolved as a matter of trial and error, with the overdrive first mounted at the rear in unit with the transaxle, then relocated to a position below the front seats, with propellor shafts to the engine and transaxle. At some stage of the development process the automatic clutch was replaced by a conventional two-plate item.
Jonathan Wood’s Issigonis biography mentions a radical change not referred to in other accounts. A problem arose with the bronze-bushed drive pinion assembly which could be worn out in a night’s testing, as was being demonstrated by Mike Parkes, the 23 year old son of Alvis’ chairman, who had joined the test team very much against his father’s will. Wood quotes Alvis’ chief of aero-engine design, Arthur Varney who said: “The solution to the problem, I believe, was to use a ZF gearbox mounted in the normal position, and to build a new pinion assembly in the gearbox casing. This used the normal Timken tapered roller bearing to take care of the thrust and radial loads.”
This suggests that the change was made by the time the prototype was registered for the road in February 1955. The undated prototype photographs show the floor mounted overdrive selector lever to the right of the driver’s seat, and a small panel with a vertical T-bar on to the far right of the dashboard, curiously similar in location and appearance to the automatic ADO17’s selector. There is a lever in the centre of the floor, which could be the conventional gear selector, although the near-flat floor and lack of a transmission bulge in this area is puzzling.
Suspension
The most radical aspect of this highly unconventional car was its suspension design. It was also to be its most enduring legacy.
Despite
Alex Moulton’s early co-option on to the design team, Issigonis was initially
unconvinced of the suitability of rubber as a suspension medium. He had used
a form of rubber springing on his Lightweight Special, but considered it inherently
too stiff to meet the expectations of buyers of a high-performance luxury car.
Experiments with a Flexitor and Rotashear sprung Minor led by Jack Daniels took
place after Issigonis had left Morris. These had given promising results, but
at the outset of the TA350 project torsion bars were the favoured springing
medium.
The key to making the evolving Moulton system work, and thereby winning Issigonis over to the idea, was front to rear interconnection. A system of mechanical interconnection was already in production by Citroën in the 2CV. A 2CV van was bought by Moulton and the dimensions and design principles studied in detail.
As with the driveline, the suspension development process appears to have used trial and error as much as science, with the rubber cone springs first used point-to-point in a Diabolo configuration, then turned base-to-base with an internal chamber for the interconnecting fluid. Interconnection was achieved using rubber hoses filled with water, then 5/8” copper plumbing pipework with standard plumbing valves to adjust flow rates. Chris Kingham’s later recollections noted that this aspect was not fully understood, with much more fluid used than was demonstrated to be necessary in the later BMC Hydrolastic applications.
Considering that Issigonis was already recognised as a suspension expert, it is strange to discover Issigonis’s early reluctance to adopt independent rear suspension, despite the rear-mounted transaxle already being one of the “holy writs” of the design brief. Apart from the difficulties of designing a gear linkage, the unsprung weight implications of adding the gearbox and a live axle to the car’s sprung mass would be beyond countenance, yet Issigonis noted at the time: "There is nothing in the unsprung weight complex, the only advantage is reduced side shake and tramp caused by the beam axle"
In their developed form, the mechanical elements of the suspension were remarkably advanced, and their sophistication should not be disregarded lightly in contributing to the success of the overall set-up. A system analogous to double wishbones was used at the front and rear, with a fabricated upper wishbone, and a lower arm and tie rod. The rubber/fluid displacers were mounted high in the wing cavity, acting on the upper wishbones through lengthy struts.
Remarkably, Issigonis’s notes refer to the possibility of filing a patent for rear wheel steering, something which the rear wishbone system would have facilitated. There is further evidence that this was under consideration in the large, radiused rear wheel arches, which went against the semi-enclosed fashion of the time, but would have been ideally suited to accommodating steerable wheels.
