Classic Jaguar XK E-Book

Brian Laban

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 413

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

There have been other generations of Jaguar XK since, but the definitive incarnation is the family of 6-cylinder sports cars that stretch from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, from XK120 to the E-Type. On road, on track and on rally stage, they built the foundations of Jaguar's sporty image and giant-killing reputation, not to mention its commercial roots - especially in America. By any definition, the 6-cylinder XKs are at the heart of everything that Jaguar grew into. This is the complete story of the whole 6-cylinder XK generation, the circumstances, the people and the events that created it and made it a sports car legend - and guaranteed that forever after, in Jaguar's vocabulary, XK would always mean 'sports car'.

Leseprobe

CLASSIC

JAGUAR XK

The 6-Cylinder Cars, 1948–1970

Brian Laban

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2016 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2016

© Brian Laban 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 194 9

Disclaimer

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace and credit illustration copyright holders. If you own the copyright to an image appearing in this book and have not been credited, please contact the publisher, who will be pleased to add a credit in any future edition.

Dedication

For Simon, Helen, and Timo

CONTENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER 1FRESH AIR AND FUN – FROM BLACKPOOL TO BROWNS LANE

CHAPTER 2FROM THE ROOFTOPS

CHAPTER 3INTO PRODUCTION: THE FIRST XK CARS

CHAPTER 4THE SPORTING LIFE

CHAPTER 5THE PRODUCTION RACERS

CHAPTER 6THE LE MANS ADVENTURE

CHAPTER 7PRODUCTION EVOLUTION

CHAPTER 8ANOTHER GAME CHANGER

CHAPTER 9THE E-TYPE EVOLVES

CHAPTER 10THE E-TYPE IN COMPETITION

CHAPTER 11THE RACING COUSINS

CHAPTER 12OWNING, DRIVING – AND IMITATING

Index

INTRODUCTION

In Jaguar’s model-naming vocabulary, the two simple letters ‘XK’ have always stood for ‘sports car’; and, virtually from the birth of Jaguar as a marque in its own right in 1945, the company has used sporty cars to push both its technology and its popular image.

The company had started as the Swallow Sidecar Company before moving on to four wheels and eventually emerging as Jaguar. It survived World War II, but with difficult connotations; its former name, SS Cars, was abandoned and Jaguar was elevated from a model name to become the new marque identity. What did not change, though, was the essentially sporty character that had underpinned the company since it was created in the early 1920s by William Lyons.

Jaguar was always proud to acknowledge the Coventry connection, at the heart of the British motor industry.

The beginnings were modest, but revealing. Lyons’ first creations, in partnership with William Walmsley in the northern seaside town of Blackpool, were lightweight aluminium motorcycle sidecars, and, from the first, the emphasis was on style and performance.

That direction continued when the Swallow Sidecar Company progressed from three wheels to four in 1927, with specially bodied versions of several small, affordable cars including the Austin Seven and Morris Cowley. The company grew steadily and in 1931 introduced the first car on its own purpose-built chassis, the Standard 16hppowered SS1, soon followed by the smaller SS11. Both had two key characteristics: they were very sporty and very aggressively priced. And both those characteristics would be equally evident when SS evolved into Jaguar and Jaguar created the first XK.

THE MAN BEHIND THE MARQUE

Through all of this, the catalyst was William (later Sir William) Lyons himself, a shrewd businessman surrounded by a team of exceptionally talented engineers that he had built before, during and after the war. Having resumed production in 1945 with revitalized pre-war models, Lyons wasted no time at all in formulating his plans for the immediate future, and they were all based around an all-new engine that Lyons and his engineering team had conceived during the later years of the war – an engine designated ‘XK’.

It was a technically advanced 6-cylinder engine that would be versatile enough in various versions to power a huge range of cars and was destined for an extraordinarily long production life. But its first incarnation on the road was in the sensational XK120 sports car, star of the 1948 London Motor Show. In classic Lyons’ tradition, it offered a blend of exceptional performance and show-stopping looks at a price that other manufacturers simply could not approach. The XK story had begun.

Sir William Lyons, impeccably dressed as ever, with the Series 2 E-Type outside his long-time home, Wappenbury Hall.

It continues to this day, into a current generation of V8-powered XKs, but this is the story of the classic original 6-cylinder generation, which lasted until 1970 for the 6-cylinder E-Type; the XK engine itself was to last for another decade and a half.

BEATING THE WORLD

On the way, the XK evolved from XK120 through XK140 and XK150 to the XK-E, E-Type, during which time both Jaguar’s own cars and other specialist cars powered by Jaguar’s XK engines became a dominant force in world motor sport – crowned during the 1950s by five wins in the world’s greatest endurance race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and upheld until the dawn of the 1970s, all the way to the final 6-cylinder E-Types.

The XK engine became the lifeblood of many specialist sports car makers, but also had a parallel life powering iconic military vehicles like the Scorpion light tank and the Samaritan armoured ambulance – with the Scimitar evolution doing duty all the way into Gulf War days. It made a fleeting appearance in Grand Prix racing and even became a force to be reckoned with racing on water, where it broke many powerboat speed records in the 1950s.

