In the years 2016 to 2019 I was a volunteer with the Donald Healey Motor Company archive project initiated by the Warwickshire County Record Office (WCRO) after it purchased the archive from Geoff Healey’s family. My main role was to conduct recorded interviews with former Healey employees and others who had strong connections with the Warwick based company.
One of the people who volunteered to be interviewed was Bill Price. Bill worked for the famous BMC Competitions Department based in the MG factory at Abingdon. With the 70th Anniversary of the founding of the Competitions Dept. being celebrated at the BMC & Leyland Show, Gaydon, on 13th July, I thought that it would be appropriate to publish a “tidied up” version of that interview now.
The reason why I use the term “tidied up” is that transcripts of the recorded interviews were made and are available on the “Warwickshire’s past unlocked” website. However, because transcripts have to be “verbatim” i.e. noting every “and”, “but”, “you know” and every cough etc., they are not easy to read; neither are they accompanied by any photographs. It is for those reasons that I embarked upon “tidying” the transcripts, to make them more readable and at the same time adding appropriate photos. I published five of those versions of the interviews in ‘Healey Bulletins‘ on the CSI website. This Bill Price interview follows a similar format.
Sadly, in checking some facts on the internet I discovered that Bill died in February this year. This makes publishing the interview at this time even more poignant, a fitting tribute to a life well lived.
I = Nick Maltby the interviewer BP = Bill Price the interviewee.
I: It’s Tuesday the 31st of January 2017. My name is Nick Maltby of the Warwickshire County Records Office, Donald Healey Motor Company Archive project. I am here at the home of Bill Price to capture, on tape, Bill’s memories of his time with the BMC and Leyland Competition Departments, particularly referencing Austin Healey cars.
So Bill, if you’d like to start off with your first job whether it was to do with motor cars or not. It would be particularly useful if you could remember the dates when events took place.
So, talk about your career, how you started off, how you got into BMC Motorsport Competitions Department and your interaction with the Austin Healey cars. Over to you.
BP: Yes, well my father was a garage proprietor at the seaside town of Clacton-on-Sea in Essex before the war, he was in the Territorial Army and, naturally, he was called up when the war started. The garage was requisitioned by the War Department, so he didn’t see much of it until 1946 when he was able to get the keys back. I recall going with my father into the garage at that time, I would have been around eleven years of age. I can remember going in, father looking at some cars that had been left within the garage premises in a separate part of the building, which I think was probably the showroom at the time. That was my first real sight of motor cars as such, in an interesting way.
My father owned a 1931 Alvis 12/50, that’s the first car I can remember him owning. Anyway to carry on a bit; when I left school I planned to join the Royal Navy and I applied to go to Dartmouth. There were seventy-five people for interview and only thirty-five got in, I was in the wrong half. I had already developed an interest in motor cars and did odd jobs in the garage for Dad. He was a small Ford retail dealer at the time and he looked at what Ford had got to offer in the way of apprenticeships. What he came up with was a two-year, student type of apprenticeship aimed at the sons of Ford dealers. (Rootes had something similar called a Pupillage. ed.)
However, I had a very good friend at school whose father was also a garage proprietor in Suffolk and he started an apprenticeship with BMC in Birmingham at their tractor and transmissions branch (Drews Lane, Washwood Heath – ended up as the Sherpa Van factory. ed.).
I: What year would that be?
BP: That would have been about 1952.
So, I decided I would go for a Nuffield apprenticeship and I ended up going to Morris Commercial Cars in Birmingham. It was a five-year apprenticeship and you had the option of doing a Production Engineering apprenticeship if you were interested in staying with manufacturing, or as a specialist on the car side. Unbeknown to me I had been assigned to the production side. However, I changed within the first year which was a training year in the apprentice school. I changed over to the car side, which meant that I did basic training, welding and machining and all the sort of things that apprentices do in a car factory. I started there in 1953 and went through to 1958.
Almost two-thirds of my apprenticeship was involved in being sent out to places like the Joseph Lucas Service Centre in the middle of Birmingham and working some months there learning about the electrics of the cars and rewiring and all that sort of thing. Also, learning about Simms Motor Units, injectors in particular, metering units, all to do with diesel engines. Then I went to S.U. carburettors which was one of the most interesting places to work, particularly in the Tuning Department. Then for six months in the Experimental Department which was very interesting.