Two other aspects of the suspension design deserve mention in relation to designs which followed in the BMC era:
· Front wheel drive in waiting. There is no clear reason why the displacers should act on the upper wishbone rather than the lower arm of the front suspension, as was conventional practice. The bulk of the displacers was considerable and they certainly could not have been accommodated easily between the wishbones, but the connecting strut took care of that particular conflict. The chosen configuration must have added to the height of the waistline, when one of the design intents was for the car to have as low a waistline and overall height as possible. The conclusion must be that Issigonis either wished to standardise the front and rear components, or was configuring a suspension which could accommodate front wheel drive with very little adaptation.
· Hydrolastic and rear wheel drive. Rather than follow the Alvis double wishbone example, the rear suspensions of the two rear wheel drive Hydrolastic cars designed at Longbridge, the ADO30 “Fireball XL5” prototype, and the short-lived ADO61 Austin 3-Litre, used semi-trailing arms for their rear suspension. Issigonis maintained a strategic distance from both of the projects, but this does not explain why double wishbones, which would surely have been relatively easy to assemble using front wheel drive components already in production, were not considered.
Driving reports from the time indicate that the many hours of suspension experimentation and development had paid off to produce something exceptional. When Issigonis demonstrated the prototype to Jack Daniels, his long-time colleague commented: "As I recall it was an excellent car, I was only being driven around the Alvis area but it seemed to be very good, suspension-wise it was unique I thought."
Chris Kingham, having lived with the project for it entire duration, might be considered a less objective commentator, but his recollections again point to something quite out of the ordinary: "Roadholding and handling were absolutely marvellous and it was certainly exhilarating driving round MIRA flat-out which was 100mph".
Called to account
Despite being designed for the production line, Alvis considered the project
too costly...
In April 1954, Alvis’ directors commissioned an external report on the development of the car, snappily entitled “Scheme for the production of Passenger Car TA350”. Concentrating on the financial viability of the project. Completed in the same month, the un-named author concluded that, “if the estimated selling price of £850 was to be maintained, material and manufacturing costs have got to be reduced by approximately 8 per cent”.
There is some recognition of the value embodied in the car’s unique engineering insofar as a suggestion is made that, while savings could be found by using a smaller more conventional engine, or replacing the Moulton suspension with steel springs, the result would be, “a type of vehicle which is universally manufactured at the present time”.
Although Issigonis was aware of the report, he seems to have disregarded its conclusions and recommendations as the development process advanced towards the prototype stage.
In the metal
The prototype engine was being bench tested long before a car was ready, with 360 hours logged by April 1954. The Pressed Steel Company supplied the prototype body, and as 1954 drew to a close, the design team had begun night-time high speed testing at MIRA’s test track near Nuneaton. Compared with the scientific rigour of proving modern cars, the story of the testing process reads like a story from a 1950s boys’ adventure comic. Good accounts of the process are contained in both Bardsley’s and Wood’s biographies – both leave any true car enthusiast wishing they could have taken part.
On 12 February 1955, the only TA350 ever produced was registered with the Coventry mark PVC 835, and night-time road evaluation began on the roads of Warwickshire, Worcestershire, and Gloucestershire. For reasons explained below, the project was in all probability doomed even before the prototype turned a wheel, although testing and development continued through most of 1955.
Clouds gather
In April 1953 a chain of events was set in motion which shook the very foundations of the British motor industry. The American-owned pressed steel company Briggs announced that their UK operations, based in Doncaster and Dagenham, were to be sold to Ford UK. At first sight, this was of comparatively little consequence to manufacturers other than Jowett, already in unrelated difficulties, as Ford already took 90 percent of Briggs’ production. The effect was to concentrate manufacturer’s attention on the tenuous nature of their bodywork supply contracts, and the catastrophic effect on their businesses if rival manufacturers took control of their pressing and bodywork suppliers.
With even the largest car manufacturers relying mainly on outside contractors for pressings and completed bodyshells, a precipitate battle commenced to secure supplies, with fortune favouring the bold and ambitious, while the weak and indecisive faced extinction. Within six months of the Briggs takeover, BMC had acquired Fisher and Ludlow through Austin. Fisher and Ludlow were a major supplier to Standard Triumph, who recognised the threat to their operations and by June 1954 secured an agreement with Mulliners of Birmingham, the largest of the second rank of body suppliers, for exclusive rights to their production capacity. The much larger Pressed Steel Company, based at Cowley, would continue to supply bodyshells for the Vanguard.