When Lyons and his team conceived the engine that underpinned all these varied achievements, during nighttime fire-watching duties in World War II, it is highly unlikely that they could have dreamt of it still being effective in both wartime and peacetime roles thirty years and more into the future. Or even, perhaps, of its more conventional production role in underpinning the whole growth of Jaguar as a prestige manufacturer, based on its own three defining words – ‘Grace, Pace and Space’. This is the story of how it happened.

CHAPTER ONE

FRESH AIR AND FUN – FROM BLACKPOOL TO BROWNS LANE

Blackpool is the archetypal British seaside resort, on Lancashire’s Irish Sea coast, between Liverpool and the Lake District. It is known around the world for its seven miles of flat sands, its Tower (closely modelled on M Eiffel’s construction in Paris, but a little smaller), its Pleasure Beach funfairs, its traditional piers, popular shows, ‘Golden Mile’ of amusement arcades and its Promenade tramcars. It is famous, too, for its annual festive Illuminations, devised to stretch Blackpool’s summer season (founded on the annual ‘Wakes Weeks’ holidays of neighbouring industrial towns brought in by the railway) into winter. And the opening lines of the famous monologue ‘Albert and the Lion’, written by Marriott Edgar and delivered by music-hall great Stanley Holloway, tell us that: ‘there’s a famous seaside place called Blackpool, which is noted for fresh air and fun …’.

It is generally less noted as the birthplace of what eventually became Jaguar Cars, but ultimately, Black-pool is where this story starts, with the birth of Jaguar’s founder and creator of the XK generation, William Lyons, on 4 September 1901.

Blackpool in the early years of the twentieth century, much as it would have been when William Lyons was growing up there.

In 1925, William Lyons was in his early twenties and the Swallow Sidecar Company was already starting to grow out of its original premises, but was still firmly rooted in Blackpool.

Lyons was born less than a year after Queen Victoria died, exactly a year after the end of the Boer War and just days before US President William McKinley was assassinated. It was a time of scientific exploration and the year when Marconi first sent wireless messages across the Atlantic. Lyons was also born into a world where the motor vehicle was still in its infancy and still exciting. It was the same year that Gottlieb Daimler built his first Mercedes car, named after Mercédès, the daughter of Emil Jellinek, Consul-General of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Nice, and the year when Rudolf Diesel revealed his first engine to the public.

Blackpool was already a teeming holiday resort for Britain’s northern working classes, but was yet to become the brash entertainment centre it is today. In 1901, Blackpool had a ‘permanent’ population of around 47,000, but the annual tourist influx, soaring since the opening of the railway in 1846 and further boosted by the introduction of holidays-with-pay for the working classes, already ran into the low millions.

It was the entertainment business that brought William Lyons’ father, also William, across the sea from his native Ireland to Blackpool in the 1890s, with a travelling orchestra. He liked it enough to stay on and in 1894 he married a local girl, Mary Jane Barford, more usually known to friends as Minnie. They settled in the heart of Blackpool and in July 1895 they had their first child, a daughter, Carol – six years before William junior arrived.

RELUCTANT SCHOLAR – KEEN MOTOR CYCLIST

William senior continued to perform and now to compose music. William and Minnie also opened a fairly substantial showroom and workshop selling and repairing pianos, as well as selling sheet music – both of which were considerable business enterprises around the turn of the twentieth century. It made them quite comfortably off and after an undistinguished start to his education at nearby Poulton-Le-Fylde Grammar School, young William was sent to the privately run and well-regarded Arnold House school In Blackpool itself. There were early signs, too, that young William was already interested in technology; when he won a school competition, he chose as his book prize The History of Modern Science and Engineering. But as World War I superimposed itself over his schooling, Lyons never did grow into much of a scholar, although he did become an enthusiastic and quite promising runner.

Another big passion, though, was for bicycles and, even before he was old enough to ride them, for motor cycles – the boy spending long hours learning how to service and rebuild machines owned by various older friends. William junior, of course, was too young to be directly involved in World War I and his father was effectively too old, while Blackpool suffered only peripherally, insofar as, like virtually every town in Britain, it lost tragically large numbers of young men, many of them very little older than William himself. But one of the Blackpool boys who came back sold William Lyons his first motor cycle, a 1911 Triumph, which he refurbished, ‘improved’ and would sell for a profit after the war ended.

Lyons’ old school, Arnold House, where he admired the headmaster, Mr Pennington, but did not really like academic subjects.

Before that, in 1917, Lyons finished school, barely scraping the qualification for an apprenticeship with Vickers Naval Shipyard in Barrow-on-Furness, a little further up the coast. But already having a strong interest in cars, he apparently changed his mind about joining Vickers and chose instead to start a different apprenticeship – in the motor industry. That was with Crossley Motors in Manchester, which had grown quite large during the war, building staff cars, ambulances, armoured cars and tenders for the military, as well as aero engines under licence. Lyons should also have studied engineering at Manchester Technical College; but again, he had an early change of mind. He finally moved back to Blackpool to take up a job with Brown & Mallalieu, distributors of the sporty Sunbeam motor cycle in the town.