Within sight of the Adderley Park, Birmingham, Morris Commercial factory, which was my base, was the main Morris distributor in Birmingham, Colmore Depot. The apprentices who were on the car side would end up there, I spent almost a year in their Commercial workshop. During this time, with the help of my father, I had bought a car, appropriately, a 1939 Morris Eight Series E. It was a super car, I know you always think your first car is a super car but I thought it was a very good car, four-speed gearbox and reasonable engine which carried on into the Morris Minor of course. I did lots of events with the Morris, with the Morris Commercial Apprentice Association, also the Austin Apprentice Association,…
I: When you say events, rallying?
BP: I mean, very small local events like Road Rallies, Trials and Driving Tests, and that sort of thing. I achieved a little bit of success with my Morris Eight and beat a few people with more powerful cars, which was quite pleasing.
I: Did you tune it at all? Did you have…
BP: Not exactly. I purchased an aluminium cylinder head for it because the Morris Z van, which was based on the Series E, had the same engine. The contract for the GPO or Royal Mail, said that the engines had to be fitted with an aluminium cylinder head so they could run on pool petrol which is low octane, the idea being to give them greater reliability and getting perhaps almost as much power running on the cheap petrol. I found one of those in an orchard somewhere and fitted it but I don’t suppose for one minute it made any difference to the performance. But that’s really about all I did to it, performance-wise.
I: Coming back to your career, you were working at Colmore Depot?
BP: Yes, the last year was in Colmore Depot. I was working in the Workshop with an experienced mechanic doing all sorts of things, you know, everything on the vehicle, really. Even going out on recovery work and that sort of thing. I knew that National Service was imminent, and my apprentice supervisor, a lovely bloke, Bert Bibb, said to all the chaps who were going to do National Service, “When you’ve got six months left to do in your National Service, drop me a line and tell me where you’d like to work in the Corporation, no guarantees, but I’ll have a look and see if there’s any vacancies”.
So, I went off to do National Service and signed up, because I lived in the East of England I had to go and sign on in Ipswich. I was actually born in Ipswich, my father was born in
Southampton but he worked in Ipswich. There were stories that used to circulate at the time, saying, it didn’t matter what trade you’d been in prior to National Service, you wouldn’t necessarily get into the same trade when you went into the Army, Navy or Airforce. In my experience that wasn’t true because they thought, well here’s a bloke that’s done a five-year apprenticeship in the car industry, we’ll have him in REME [Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers], so, that’s where I was posted. I did my basic training and my ambition was to get as far away from England as possible, at the Government’s expense. I had developed an interest in armoured vehicles anyway, so, myself and three others in the same training platoon applied for an armoured vehicle technician’s course. We were accepted and sent to Borden Camp in Hampshire. We did a twelve week armoured vehicle mechanic’s course, Craftsman A, I think it was called, on the Centurion tank and the Saracen armoured car. At the end of that course you were selected, well, you were given your posting, this was displayed on the Barrack’s noticeboard. Where do you think my posting was?
I: Australia?
BP: Close, Hong Kong! I ended up doing fifty-two days of my National Service at sea because they hadn’t started air trooping then, so, to get you to Hong Kong, it was by troop ship, through the
Suez Canal, twenty-six days, and then at the end of the posting, twenty six days back. I was attached to the First Royal Tank Regiment, which, at that time, were based in Hong Kong. When I got
there, they had Comet tanks, World War II Comet tanks, this is in 1958. Because the regiment had already been there for two years, it meant they had only got a year left, and we weren’t sure whether the regiment would bring the REME people back with them, because we were described as a Light Aid Detachment.
At the end of a year in Hong Kong, the Regiment is all set to come back, in the meantime fifty Centurion tanks had been delivered to replace the Comets. I knew I was getting nearer to the end of my apprenticeship and my National Service, so I dropped a line to Bert Bibb telling him that I’d like a job in the BMC Competitions Department. I thought to myself “I’ve got more chance of being struck by lightning”.
So, I waited for a letter to come back from Bert, this arrived during the return journey from Hong Kong. In his letter Bert informed me that a vacancy has occurred at the BMC Competitions Department and when can you go for an interview. As it happened, goodness knows why, when the Regiment got back to England, before it went to Germany which is where I was to spend the rest of my National Service, we had five weeks of what they call Transit Leave; so I had five weeks at home after a year in Hong Kong. My father ran me over to Abingdon where I had an interview with Marcus Chambers. The job on offer was Assistant to Marcus Chambers, in other words “the office boy”. It wasn’t a mechanics job, you see. Because I’ve never professed to be a professional mechanic whether I’ve been mistaken for one at times, only because of where I was, not what I could do. So it was interesting and unexpected to be offered this type of job. I always remember one of the questions he asked was “Have you got any interest in Motorsport, you weren’t going to be going out rallying at the weekends, would you?”, or words to that effect. I replied, well no, I hadn’t any ambitions to go seriously rallying, because I knew it was an expensive operation and I hadn’t even got a car.