With Mulliners no longer able to provide saloon bodies for the TC21, the changing order within the industry had finally visited a body-blow on Alvis’ activities. Worse was to come in January 1955 when Tickford, who supplied the TC21 convertible bodywork, was acquired by David Brown and merged into his Aston Martin Lagonda interests. Convertible body production for Alvis ended shortly afterwards.
Without the TA350 project, which was to have bodywork supplied by Pressed Steel, in the offing, Alvis could well have decided to abandon passenger car manufacturing activity altogether. The upheaval had already claimed one victim in Jowett, a customer of Briggs, who had abandoned car production and sold their factory to International Harvester in October 1954.
Market forces and the strengthened position of the Pressed Steel Company, now the only large-scale car bodywork supplier in the UK, were to do the TA350 project no favours. Costings for the TA350 were based on an estimate of £350,000 to £375,000 for tooling, and £118 for each body in-white. In June 1955, Pressed Steel revised their estimate for tooling costs to £620,000, with a unit price per body of £233, based on a volume of 5000 units per year.
Since the April 1954 report had used the earlier costs as its basis, and still concluded that substantial cost savings were necessary to achieve viability, Alvis’ directors would have had to be either foolhardy or absurdly optimistic to accept Pressed Steel’s estimate and commit the project to the next stage. Nevertheless, there was some examination of numerical possibilities, for higher and lower production numbers and the viability of an increased selling price. Bereft of other possible suppliers, Alvis approached Coventry neighbour Singer, who had their own bodywork production facility.
Their quotation undercut Pressed Steel for tooling, but did not provide a cost per unit. When the company, known to be in financial difficulties, advised that the cost per body for their own SM1500 was £365, it was clear that no salvation was to be found from that quarter, and by the end of 1955, Singer was to be taken over by Rootes.
John Price Williams’ Alvis book refers to work carried out at the time by the design team to assess alternatives to pressed steel construction, including a plywood monocoque, drawing on the Mosquito aircraft construction techniques.
An inevitable conclusion?
With all options in the search for a cost-effective supply of bodies exhausted, the TA350 project was effectively abandoned by June 1955. The company’s profitability had declined sharply since the start of the 1950s, and their bankers, already underwriting an overdraft of £643,000, refused to fund the tooling and production stage of the project, estimated in 1954 at a staggering £2,243,037.
The bodywork supply situation provided an honourable escape route from an enterprise which was clearly beyond Alvis’ means. In November 1955, John Parkes announced the termination of the project at the company’s Annual General Meeting, citing a 100 per cent increase in the cost of production tooling over the original estimates. Some reassurance was given to loyal Alvis car enthusiasts with the statement that “Instead Alvis’ motor engineers will concentrate on improving the design of the proven Three Litre model”.
With the exception of Chris Kingham who was retained to work on engine development, those “Alvis motor engineers” involved in the TA350 project would soon have to concentrate on finding other jobs. The public announcement of the change of direction coincided with the termination of employment for the small TA350 design team. Some months earlier, Sir Leonard Lord, who had been made aware of the turn of events at Alvis, instigated an approach to bring Issigonis back into the BMC fold and on 17 November 1955 Alvis and BMC made a terse joint statement that “Mr. A A Issigonis will join the staff of BMC. He was formerly a member of the staff of Morris Motors Ltd.”
Harry Barber’s talents soon found use at Pressed Steel, and John Sheppard joined Issigonis’ team at Longbridge in January 1956. Fred Boobyer, who had sat uneasily with Issigonis’s uncompromising approach had left a year into the project, ironically to join the BMC styling studio at Longbridge.
Although Issigonis regretted the abandonment of the project at the time, in a conversation many years later with Philip Turner of Motor he said, “No, I’m glad it didn’t happen, I was never happy with that car, you know.”
