Life of Automobile, The Page 8

  The interior of the car was equally innovatory. The gear change was set in the dashboard, with the gear lever protruding through a vertical, H-shaped gate alongside pendant pedals, an umbrella-type handbrake control, and front bench seats. This all made for a very spacious interior with a flat and unobstructed floor of the type more usually associated with modern-day MPVs.

  Rivals cast doubts on the resilience of the new car’s monocoque construction; Citroën accordingly staged a public relations event in which a Traction Avant was driven off a cliff and (unlike Chrysler’s Airflows) was found to be still intact, if a little bruised and bent, at the bottom. Citroën was a master of PR, initiating direct-mail marketing straight to potential customers and making extensive use of poster and print advertising. In his advertising, Citroën was once again way ahead of his time, preferring to communicate the qualities of the Citroën brand rather than those of a single product. He had his cars photographed in genuine outdoor venues, which no one had ever done before. Imitating Morris, he also launched a company magazine, the Bulletin Citroën, with illustrations featuring some of the best French graphic artists of the day. At the launch of the Paris Motor Show of 1922 he even had an aircraft emblazon his name in the sky above the Eiffel Tower, the first example of skywriting ever seen in Europe. And between 1925 and 1934 his name was flashed in 100-foot letters created by a quarter of a million electric light bulbs wired to the Eiffel Tower, a brazen advertisement which could be seen from sixty miles away. He also paid for Paris’s Arc de Triomphe and Place de la Concorde to be permanently illuminated.

  Citroën’s public relations coups were not just limited to his native France. At the Berlin Motor Show of 1933 – the first since Hitler’s seizure of power – the Club Citroën hospitality centre dominated the event. (Hitler ordered that such a national embarrassment, particularly one perpetrated by a foreign Jew, was never to happen again in Germany.) And when King George VI visited Paris in 1938, Citroën presented his two daughters – one of whom was the future Queen Elizabeth II – with working miniature right-hand-drive Traction Avants, made in England at Slough. After 1945 the firm went out of its way to stress that its right-hand-drive Citroëns were ‘made in England’, staging publicity shoots for Slough-built Traction Avants – badged throughout the British Empire as Citroën Twelves and Citroën Fifteens (or ‘Big Sixes’) – at quintessentially English venues such as the idyllic Cotswold town of Chipping Campden.

  Production of the Traction Avant continued until 1957 and thus overlapped with Citroën’s other legendary large car, the DS. When production of Slough-built, right-hand-drive versions of the Traction Avant restarted in 1946, Motor magazine commented that it ‘was the car we could not overturn’ and hymned its ‘extraordinary stability and exceptional roadholding and riding comfort’. Autocar was similarly ecstatic, noting that ‘the car can be driven at amazing speeds over a potholed surface that you would not take at more than a cautious 20 mph in the average car’.

  The importance of the Traction Avant, and the sheer genius of André Citroën, cannot be underestimated. All other car manufacturers of the period stood by the principle of rear-wheel drive. The Austrian engineer Ferdinand Porsche went even further, insisting that for optimum traction both engine and gearbox should be located right at the back, behind the rear axle, a solution found in Porsche designs from the legendary VW Beetle to the Porsche 911. Only Citroën dared to challenge the accepted wisdom, insisting that frontwheel drive gave better tyre adhesion, improved directional stability and easier steering control. In short, frontwheel-drive cars were, Citroën insisted, safer. But it was not until the 1950s that his rivals warily began to forsake rear-wheel for frontwheel drive.

  Tragically, the high development costs of the revolutionary Traction Avant ruined a company already weakened by the aftershock of the worldwide depression (which devastated the market for Citroën’s larger models), a crippling factory strike of March–May 1933, and over-optimistic sales forecasts. The end came when Citroën’s supplier of Bakelite steering wheels submitted a winding-up petition to the French courts in November 1934. Citroën’s bankruptcy was announced on 21 December, and a creditors’ committee was appointed only nine months after Citroën had unveiled his first Traction Avant. Thankfully, Citroën’s largest creditor, the tyre manufacturer Michelin, stepped in at the last minute to purchase the company, reassuringly promising to maintain the firm’s reputation for innovative excellence.