Yet again, it did not last long and he soon reverted to dealing in motor cycles on his own account, while occasionally helping out with the family music business – where possible repairing pianos, which was the part he found most bearable. He also used to compete in the motor cycle races and speed trials regularly held on the huge expanses of the Blackpool and neighbouring Morecambe sands and in hill climbs on the nearby moors. By the time he was twenty, he had probably owned twenty different motor cycles, including some fairly exotic ones, but he became particularly fond of his very sporty Harley-Davidson.

By now, the family lived in King Edward Avenue, in a large red-brick corner house just one road back from the Queen’s Promenade and Blackpool’s North Shore – latterly an ordinary, middle-class family house rather than a boarding house or small hotel as thousands of others in the archetypal seaside resort already were, or were to become over the years. And this was genteel residential Blackpool, not brash commercial Blackpool, where the pace was a bit more leisurely and the typical residents somewhat more refined.

In the summer of 1921, the Lyons family gained new neighbours, as a prosperous coal merchant called Thomas Matley Walmsley moved into the house on the opposite corner of the crossroads of King Edward Avenue and Holmfield Road. And there, in the double garage of another fairly unremarkable house in this quiet backwater, Walmsley’s son William resumed the small business he had started in Stockport after he had served in the Cheshire Yeomanry during World War I and before the family’s move to Blackpool – making sporting motor cycle sidecars, on Watsonian chassis, which he called Swallows.

Even before the sidecar adventure, motor cycles and motor cycle competitions were a passion for Lyons; this Harley-Davidson was one of his early favourites.

THE BUSINESS BEGINS – AND GROWS

Walmsley would become successful, but it was Lyons who would become famous. It was an inevitable friendship (although in later years they drifted far apart over their business styles) and it was not long before Lyons placed his order with Walmsley for a Swallow sidecar. Then, not long after that, the two young men went into partnership together – Walmsley (who had officially registered the innovative design of his sidecar in April 1921, but who thus far had been happy to build it more or less on a one by one basis) was mainly responsible for the manufacturing side, while his possibly more far-sighted new neighbour and friend Lyons took on enthusiastically developing and promoting the growing business.

The founding partners: William Walmsley on the bike, Lyons in the stylish Swallow sidecar, an early ‘octagonal’ model.

Its early progress is charted in Blackpool’s local street and commercial directories from the 1920s, which record the first steps in the long road from the seaside town to Browns Lane in the heart of Britain’s motor manufacturing industry. The three-wheel operation quickly outgrew the Walmsley family’s domestic garage and in 1922 Thomas Walmsley and William Lyons senior agreed to guarantee an overdraft of £1,000 from Williams Deacons Bank to evolve their sons’ backstreet business into the Swallow Sidecar Company, also providing them with the funds to look for bigger premises, from which to expand. The first proper factory and the bank office that lent them the money both survived long after Lyons had moved on, the former just down the road from Blackpool’s football ground in Bloomfield Road, again just a stone’s throw from the Promenade, the Tower and the glitz of the Golden Mile.

Early insignia – the Swallow Sidecar wings.

In 1922, when a ‘Model 1 Coupé Sports de Luxe’ Swallow sidecar was listed at £28, the ground floor at Bloomfield Road was an electrical workshop and Swallow was able to take the upper two floors, with useful double doors that opened out into the street for delivery and despatch. The new company was also able to take on several production workers and even a young apprentice – starting a training tradition that continues in Jaguar to the present day.

During a visit for a magazine story in the early 1990s, 5 Bloomfield Road was still easily recognizable beneath beige paint and stucco as the same three-storey building; but rather than the sidecar building operation, it now housed the Continental Bedding Company’s Bedding and Textile Warehouse, ‘suppliers of bedding and textiles to the hotel and guest house trade – all at discount prices’. Remarkably, the trade name on the board outside was now Swallow Co-ordinate Bedlinens, which may or may not have been a complete coincidence. And opposite the new Bloomfield Road works in 1922 were the narrow confines of John Street and Moon Avenue, where Swallow took additional space for storage.

It was not long before the Swallow Sidecar Company had moved on from building one-off models for individual customers to a fairly extensive catalogue of chassis and body types for a growing range of machines.

A VERY INFLUENTIAL JUNIOR PARTNER

In terms of years, Lyons was the junior partner, ten years younger than Walmsley; he was not even able to sign official papers for the company until after his twenty-first birthday in September 1922, when the agreement set up a partnership under the name Walmsley and Lyons, to carry on ‘the trade or business of Body Manufacturers for Motor Sidecars …’. But in terms of business acumen, Lyons was already the real driving force, while Walmsley was essentially always the builder, never the businessman. So it was Lyons who encouraged the company to start advertising its products and Lyons who seized the opportunity to take a stand at the 1923 Motor Cycle Show when another exhibitor pulled out just before the Show opened.

Yet it was by no means a one-sided enterprise. Rather, it became a successful blend of skills and in 1926 the rapidly growing manufacturing operation moved to new premises again, further along the North Shore, to Cocker Street, into what had formerly been a large garage premises – a long, two-storey building with large doors and lots of windows, large enough in its former life to accommodate lorries and buses. Cocker Street was also close to Blackpool’s main-line railway station, which allowed sidecars to be shipped out and car chassis to be brought in, so the new base was perfect for its new purpose.