On balance, the decision of the Alvis board was the right one. The cost of taking the project to the stage at which it was abandoned was estimated at £76,816 – around £1.3 million at 2008 values. The price of tooling for the bodyshell alone was estimated at 8-9 times that figure. Passenger cars were no longer Alvis’ lifeblood, but the level of investment and the risk of entering an unfamiliar market with a product of daunting technical sophistication could have compromised the entire company’s survival, or at least its independence.
A missed opportunity – or a missed target
Had the TA350 made its debut at the 1956 London Motor Show as planned, it would have been a technical tour de force, a product which challenged the engineering orthodoxies of the time in almost every aspect of its design, and re-established its manufacturer at the cutting edge of automotive innovation.
Assessed with a little cold realism, the project displays all the hallmarks of a heroic failure, to match the Jowett Javelin or NSU Ro80. This pessimistic view is reinforced by the expedient major design changes made during the development process and the harsh assessment of the V8 engine by Aston Martin’s engineers.
There is a discernible nuance of hostility to the car among those of Alvis’ directors who considered that the car failed to project the company’s ethos. The light, spare and technically advanced Alvis two-seaters of the twenties and thirties would certainly have been in tune with Issigonis’s thinking, but the company and the majority of its directors had, by the mid-1950s matured deep into cautious and comfortable middle age.
An outsider’s words reinforce this concern. Shortly after his peremptory dismissal as BMC’s Chief Engineer in September 1955, Gerald Palmer was invited to Holyhead Road by Issigonis.
“Issigonis kindly invited me to see the prototype at the Alvis works. My vague recollection is that it was not particularly striking in appearance, rather like the current Morris Oxford Series 2 and not likely to appeal to traditional Alvis clients. It was powered by a V8 engine, but its outstanding feature was undoubtedly four-wheel independent suspension of the Hydrolastic type, at the time being developed by Alex Moulton and Issigonis, which would later be adopted by BMC.”
Issigonis is routinely characterised as a designer whose talents were firmly fixed in the small car sector, and whose ascetic outlook was ill-suited to the realisation of luxury car projects. This is only partly true. For Issigonis, luxury derived from maximisation of interior space, the achievement of the best possible ride/handling compromise, and inherently well-balanced engine configurations, most notably the small capacity straight sixes he championed until the end of his working life. A designer of the Machine Age, Issigonis would have seen the use of hand-craftsmanship and costly materials for appearance’s sake as money wasted which could be better used on engineering solutions.
Obliterated from history
With the design team disbanded, and no intention to put any part of the work on the TA350 to further use, the prototype was consigned to a corner of Alvis’ Service Department and covered with dustsheets. John Price Williams’ Alvis book states that BMC approached Alvis with an offer to buy the TA350 prototype, but the deal did not proceed any further as John Parkes would only accept a figure close to his company’s full £76,186 development outlay.
It is possible that commercial secrecy, the passage of time, and apparent lack of interest conspired to produce a variety of clouded accounts of the prototype’s fate. The broad consensus is that the one and only prototype, its engine long since removed, was broken up and removed for scrap in 1964, although Wood’s book states that Arthur Varney gave the date as 1968, linking it to the clearing out of car parts stocks for handing over to the newly formed Red Triangle Autoservices. (A footnote questions details of the chronology and speculates whether another prototype could have existed.)
There seems to have been no urgent reason to destroy the prototype other than lack of space. It is one of automotive history’s minor tragedies that Alvis management could not have swallowed their pride and donated the prototype to a museum, rather than airbrushing the episode from their corporate history. The lack of physical evidence of the TA350 has endowed it with the status of a mythical beast, with speculation that two or even three bodyshells were produced. Of the engines, numbers are equally uncertain, although two were thought to have survived after 1955, kept at John Parkes’s, to be used by his son Mike in a plywood chassis racing car. Both were eventually returned to Alvis and scrapped.
The sheaf of drawings which Issigonis took from Holyhead Road to Cowley survives, and is held in the archives of the Heritage Motor Centre at Gaydon.