  Michelin had been Citroën’s sole supplier of wheels and tyres since 1919, and the surviving Michelin founder, Édouard (his brother and business partner André had died in 1931), understood and admired Citroën’s vision and methods. The resulting purchase was negotiated with tact and decorum by Édouard’s son, Pierre, on condition that Citroën himself did not leave the company to start another manufacturing operation. (It was widely rumoured that the automotive genius was planning to team up with Ettore Bugatti.) Thereafter, Michelin took care to keep the tyre and car concerns wholly separate. More worryingly, Michelin also swiftly terminated most of Citroën’s flamboyant marketing campaigns – a strange decision from the company that as early as 1898 had popularized the Monsieur Bibendum trademark – and established a secretive management method completely at odds with Citroën’s jovial transparency. Austere and devout Catholics, the Michelin family ensured that no outsider was admitted into the inner sanctum of higher management. Certainly no Michelin was ever seen at a racecourse, casino or nightclub.

  Crushed by the ignominy of his bankruptcy, André Citroën died of cancer only seven months after his company’s sale, on 3 July 1935. Two years later, Citroën’s friend and the saviour of his firm, Pierre Michelin, was killed in a car accident while at the wheel of his Traction Avant. This double tragedy meant that neither man lived to enjoy the huge success of Citroën in the years after the Second World War, a time that saw the firm not only produce one of the most popular automotive workhorses the world has ever seen but also, exactly twenty years after André’s death, launch a vehicle that is still hailed as the most beautiful and advanced automotive design of all time.

  While most of the successful European car makers of the 1930s were those who concentrated on the middle-class market for small family cars, a few firms did manage to prosper at the other end of the scale – at least until full effects of the Depression were felt in the early 1930s. By 1939, though, the continent boasted very few luxury car makers. Of those, even fewer survived the vicissitudes of the coming war.

  Rolls-Royce was one glowing exception to the string of interwar failures and motored serenely on. Following Claude Johnson’s untimely death from pneumonia (contracted at the funeral of a friend) in 1928, he was succeeded by the able Arthur Sidgreaves, who had made his name developing aircraft engines. Royce, meanwhile, visited Britain less and less often, preferring to work with Sidgreaves on the firm’s new aviation projects. Royce quietly expired in 1933, two years before Rolls-Royce’s legendary Merlin aero engine was finally perfected. In that year, too, the ‘RR’ emblem atop all the firm’s car radiators was permanently changed from red to mourning black – but not, as is often thought, in memory of Royce; rather, the red colour was thought to clash with the tones of many of the new car bodies and the decision to change the colour had actually been taken before Royce’s death.

  The strength of the Rolls-Royce brand enabled it to outlast the Great Depression. At the 1931 London Motor Show, the Rolls-Royce Phantom II was, astonishingly, the only British-built premium car to be exhibited. The company’s famous sporting counterpart, Bentley, had already succumbed to the recession; indeed, it had now become part and parcel of Rolls-Royce.

  Like Royce and Rolls, Walter Owen Bentley began his working life in a railway workshop – in his case, in the GNR’s vast Doncaster complex. As a wealthy former public schoolboy, however, he could choose his desired path, as C. S. Rolls had done, rather than having to fight for a job, as working-class boys such as Henry Royce had to do. In 1912 he and his brother Henry set
up an agency to sell and repair French cars – still then regarded as the gold standard of the automobile world – and during the First World War they successfully converted their workshop to the manufacture of aircraft engines. Then, in 1919, the restless Bentley founded his own car works.

  Bentley’s personal life was a bit of a mess. His first wife, Leonie, died of influenza in 1919. His second wife, Audrey, was a fun-loving society girl who hated factories. Bentley, though, was a homely, modest workaholic who was prone to depression and loved to spend his weekends in the plant. Predictably, the marriage was a disaster. Walter only found lasting happiness with his third wife, Margaret.

  His professional life was rarely smooth, either. An engineer dedicated to motoring perfection, who preferred testing and racing cars to checking budgets, he was never a real businessman and always hovered on the brink of bankruptcy. Bentley’s target was the performance end of the specialist market. As Martin Adeney put it, his products ‘were racing cars adapted for the road’. His classic 3 litre of 1921 was made famous by a group of rich playboy motorists, known popularly as ‘the Bentley Boys’, led by the diamond and gold tycoon Woolf Barnato, whose outrageous exploits entranced the media. Barnato was so impressed with the 3 litre that in 1925 he bought a majority shareholding in Bentley and became its chairman.