With that move came a new name and a further broadening of ambition, as the business was renamed as the Swallow Sidecar and Coachbuilding Company. The company’s first overseas agent and distributor, motor cycle enthusiast Emil Frey of Zürich, Switzerland, was appointed. From here, there would no looking back in the evolution towards Jaguar.

Taking a stand at the Olympia Motor Cycle Show after another exhibitor dropped out was a timely piece of opportunism for Swallow and brought the first flood of orders.

The first move, to Cocker Street in Blackpool in 1926, was a clear sign that the company was growing fast and that Lyons in particular had serious long-term ambitions.

A growing workforce at Cocker Street, but still essentially a hand-building operation.

THE FIRST FOUR-WHEELERS

In 1927, Swallow rebodied an Austin Seven that Lyons already owned, with a hand-formed aluminium alloy body over an ash frame and a removable hard top. Lyons’ old employers Brown and Mallalieu were appointed to sell the car in the Blackpool area, while a Birmingham dealership, P.J. Evans Ltd, agreed to distribute the car in the Midlands, quickly placing an unexpectedly large order for fifty examples. But even that paled when Lyons entered another agreement with Henlys, of London, which ordered 500 Austin Swallows and became exclusive distributors for southern England, retaining strong Jaguar links to this day.

An early Henlys press advertisement from The Autocar announced them as ‘SOLE SWALLOW DISTRIBUTORS FOR SOUTHERN ENGLAND {EXCEPT KENT}’, and showed an early Swallow-bodied Morris Cowley. The heading ran ‘when you see a SWALLOW BODY you may look for SUPER SPEED’. And the text promised: ‘There is something more than a touch of the thoroughbred in the Swallow bodied car. Performance lives up to appearance; an inspection and trial will convince you, the Swallow Morris or Austin is literally A NEW MODEL giving big car comfort and elegance. See them at Henlys today.’

The prices listed ranged from £175 for the Swallow Austin ‘with cape hood only’ (£220 for the equivalent Swallow Morris), to £235 for the Swallow Morris ‘with cape hood and interchangeable coupé saloon head’ (or £190 for the similarly equipped Swallow Austin).

In May 1927, Lyons and Walmsley, having shown off the Austin Swallow, then quickly moved on to building other specially bodied cars, mainly based on Morris Cowley, Clyno, Alvis and later Fiat, Wolseley and Standard chassis. But their success was the beginning of the end of the Black-pool chapter; if the company was to keep growing, as Lyons was absolutely determined that it would, it had to move towards the motor industry heartland.

The next big step towards Jaguar – from two wheels to four with the early Austin Swallows.

Swallow’s future was moulded early on by the company’s relationship with distributor Henlys, which was linked to the business almost from the start and is still connected today.

From the diminutive Austin Seven-based Swallows, the company soon began to offer its own, stylish versions of bigger, more powerful cars, such as this Standard. And the relationship with Standard would soon give SS a generation of sporting engines.

GROWING UP

So Swallow left Cocker Street in November 1928, along with about three-quarters of its workforce of fifty. The company’s production target was already up to around fifty cars a week, including bigger cars on bigger chassis; and Cocker Street, even with its sign prominently boasting ‘Manufacturers of sidecars and light car bodies – coach painters and trimmers’, simply could not cope with that volume of business. With the bulk of bought-in components coming from motor industry suppliers in the Midlands and the majority of sales going through Henlys in the south, there was also the question of transport costs, which were anathema to the extremely cost-conscious Lyons.

The road from Blackpool to Browns Lane started with the move from Cocker Street to Coventry, into to a former munitions factory on an industrial estate in the Foleshill district called Whitmore Park – from where the company would grow to occupy sites all around Coventry, with Browns Lane at the heart of the operation.

In 1930, the company became simply the Swallow Coachbuilding Company and although sidecar manufacture continued to 1939, co-founder Walmsley left in 1935 to join caravan builders, the Airlite Trailer Company. Sadly, as time had gone on, Lyons and Walmsley had grown a long way apart, both socially and in terms of business ambition. In general, Walmsley was happy to drift along, while Lyons always needed to progress. When the partnership formally ended in 1934, it irked Lyons that Walmsley was entitled to half the equity. After that, they had little contact; when Walmsley died in 1960, Lyons did not even go to his funeral, although he did send someone to represent the company. In the meantime, in October 1933, the car-building part of Swallow had been given its own identity as SS Cars Ltd. And in 1935 the name ‘Jaguar’ appeared for the first time, on the 2.7-litre overhead-valve SS100 – after which all subsequent SS models had the Jaguar suffix, until, in a major reorganization after World War II in March 1945, the company became Jaguar Cars Ltd.

By the 1930s, the company had a new identity as SS Cars, a firmly established sporty character and the first of its truly iconic sports cars, the SS100.

Even before World War II began, SS also had a new model name – Jaguar.

What was already well established was Lyons’ core philosophy, ‘give the people what they want, and give it to them with style’. It had already taken him from a back-street garage in Blackpool to being a substantial figure in the British motor industry. With the advent of Jaguar it would now take him (or he would take it) not just to commercial success, but also to international race and rally wins and to a worldwide reputation for delivering luxury, performance and style at prices that no rival could even approach.