Historical accounts of the TA350 project written over the last fifteen years agreed on one matter, that no photographs of the car survived. The unexpected discovery of two sets of photographs by motoring historian Jon Pressnell, 53 years after the project was abandoned, is an extraordinary development, hugely enhancing our understanding of the design and laying to rest a number of myths and unfounded speculations which had arisen in the absence of hard visual evidence.
Alvis after Issigonis
Alvis GTS (Gladys) was the company's last shot at the luxury car market
Alvis’ solution to the bodywork supply turmoil of 1953-55 established the future direction of the company’s car production activity, and their marginal yet exalted position in the marketplace. With Mulliner of Birmingham’s production committed to Standard Triumph, and Tickford’s to Aston Martin and Lagonda, by 1955 only a trickle of Three Litre chassis were being produced, for bodying by Swiss coachbuilder Hermann Graber, of Wichtrach near Berne. From 1951 Graber, who was to become Alvis distributor in Switzerland, had produced a small number of open and fixed head coupes on the Three Litre chassis, markedly more modern and sporting in their styling than the British-bodied cars.
In June 1955 two TC21 chassis were sent to Switzerland to be built into examples of a new prototype, the TC108/G, for display at the 1955 London Motor Show. The reception from the public and the motoring press was overwhelmingly positive, and the next part of the Alvis’urvival plan swung into place, with a licensing arrangement being set up with Graber for Willowbrook of Loughborough to build the Swiss design. Willowbrook, whose principal workload was bus bodywork, struggled to meet Alvis’ quantity or quality expectations and by late 1957 the contract had passed to Park Ward of Willesden, who would produce the TD21, a new Graber design for a full four seater without the distinctive wrap-around rear screen of the Swiss coachbuilder’s previous fixed-head coupes.
Over the years which followed, the external design altered only in detail, while Willie Dunn’s chassis and Chris Kingham’s engine coped ably with power upgrades and the adoption of disc brakes, power steering, and ZF manual and Borg-Warner automatic gearboxes.
Reliance on external suppliers for bodywork, and the associated high costs meant that Alvis had set themselves a future as an exclusive, small-scale producer. In the Willowbrook era from 1955-58, only 37 cars were produced, Swiss production considerably exceeding that of the Loughborough-bodied cars.
In the final nine years of Three Litre production from 1958 to 1967 a further 1531 cars were produced, equivalent to just over three months of TA350 production at the median projection.
By the middle of the 1960s, Alvis’ independent status was to end as consolidation fever overtook the engineering and automotive sectors in the West Midlands. In May 1965, recognising his marginally-profitable company’s vulnerability in the prevailing commercial environment, John Parkes approached George Farmer, chairman of the Rover Company with a merger proposal. The “amalgamation” was finalised within months.
To begin with, passenger car making activity at Alvis was unaffected, and the 150bhp triple carburettor TF21 was launched at Geneva in March 1966. By May of the following year rumours that Alvis car production was to end were widespread, not only in the motoring press but in the columns of national newspapers. These were countered by stories of Rover and even Triumph derived replacements,
There was certainly a will within Rover to continue the Alvis marque, as is evidenced by the statement of A B Smith, Rover managing director and Alvis board member in April 1967 that: "There is no question of giving up the great Alvis name in the range of quality cars. While the present batch production (of the TF21) is being run down, consideration is being given to a replacement worthy of the Alvis tradition, but no plans have been finalised for either a prototype or production”.
Prototype Gladys certainly looked good enough to ensure Alvis' continued existence.
The statement is disingenuous as the both the Alvis GTS fastback coupe based on the P6B inner frame, and the mid-engined P6BS which was regularly referred to as the Rover-Alvis were already in existence in prototype form.
Rover’s good intentions for Alvis came to naught as the merciless pace of events within the industry picked up in 1967 when Rover and Leyland, owners of Triumph since 1961, merged. A year later Leyland merged with British Motor Holdings to create British Leyland. In a conglomerate which included Jaguar, Daimler, Triumph and MG, Alvis the car manufacturer was one badge too many. Purists took some comfort that a proud chapter in Britain’s automotive heritage had concluded in a manner which preserved the marque’s idiosyncratic ethos rather than enduring a drawn-out “death by badge engineering”.