  Woolf Barnato was one of the great characters of the age and his daring exploits epitomized the postwar passions of the Roaring Twenties. He inherited a multi-million pound fortune at the age of just two, on the mysterious suicide of his father, Barney Barnato, the music hall entertainer turned South African mining king. Woolf was an early convert to the charms of the motor car and raced Bentleys to great acclaim. He was also an excellent cricketer; between 1928 and 1930, while he was Bentley’s chairman, he also kept wicket for Surrey County Cricket Club. Even away from the stumps, Barnato’s adventures rarely failed to hit the headlines. His most famous feat came in 1930 when he raced the Train Bleu and Flêche d’Or express trains from Cannes to London in his Bentley 6½ litre Speed Six – and won, beating the train by forty-five minutes.

  From 1925, thanks to Barnato’s vast injections of cash, Bentley’s cars got bigger and bigger – and their bonnets longer and longer, as they were redesigned to accommodate ever-larger engines. Bentley models progressed from the excellent 4½ litre of 1926 to the massive 8 litre of 1930. Bentleys also became hugely successful on the racetrack. From 1927 until 1930 Bentley cars won the Le Mans 24-hour endurance race – part driven, from 1928, by the fearless Barnato himself. Nothing seemed to stand in the way of Bentley and Barnato, either on the track or on the road.

  However, while Bentley’s cars were more than able to cope with the racetrack challenges of Bugatti, Alfa Romeo and Mercedes, they were unable to survive the Great Depression of the early 1930s. The 8 litre was launched in 1930 as the most luxurious Bentley ever, capable of 100 mph. It was the largest production car ever made in Britain, and was designed to eclipse its contemporary rival, the massive Bugatti Royale (which boasted a vast, 15 litre engine and an endless bonnet), and to elevate Bentley to the position of the world’s supreme manufacturer of luxury cars. However, the Depression made it almost impossible to sell luxury behemoths such as the 8 litre and the Royale. Bentley only managed to sell sixty-three models before production was stopped. (Bentley had done relatively well: only three Bugatti Royales were sold. Even then, Ettore Bugatti famously refused to sell a Royale to the notorious King Zog of Albania, claiming that ‘the man’s table manners are beyond belief’.) Barnato himself lost a fortune; Bentley’s orders dried up and Bentley himself was promptly sacked by Barnato. In 1931 Bentley Motors was declared insolvent and was snapped up in secret by Rolls-Royce.1 Walter Bentley, humiliated by the company that bore his name – he was even asked to return his personal Bentley 8 litre – recovered from depression sufficiently to join Lagonda after they emerged from receivership in 1935. And unlike Rolls and Royce, Bentley lived until a ripe old age. He died in 1971, aged eightythree. Today, the rights to make Bentley cars are owned by the German giant Volkswagen.

  Bentley and Bugatti were not the only luxurious marques to find illusory prosperity in the interwar years. In 1898 a Spanish artillery captain, Emilio de la Cuadra, began making electric cars in Barcelona. Four years later Swiss engineer Marc Birkigt joined him to form Fábrica Hispano-Suiza. By 1911 a second factory had been set up in France, and during the First World War both the French and Spanish sides of the firm gained an international reputation for building excellent aircraft engines. Birkigt, later hailed as the Henry Royce of Spain, cleverly capitalized on this military fame, introducing a stork mascot on to the front of the bonnet of each Hispano-Suiza car, in imitation of Rolls-Royce’s Spirit of Ecstasy and derived from the Alsatian stork emblem adopted by French fighter ace Georges Guynemer, who himself was an enthusiastic Hispano-Suiza customer.

  In the immediate postwar years, Birkigt swiftly stole a march on his arch-rivals at Rolls-Royce. Where Rolls-Royces were boxy and staid, Hispano-Suizas were long and slender, and far more powerful. Birkigt’s H6 of 1919, with a six-cylinder engine based on his successful wartime V-8, eclipsed the Crewe car maker’s already legendary but now somewhat elderly Silver Ghost, and prompted Rolls to adopt, under licence, a number of Hispano-Suiza’s patented features, such as power brakes.