By 1945, Lyons’ long-term plans for the future were already well advanced, underpinned by a new engine conceived during the (literally) dark hours of the recent war.

WILLIAM LYONS – THE MAN

To most people, even those who knew him quite well, William Lyons (Sir William after 1956) was an enigma. Almost every aspect of his personality could be seen from more than one viewpoint. He was always driven by business decisions first, but was obsessive about style – and above all it was his unerring eye that defined everything he ever offered for sale, from the first sidecars, through the Swallow and SS cars, to Jaguar and by no means least, the XKs.

He was single-minded, yet deeply concerned with how his work was perceived by the outside world (and maybe even by how he was seen personally, as he was never less than impeccably and usually quite formally dressed, even at motor racing circuits). He was highly committed to winning, but only to winning fairly. And he was equally committed to honesty in his personal and business relationships, although few people really felt they got close to him.

He had drafted his autobiography with some years to spare before he died in 1985, aged eighty-four, but it was never published, although there is still a massive amount of personal information and insight contained within the company archives, in his own writings and from family and friends. There are also many, many books that (rightly) look closely at Sir William as the key to the Jaguar story. Most of all, though, there is the brilliant character study by Phillip Porter and Paul Skilleter (Sir William Lyons - The Official Biography; Haynes Publishing, 2001) published to celebrate the centenary of Sir William’s birth.

He was never formally trained as an engineer (nor, come to that, as an artist), but he had an instinct for thinking like one and especially for recognizing ways to do things better. He was particularly insistent on quality control and was never one to gloss over a problem, even when he had to work hard to get others to aspire to his own standards. For most of his working life, he had issues with labour relations, especially union involvement, which occasionally even threatened the survival of his business. However, he would always face the people involved directly and almost always work out a mutually acceptable solution – although sometimes he felt betrayed when others failed to deliver their side of the agreement. Similarly, both on behalf of his own company and on behalf of the whole industry, he regularly lobbied Governments of the day for changes, in particular to the tax regime.

The path to Jaguar and the XKs opened up because at the very beginning, in Blackpool in the early 1920s, young William Lyons was far more ambitious than the slightly older William Walmsley. But Lyons was not driven by money alone, as could be seen in later years when he would forgo personal bonuses if they could be better used by the business or others.

In fact, managing what money was available was one of his greatest talents: striking the best deals for materials, components and labour; being patient enough only to spend what was needed when the time was right; being acutely aware of any expenditure that could be avoided without affecting the quality of the product; and being very careful about avoidable wastage. Speaking in 2004, former test and development driver Norman Dewis gave an affectionate personal view of that side of Sir William’s character (to employees, universally referred to as ‘The Old Man’): ‘The Old Man’, Dewis says, ‘was a very strict task master. Very serious, very strait-laced. Never called anyone by their first name. He was a great boss, but he was very tight with money, as he had to be because it was his company. He would go through the factory at night and pick up nuts, bolts and washers from the factory floor and show them to the foreman the next day. “This is all waste”, he’d say.’

Even the way Lyons used motor sport to his own ends was an illustration of that philosophy. To Lyons, competition was both a cost-effective way to develop new ideas, as well as a way to generate huge publicity benefits beyond anything he could afford to pay for through direct advertising. And all those philosophies underpinned the next great Jaguar characteristic after style and performance – their astonishingly low prices.

All of this depended upon Lyons being a good judge of other people’s abilities, combined with a willingness to delegate even though this own personality demanded that he should be in control of every tiny detail – in the early days, he would oversee every piece of paper. But just as he got the most out of every purchase and production decision, he got the most out of those he entrusted with responsibilities, from shop floor to Board. He was as willing to praise as he was to criticize, and in return he inspired the trust and loyalty of his staff.

By the end of the 1920s, the fast-growing company had moved from Blackpool to the first of a series of sites in and around Coventry and Lyons was always proud to receive royal visitors.

For all his issues with the unions (and on occasion with the Government), he was proud to be able to give back to the industry, especially in roles such as President of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, and the Motor Industry Research Association. He was proudest of all of his knighthood in 1956, for services to the motor industry.

Lyons was also, of course, a family man, who protected his private life quite fiercely, while clearly enjoying it to the full – with a small but close circle of friends, almost all having no connection with his working life. He was married to Greta (née Brown) for sixty-one years and had two daughters, Pat and Mary, and a son, John Michael. But again, he had an almost formal, almost businesslike relationship with his children – loving though it obviously was. They travelled extensively for holidays and in addition to home at Wappenbury Hall, they had a wonderful seaside retreat at Salcombe on the Devon coast. The biggest tragedy of Lyons’ family life was the death of his son John Michael in a road accident in France just days before the doubly tragic 1955 Le Mans race – at a time when John was almost certainly being groomed eventually to take over the company when his father retired.