Alvis military vehicle production division remained within BL until it was sold off to United Scientific Holdings in 1981 as part of the Edwardes-era disposal of non-core assets. It is one of the cruel ironies of the TA350 saga that, as the last Alvis cars were leaving the Holyhead Road building, one of the company’s earliest tasks for their new masters was machining of parts for a 3½-litre all-alloy V8 which had originated on another continent in the early 1960s but was destined to achieve iconic status in Britain over three further decades of production, and to find use in an extraordinarily diverse selection of vehicles.
Issigonis after Alvis
The circumstances of Alec Issigonis’s return to BMC, or to be strictly acccurate, arrival at the Austin Motor Company are well documented. Far from being burdened with the career baggage of a failed project, the charismatic designer had negotiated a dream ticket. During his exile, Issigonis’s reputation had been enhanced by the success of the Minor, selling in huge numbers in both home and export markets, and endowed with an indefinable and enduring appeal which none of its BMC stablemates had managed to emulate.
Although as Deputy Engineering Manager, Issigonis was nominally subordinate in the BMC hierarchy to Sidney ‘Hitler’ Smith, the reality was that Leonard Lord had granted his department almost total freedom from management intervention in their work, recognising the need for a free thinker to design and develop products to compete with European rivals whose post-war recovery had lagged behind the British industry, but were now making a bid for leadership, both in technology and production numbers.
Leonard Lord had moved to recruit Issigonis, using John Morris as an intermediary, some time before the cancellation of the TA350 project had been officially confirmed. Issigonis’s brief was to design a new range of cars, on a clean sheet brief. The team structure would mirror that used at Alvis, with small multi-disciplinary “cells”, largely autonomous in their operation. Issigonis was able to recruit favoured members of his Alvis group, starting with John Sheppard. By Autumn of 1956 Chris Kingham had also joined BMC. A man of strongly-held religious convictions, it appears that his move was prompted as much by unease about remaining in the employ of a manufacturer of war materials as by the exciting opportunities presented by the new projects at Longbridge.
Alex Moulton was a key member of the team through his new venture Moulton Developments, the family firm of George Spencer, Moulton and Co having been sold to Avon during 1956.
Three platforms were proposed with the ‘XC’ prefix Experimental Car signifying projects under Issigonis’s supervision.
The three inaugural developments were:
XC9000: 1.5 litre rear wheel drive saloon
XC9002: Smaller front wheel drive saloon, intended as a Minor
replacement
XC9003: Fuel-efficient front wheel drive baby car smaller than
anything BMC produced at the time.
The first of these to be built as a running prototype, the XC9000 ‘long-distance’ car, looked for all the world like a TA350 with its tail docked and the reinstatement of the horizontal grille which had been over-ruled by Alvis’ management. All-independent fluid-interconnected suspension and a new overhead camshaft in line four featured. The choice of rear wheel drive is strange given Issigonis’s carte blanche brief. A transverse-engined front wheel drive Minor with end-on gearbox had been built as a running prototype before Issigonis left Morris in 1952.
Furthermore, in 1955 the Citroën DS had astonished the automotive world and was admired and studied in great detail by both Issigonis and Moulton. It seems likely that in order to “hit the ground running” with a suitably impressive showcase for the new suspension, engine and packaging ideas, the XC9000 design team chose to draw heavily on the TA350 work, rather than setting immediately to the challenges of realising a transverse-engined front wheel drive system, which would be taken up in the design of the two smaller cars.
Jonathan Wood’s Issigonis biography states that an addendum to Issigonis’s contract bound him “to keep Alvis’ secrets, and hand over any inventions arising from the project, although he arrived at Longbridge with sheaves of TA350 drawings.” (We may speculate whether Issigonis had arrived at Holyhead Road with sheaves of Oxford Series 2 drawings.)