  By 1930 the name of Hispano-Suiza was, like Rolls-Royce and Bentley, synonymous with quality and power. King Alfonso XIII of Spain was a regular customer until his deposition in 1931. The J12 of 1933 possessed a massive 9.4 litre V-12 engine under its endless bonnet and was a favourite with heads of state around the world, while the Type 68 of 1933 weighed a massive two tons. Moreover, unlike Bentley, Hispano-Suiza managed to survive the Depression years of the early 1930s. However, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 saw the firm abandon car manufacture to return to aircraft engines. Birkigt himself fled to France, but refused to collaborate with the Nazis after 1940 and returned to Spain. There he worked on Hispano-Suiza aircraft engines with the disgraced French car maker Émile Dewoitine (who faced imprisonment for collaboration if he returned to France), until his death in 1953. Hispano-Suiza’s French arm continued to produce engines for German aircraft during the Second World War, with the result that the name was considered too tarnished to resurrect after 1945. Nor did its Spanish parent ever recommence car production; instead, its factory was used as a base for General Franco’s new state-owned auto conglomerate, the ancestor of Seat.

  By the time Birkigt escaped from Franco’s Nationalist Spain to seek refuge in France, many of his fellow automotive pioneers were dead or forgotten. However, the cars they had created had, in the space of just forty years, completely transformed the developed world. From Benz to Birkigt, the inspired engineers and businessmen who had developed the automobile into the principal mode of human transport during the first decades of the twentieth century had succeeded in altering the global landscape beyond all recognition. It was a world the young Gottlieb Daimler or Billy Durant could only dream of in 1900. And it was an environment that, thanks to the car, was still changing with frightening speed.

  1 In 1939 Billy Rootes even chatted enthusiastically to Hitler, Göring and Goebbels at the Berlin Motor Show about bringing his cars to Germany, seemingly oblivious to the fact that war was imminent in Europe.

  1 In September 1915 the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, Reginald McKenna, introduced a 33¾ per cent duty on imported cars at the urging of the nation’s hard-pressed motor manufacturers, who felt they were being swamped by wartime imports from France and, increasingly, from neutral America. The McKenna duties remained in force long after the end of the war and were only finally removed in 1956.

  1 Austin himself believed that the breakthrough in the upscale market came when Cambridge University’s vice chancellor bought an Austin Seven as his second car, thus giving the model a prestigious social cachet overnight.

  1 Lord Austin himself died of a heart attack in May 1941.

  1
The Oxford Mail called it ‘The Oxford Motor Palace’.

  1 The Model T was first imported into Britain in 1909, and was assembled from imported parts at Trafford Park in Manchester from 1911.

  1 Largely thanks to Morris and his principal British rival, Austin, Britain had in 1932 overtaken France as the largest car manufacturing nation outside the USA, an accolade it held on to until 1955.

  1 In fact, it was not until 1926 that Citroën began to assemble cars in Slough.

  2 In 2011 his relatively modest home of Nuffield Place passed into the hands of the National Trust.

  1 Sadly, Fiat’s failure to update the plant meant that after 1945 it fell behind its competitors, and it was demolished in 1982.

  1 The origin of the eccentric Tudor name is mysterious; one suggestion is that it derived from the English term ‘twodoor’, butŠkoda was soon applying it to four-door cars, too.

  1 The addition of the diaeresis, changing ‘Citroen’ to ‘Citroën’, came after the family moved from Amsterdam to Paris in 1873.

  2 Swinton himself was made a director of Citroën in 1926, the year in which the firm built its British factory in Slough.

  1 Lefèbvre had not enjoyed working for the autocratic Louis Renault, and on arriving at Citroën gleefully remarked that he had evidently moved from an empire to a republic.

  1 Rolls’s agents had posed as the British Equitable Central Trust so as not to inflate the firm’s price or to alert rival bidders Napier.

  3

  The Big Three

  However successful and important were the European motor magnates of the interwar decades, by 1939 even William Morris and Louis Renault would have admitted that they stood in the shadow of the Big Three of Detroit. The Americans who had forged the industrial giants of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler had not only come to dominate motor manufacture in the US, but had irrevocably changed the face of the whole world.