Ultimately, Lyons was also pragmatic. Having fiercely defended Jaguar’s independence, often against seemingly impossible odds, when a time finally came that it served the best interests of the company, he accepted it being absorbed into the British Motor Corporation, while retaining sufficient influence to keep the Jaguar spirit alive – at least for his own lifetime. There have been dark days since where Jaguar almost lost its way, but today the marque is strong again, for all the reasons that Lyons fostered. In his own words, ‘Success comes from you, from believing in what you are doing. All an individual can do is to know what he wants, have a good enough idea how to get it, and then build up a team of first-class people to do it, and in Jaguar, that has certainly been achieved …’

CHAPTER TWO

FROM THE ROOFTOPS

When World War II ended in 1945, the British motor industry, which had largely been turned over to war work for the past five or six years, was faced with either rebuilding or going out of business. The Government’s maxim at the time was ‘export or die’, a shorthand way of saying that unless a company’s products were earning badly needed foreign currency – especially dollars – there would be no material supplies to build more. Stuck with old designs, old machinery and, worst of all, old thinking, even some of the firms that had survived the war relatively unscathed were headed for the wall. Now, it would be the ones that could adapt most quickly and effectively that would be most likely to survive.

William Lyons had already become better than most at such adapting. From the Swallow sidecar days in the early 1920s, through building his special bodies for otherwise mundane cars, to being a car maker in his own right with the classically sporting SS saloons and roadsters of the immediate pre-war period, his whole career had been based on it.

Jaguar could generally be relied upon to grab Motor Show headlines.

A NAME WITHOUT BAGGAGE

In March 1945, in that canny move to distance itself from unfortunate wartime connotations, the company changed its name to Jaguar – an identity it had already used as a model name for some ten years before the difficulties. But that was only the first change: the next big move would dispense with the long-serving but now badly outdated Standard-based engine range and replace it with something not only thoroughly modern, but also uniquely exotic for a full-scale production run. Jaguar was about to introduce a new engine, a twin overhead camshaft, in-line 6-cylinder design that would become the foundation stone for all Jaguar’s post-war success. It was called the XK and went on to become the heart of every XK car model over the next five decades.

A VERY ENDURING DESIGN

In brief, the 6-cylinder twin-cam XK engine was introduced officially in 1948 in the supposedly small production-run XK120 sports car. It was not totally supplanted until the next generation AJ6 range of twin-cam sixes in 1985 – although even then it stayed in very limited production for some time in 4.2-litre form in the big Daimler limousine.

SS was a perfectly viable name for both company and car before the war, but could not realistically survive the negative connotations after it.

As described in detail in later chapters, the XK developed through four main capacities and 2.4, 3.4, 3.8 and 4.2 came to be used almost as model numbers for Jaguar cars. It went through saloons and sports cars to iconic sports racing cars, built both by Jaguar and by many smaller, specialist British marques. In the C- and D-Types, which were XKs in every respect, the XK engine won Le Mans five times and dominated saloon car racing in the mid-1950s and early 1960s. Yet in production guise it was considered to be a refined and untemperamental engine, with outstanding character and huge development potential.

Over the years, its power output would vary from 160bhp in the original 3.4, through as little as 112bhp in the first cost-sensitive 2.4s, to as much as 265bhp for either a 3.8 or a 4.2 in E-Type trim. For racing, the 3.8 with big valve head and mechanical injection could produce more than 300bhp on a good day – and it had a lot of good days.

In the end, time inevitably did catch up with the XK engine, signalling the end of this first generation of XK cars, although it took global outside influences to do it. It lost too much power going ‘clean’ for burgeoning 1970s emissions requirements; and, with its iron block, it was really too heavy for newer, more fuel-efficient generations. Jaguar, of course, tried various developments to extend its life even further, including 4-valve cylinder heads, but, once finances and internal politics allowed, they were quick to replace it with the AJ6 – another twin-cam six with possibly the hardest act to follow in the history of the industry.

IN THE BEGINNING

So that was how it came to an end, but the XK engine story began during what were dark days indeed for Britain and for most of the world. With impressive optimism, the engine that would carry the Jaguar name and the XK badge through so many decades was planned during some of the hardest days of the war, by William Lyons himself, his chief engineer Bill Heynes, chief designer Claude Baily and chief experimental engineer Walter Hassan (with important additional contributions from consultant engineer Dick Oats and freelance cylinder-head wizard Harry Weslake).

Three of the prime movers behind the XK engine: wartime fire-watch colleagues Walter Hassan, Bill Heynes and Harry Mundy.

The old regime: the pre-XK Standard-based engine, with overhead-valve conversion by Harry Weslake – a fine engine, but overdue for replacement.

Heynes had joined the company (while it was still SS) in April 1935, poached by Lyons from Humber, where he had started, aged nineteen, in 1923 as an apprentice (and where he had stayed for rather longer than Lyons had stuck it out with either Vickers or Crossley in his own youth). Heynes was the first chief engineer that SS had ever had. Before he arrived, the company had not even had an engineering department as such, but had relied entirely on proprietary engines, suitably modified, as in Weslake’s very successful overhead-valve conversions on the Standard engines that were SS’s pre-war staple.

The next key recruit to SS’s new engineering department was Walter Hassan, brought in by Heynes as an urgently needed assistant just before the war began, but when the company was already expanding. Hassan had joined Bentley in 1920, aged fifteen, and was one of that then new company’s first employees. He joined SS late in 1938, went off to work on aero-engine carburettor development with Bristol as war broke out, returned to SS when the company was charged with developing a lightweight, parachutable Jeep-type vehicle, and proved instrumental in developing the XK engine. In 1950, Hassan would move to Coventry-Climax, where he developed their classic 1.5-litre Grand Prix racing engine – and when Jaguar bought the Coventry-Climax company in March 1963 Hassan found himself back in the fold, developing Jaguar’s V12 engine before his retirement in 1972.