According to Gillian Bardsley’s Issigonis biography, when Chris Kingham joined BMC the prototype XC9000 was already running, using an engine resembling the TA175 four-cylinder derivative of the Alvis V8, and furthermore the former Alvis engine designer was set to design further modular derivatives, a V6, and a compact 1.5-litre V4 for use in the smaller XC9002.
Issigonis’s sketches suggest that rear wheel drive was the XC9000’s sole concession to orthodoxy. The gearbox is located midships below the floor in the same position as the TA350’s overdrive unit, and the final drive appears to be fitted with inboard drum brakes. The suspension in early sketches shows tall struts with interconnected Moulton displacers, and long bottom wishbones front and rear.
How the automotive world would have received this radical interpretation of conventionality was never put to the test, as events in the wider world resulted in changed priorities at Longbridge. The Suez Crisis of September 1956 resulted in unprecedentedly high oil prices, and the introduction of petrol rationing in December of that year. Had the Alvis TA350 gone on sale at exactly that time, as had been planned, the choice of a 3½-litre V8 would have looked like spectacularly bad luck or judgement. For those of its erstwhile designers employed by BMC, it meant that efforts were fully concentrated on the smallest of the experimental cars XC9003, which would go on sale as the Morris Mini-Minor and Austin Seven in 1959.
Remarkable colour image of the XC9001. (Picture: BMIHT)
In 1957 the XC9000 prototype was abandoned, to a disused water tank in Cowley. The largest experimental car was to re-emerge as XC9001 in 1958, once the ADO15 Mini was being readied for production. Using the Mini’s “bunk-bed” engine over transmission layout, and styled with Pininfarina’s input, it resembled a larger BMC 1100. The largest of the three original “experimental cars’” went through a protracted evolution, as the larger XC9005, and from 1960 ADO17, going on sale in 1964 as the BMC1800. Chris Kingham had been placed in charge of the B Cell responsible for XC9005, although Issigonis remained firmly in the role of dirigiste, in the old Alvis manner.
Notwithstanding the change from front to rear wheel drive, ADO17 is the spiritual successor to the Alvis TA350 – spaciousness belying its compact footprint, sparse furnishings, a near flat floor, immense torsional rigidity, and the most successful application of Hydrolastic suspension. Even the driving position recalled the Alvis with a similar far from conventional steering wheel angle and, in the automatic versions, a gear selector mounted on the lower dashboard to the right of the driver.
After the event comments from Issigonis on the two cars are telling.
On the XC9000 prototype: "We only made one, a nasty thing. I didn’t like that one and I thought it was driven at the wrong end for it was a rear wheel drive car".
On the 1800/2200: "Our best car, I loved that car".
Much as Issigonis expressed his dislike of XC9000, elements of its styling – or possibly lack of styling – inspired and informed the shape of the 1959 ADO15 Mini. This is a but a minor demonstration of the Issigonis continuum - in one sketch of XC9000, VW Beetle-like swept back headlights feature, unlike the conventional circular vertical fittings of the prototype. The resemblance to the Cowley-built R50 MINI of 2001 and its barely-changed 2006 successor is astonishing.
The visual appeal of the unstyled 1959 Mini is not in question, but the likeness of the XC9000 sketch to its somewhat arch BMW-produced (and better-capitalised) namesake is clear evidence of a strongly-held set of common principles originating with the Minor and the MO and Series 2 Oxfords, which still endure 60 years later.
Footnotes:
TA175
The possibility of a four cylinder version of the TA350 using one bank of the V8 seems to have been an integral part of the project from the earliest stages – the project codename was TA175/TA350. The logic was attractive – by 1953 the superior 1½- to 2-litre saloon sector was well established, if uncomfortably busy, with competitors such as BMC’s MG Magnette and Wolseley 4/44, Sunbeam Talbot 90, Singer SM1500, Lanchester Leda, and Rover 60. The four-cylinder Alvis, with its light and compact unitary body and ohc 1750cc engine delivering a conjectural 60-65bhp would not have been disgraced in this company. What defies logic is that in 1954-55, when Alvis management agonised over bodywork supply options, the opportunities for economies of scale offered by including the lower cost four-cylinder saloon in the range do not even seem to have been considered.