Engine specialist Claude Baily, late of Anzani and Morris, also joined Lyons’ team early in the war and soon became Heynes’ chief designer.

During the war, most of Britain’s manufacturing industries switched to military production; Coventry played a huge part, which not surprisingly attracted heavy bombing.

WARTIME INTERLUDE – GERMAN INSPIRATION

Like much of the British motor industry, SS had made no cars during the war, instead making aircraft parts and repairing damaged aircraft sections. It was, however, still making military versions of the Swallow sidecar, but that was not enough to tax the new engineering department’s abilities. Instead, they planned ahead for the cars they would build once the war ended. To that end, Lyons, undeterred by the perilous circumstances, arranged that all key members of his talented engineering group would be on the same weekly fire-watching shift at the factory, signing on at 6pm each Sunday evening and regularly spending their overnight rooftop vigils discussing the possibilities of future cars and engines.

Bristol’s later version of Fritz Fiedler’s 6-cylinder BMW engine, with clever pushrod valve-gear, was one of the more advanced prewar engines that helped to inspire the XK design team’s early thinking.

They started with fairly open minds, even considering many basic configurations. They talked about in-line engines, about V8s and V12s, as well as other, less conventional, possibilities. Heynes drew up detailed comparisons between the existing 1½, 2½ and 3½-litre Standard-based SS engines, 4- and 6-cylinder Vauxhall engines, the 4½-litre Bentley and even the Railton straight-8. His list also included the 1775cc BMW 4-cylinder engine (with exactly the same bore and stroke dimensions as the Jaguar ‘1½’) and he freely admitted that BMW thinking had been a big influence in their discussions.

The brilliant pre-war BMW six that superseded the four was designed by Fritz Fiedler, born in Austria in 1899. Having designed 8- and 12-cylinder engines for Horch before that company became part of the Auto Union group, he joined BMW in 1932, as chief engineer, and one of his first projects was to create an improved 6-cylinder engine for BMW’s sportier saloons and sports cars. Starting from the earlier 4-cylinder design, he created an outstanding all-iron, in-line six with a single chain-driven camshaft operating vertical valves by a clever system of pushrods and rockers. With widely-spaced, linerless bores it had plenty of scope for capacity increases, and enough power to make it popular with other sporting car makers, including the English Frazer Nash company.

After the war, the boss of Frazer Nash manufacturers AFN, H.J. Aldington, having already gained the rights to the BMW engine and tooling as war reparations, helped to secure Fiedler’s relief from internment and brought him to England to work for Frazer Nash directly (and occasionally for Bristol, which also used the BMW engine in its sporty cars). Fiedler stayed in the UK until 1952, when he returned to BMW as chief engineer (and later Chairman) and continually improved his superb engine, especially with better metallurgy and cylinder-head design, until it was even more popular with the sporting set, including AC, which adopted it, in Bristol-spec, for the definitive AC Ace.

What clearly appealed to Lyons and his team about the pre-war Fiedler BMW engine was its exceptional smoothness and strong low-end torque from relatively small capacity, both criteria that Lyons insisted upon for his company’s new project.

DEFINING THE GOALS

Naturally enough, it was Lyons himself who laid down the key targets. He wanted his new engine to have around 160bhp, with good torque and a high degree of refinement, just like the BMW. It was originally intended first to be the basis of a 100mph (160km/h) saloon, which was a highly ambitious performance target for that kind of car at the time. The 160bhp target was in turn influenced by a pre-war Heynes-developed 3½-litre racing engine, which had given short-duration readings of 169bhp on the engine dynamometer – albeit running on methanol fuel and a 13.5:1 compression ratio.

A fairly advanced specification would be required to replicate that level of performance in a production engine and on normal ‘pump’ petrol (which was typically of barely 80-octane rating at the time, where 100-octane would eventually become a benchmark for anything approaching performance needs). Even the most powerful of SS’s Standard-based production engines had given only 125bhp, or just under 36bhp/litre. Lyons, also anticipating the possibility of post-war tax penalties on larger-capacity engines, and expecting petrol rationing to continue for some time to come, was broadly thinking in terms of a 2½-litre capacity for his new 6-cylinder design, with a 2-litre 4-cylinder option. That would have meant 64bhp/litre for the six, which was clearly a substantial jump from the aforementioned 36bhp. On that basis, he rejected the idea of staying with a pushrod-operated overhead-valve layout and committed instead to a twin-overhead-camshaft layout. That was still not common, even in thoroughbred sports cars, and it was not so long ago that it had been considered state of the art for Grand Prix racing, so it would certainly be a first for a mass-produced car.

To add one more criterion, Lyons, whose entire career, from the earliest sidecars through to the most recent SS sports cars, had been based on stylish designs, insisted that the new engine should also look the part – quite an unusual stipulation at the time.

FROM CONCEPT TO DEVELOPMENT

With the concept and basic detail established, physical development began as soon as Jaguar was free of war work. The company was in fair financial health and with a lot more (and more modern) machinery than when the war started. Unlike much of the rest of Coventry, Jaguar had even survived the worst of the Blitz; the sidecar operation was sold off in 1945 and car production resumed in July 1945, in the first instance entirely for export, guaranteeing the company reasonable raw material supplies under those prevailing Government edicts.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill visits the ruins of Coventry Cathedral after a particularly destructive period of the Blitz on the city in 1940, uncomfortably close to where Lyons’ fire-watch team spent their nights.

One of the main keys to making the XK engine work – the twin-overhead camshaft layout.

The nomenclature was also being established: in the engineering department, ‘X’ stood for Experimental and the proposed new layouts had started at XA, a 1360cc 4-cylinder proposal that, like everything else up to XE, failed to progress beyond the discussion stage. The first to get beyond the drawing board was XF – another 1360cc 4-cylinder design, with twin overhead camshafts and hemispherical combustion chambers, but quite a different engine in all other respects from the stillborn 1360 XA four.

This iteration was heavily influenced by Heynes’ earlier experience. His first engine design had been for a technical paper that he presented to the Institute of Mechanical Engineers while he was still an apprentice at Humber. That was not actually for a car engine, but for a 4-cylinder motor cycle engine – with the same headline features of twin overhead camshafts and hemispherical combustion chambers. As Heynes was at pains to point out in later notes on the XK engine, no reliance was placed on the use of anything completely new or untried; rather, the design team combined the best of already proven technology with utmost attention to detail. But the ‘exotic’ cylinder-head and valve-train design was crucial to reaching Lyons’ targets and in effect the whole engine was designed around it.

The reasoning was well-established: Heynes chose twin overhead camshafts, with one camshaft operating the inlet valves along one side of the centre line of the head and the other operating the exhaust valves on the other side, on either side of the spark plugs, principally because that allowed the inclined valve layout essential to the hemispherical combustion chamber shape. And that in turn was desirable because it allowed large valve areas to promote efficient gas flow.

He resisted adding more complication than strictly necessary, so chose direct-acting bucket tappets between cams and valves for better reliability and more positive control than rockers. For the same reasons, of cost and reliability, he chose chain drive rather than a train of gears to drive the camshafts from the crankshaft.

The XF, however, still had weaknesses, including two fundamental ones. First, its bore and stroke dimensions of 66.5 × 98.0mm would help with the traditional long-stroke bonus of flexibility, but at just 1360cc it could never have enough bottom-end torque for the kind of car that Lyons planned to go around it. It had an equally worrying weakness in that the cylinder block was not sufficiently strong, so the XF gave way to the XG iteration.

That was a very different engine, with a single side camshaft operating the valves, à la BMW, by crossover pushrods and rockers. Derived from the Standard 1776cc ‘1½-litre’ unit, with bore and stroke of 73.0 × 106.0mm, even at the time that must have been seen as a retrograde option. They got as far as building and extensively testing that engine, which only proved conclusively that it was too rough, too noisy and nowhere near powerful enough – again partly because its capacity simply was not big enough. It did, however, suggest that Harry Weslake’s hemispherical head shape worked and should be persevered with.

The XJ design that followed (not to be confused with the XJ designation for later cars, as opposed to engines) started life as a 2-litre, 80.5 × 98.0mm 1996cc 4-cylinder that again lacked torque, but which was otherwise considered to be a step in the right direction. A 6-cylinder, 83.0 × 98.0mm, 3182cc version of that XJ engine was planned and experimental versions built; but, yet again, while power was moving in the right direction, it lacked refinement and low-speed torque. Before it translated into production guise, the XJ was supplanted by a longer-stroke 3442cc 6-cylinder design. And that, of course, was designated XK.

The key elements: head casting, valves, followers, springs and camshafts – elegant simplicity that would last for the whole 6-cylinder XK generation. The hemispherical combustion chamber shape, for optimum fuel burning, is made possible by the inclined valve layout.

Each camshaft, inlet and exhaust, has six lobes for six valves, sits in four bearings and has a flange on the front end for the drive sprocket. The followers, between cam lobe and valve stem, run directly in the head, enclosing the valve springs.

The front end of the XK engine, showing the elegantly simple two-stage chain drive to the overhead camshafts, shown in plan on the right. In the original design, the valves were angled symmetrically around the central spark plug.

As for the XK engine proper, it went into limited production almost exactly as it had originally appeared, earmarked for a full-scale production launch in 1951, in a proposed new Jaguar saloon. But before that, a limited run in a new sports car was planned, ostensibly to give an opportunity to iron out any remaining detail problems before full-scale production start-up.

THE 4-CYLINDER XJ

While the 4-cylinder XJ design never came close to satisfying William Lyons’ criteria for his new production engine, it did have a brief spell in the spotlight in a completely different role, as the engine in an early postwar MG record-breaker, created and driven by one of the great names from the pre-war golden era of record-breaking, Lt Col Alfred Thomas Goldie Gardner.

Goldie, as he was universally known, was born in 1890, commissioned into the Royal Artillery during World War I and sustained severe leg injuries when his reconnaissance plane was shot down in 1917 – injuries from which he never totally recovered and which he further aggravated with a bad accident in the 1932 RAC Tourist Trophy in Ards.