Aston Martin
Aston Martin Lagonda, and owner David Brown, feature in the roles of both angels and demons at various stages of the TA350 story.
Following the acquisition of Aston Martin in 1947, and Lagonda the following year, Brown had become a significant player in the luxury sports car market, and substantial investment and motor sport success had consolidated this position. Alvis was seen as a potential takeover target, and by February 1954, David Brown had a 10% holding in the company, and informal discussions opened on co-operation on manufacturing and marketing.
The two firms had much in common – although prestige cars were their best known products, their profitability derived almost entirely from other less alluring engineering and manufacturing activities. The corporate cultures were vastly different, the Yorkshireman’s name was already a byword for swashbuckling entrepreneurship in the engineering sector, whereas the Alvis board’s approach was one of self-preserving caution.
Despite these differences, according to David Brown, after a number of private meetings John Parkes was willing to take a merger proposal to the Alvis board. The offer was, perhaps unsurprisingly rejected, and in the aftermath, from which Parkes appears to have emerged unscathed, Brown offered to sell his shares but take over development of Issigonis’s TA350. Some further proposals were made on co-operation on tooling and supply of car bodies, but no agreements were made, and David Brown eventually sold his Alvis holding at a point when takeover speculation made the transaction profitable.
Around this time, Aston Martin expressed an interest in developing the V8 as a replacement for one of their two straight sixes. A prototype engine was collected from Coventry by and tested at their Feltham factory, but was returned to Alvis’hortly afterwards with a scathing indictment from engine designer Harold Beach; “It had a dreadful crankshaft like a piece of bent wire”.
With commercial collaboration talks at an end, in early 1955 Brown delivered a cruel blow by ending supplies of Alvis convertible bodies from his newly acquired bodybuilding subsidiary Tickford. Neither this move, nor the abandonment of TA350 development destroyed Alvis, and the rescue plan for the Three Litre cars made their reputation stronger, if not their profitability. Discussions with David Brown appear to have taken place occasionally in the years which followed.
The recently published article by Jon Pressnell refers to the engine being removed from the prototype early in the 1960s and sent to Aston Martin for assessment "at a time when the two companies were exploring joint ventures". Aston Martin provided a twin-cam straight six in part exchange. This event, long after the complete abandonment of the project by Alvis, is also referred to obliquely in John Price Williams’ book. The engine concerned would have been the revised type with the conventional crankcase, rather than the original barrel-crankcase version roundly condemned by Harold Beach. The chronology suggests that Aston Martin may have been looking for examples before embarking on the design of their own all-alloy V8. Work on Tadek Marek’s substantially larger V8 started in 1963, and apart from a certain GM unit which had begun production late in 1960, examples of proven all-alloy V8s were a rare commodity at the time.
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Reference Sources
Issigonis – The Official Biography: Gillian
Bardsley, Icon Books 2005
Alec Issigonis – The man who made the Mini: Jonathan
Wood, Breedon Books 2005
Alvis Three Litre in Detail: David Culshaw, Herridge and Sons
2003
Alvis – The Postwar Cars: John Price Williams, Motor
Racing Publications 1993
MG - The Untold Story: David Knowles, Windrow and Greene 1997
Last Chance Saloon – Rise and Fall of an Industry: Keith
Adams 2004
Auto-Architect – The Autobiography of Gerald Palmer:
Gerald Palmer with Christopher Balfour, Magna Press 2004
Apex – The Inside Story of the Hillman Imp: David and
Peter Henshaw, Bookmarque Publishing 1990
Jowett Javelin and Jupiter – The Complete Story: Geoff
McAuley and Edmund Nankivell, Crowood Press 2003
Triumph Cars – The Complete Story: Graham Robson and
Richard Langworth, Motor Racing Publications 2004
Classic and Sports Car June 2008. Article by Jon Pressnell
– Alec’s Lost Alvis
Advertising what might have been