I: You’d sold the Morris Eight, then?.
BP: Yes, I sold the Morris Eight before I went into the Army. About two weeks later I got the letter from the MG Car Company offering me a job as Assistant to Marcus Chambers in the Competitions Department and I’d be paid £13 a week. “When can you start?”.
I: You must have been absolutely highly delighted, I would have thought?
BP: I was rather pleased, yes. Mind you, I had no experience of international Motorsport, I couldn’t quite work out why he’d taken me on. I still don’t know what other applicants there were for the job and when I talk to my old work mates in the shop, they can’t remember who came because people were coming and going all the time.
I: That’s right. But that’s fate, isn’t it? That’s how life treats us all.
BP: My father was anxious for me to get the job I had been offered and he wrote to the local MP asking if I could be released from National Service early. Well, that didn’t work, of course. So, in October 1960, I finished in the Army and within days I started at Abingdon at the MG Factory. I was employed, all of us were employed, by the MG Car Company. Marcus Chambers was a real uncle type, you know, he was a gentleman of the old brigade, raced at Le Mans in HRGs and all sorts of stuff. He’d got quite a wide experience. So in October 1960 I started in the little office in the corner.
I: Did you share the office with Marcus or did you have a separate little office?
BP: Well, it was a little box in the corner divided more or less in half and one half was Marcus Chambers, the Competitions Manager, and the other half was his secretary, Jane Derrington and a
shorthand typist, Jean Stoater and that is where my desk was. Within about three days Marcus said “I’ve got a job, I’ve got a little job for you, you can take over homologation”. I thought to myself, what the hell does that mean, I don’t even know what the word means, I had to look it up in the dictionary. So I was thrown in at the deep end there with homologation. My task was to prepare the homologation forms for all the BMC models that the company wanted to run in international events until the department closed in 1970 when Lord Stokes got the axe out.
I had various jobs there to start with, because the Mini had appeared and this extraordinary little box which Doug Watts, the Chief Mechanic, refused to go into Abingdon in, he didn’t want to be seen in this little box thing. It didn’t look like a car really, but people realised it went round corners rather quickly and it became very, very popular, even in its 850cc form. There was a lot of demand for them.
As soon as the car was out, Marcus Chambers had some cars in the department. The then current drivers tried them out and they started entering it into rally events such as the ’59 Portuguese Rally and several cars in the 1960 Monte Carlo Rally. In the public eye, the Monte was probably one of the only international rallies they knew about because it got such big publicity.
That is what I was getting in to, as a result of the Minis success Marcus Chambers was receiving letters from people wanting to know what needle to put in their car to make it go fast. There were a lot of tuning careers going on, so I inherited all that.
I: Because the thing is, you mentioned about homologation, that was the key, because the competition regulators/organisers established the standard/specification and the cars had to comply with that standard. You could only tune the cars to a certain degree and it was up to you to advise Marcus as to exactly what that standard was for that particular category, I guess?
BP: Well, it was a two-way thing really, and discussions with the senior technicians in the workshop, you know, Dougie Watts the Chief Mechanic and Tommy Wellman, Deputy Foreman, Dougie Hamlyn, Deputy Foreman etc. But, yes, it was getting to grips with the Appendix J, the FIA Appendix J which governed International Motorsport; because we were taking cars off the end of the production line to do what we could to them, within the terms of the FIA Appendix J Regulations. There were three separate categories, Saloon car, Touring car, and GT cars and different groups in each category. You had Groups 1, 2, and 3. Group 1 was, I would loosely call the showroom spec cars, pretty well a standard car but blueprinted i.e. using machine tolerances which provided the best performance which may not be acceptable in a retail customer’s car. You were also allowed to do certain things like replace any consumable materials such as brake linings/pads, clutch linings, air and oil filters etc. You could up rate your shock absorbers, you could put a different needle in the carburettor, you could change any spring on the car, so any road spring or, clutch spring or valve spring you could change. But no polishing or increasing the machining beyond the specified tolerance, changing the shape of bits so they were not recognisable, and you weren’t allowed to raise the compression ratio by machining the cylinder head or fitting different pistons.
Then you had Group 2, which was like the improved category where machining and polishing was permitted, you could also change things like camshafts and carburettors as long as they would go onto the inlet manifold without an adaptor. So, there was quite a bit of flexibility in Group 2. I suppose, most of the events we entered, saloon cars anyway, would have been Group 2 cars. Then the GT cars, where we were particularly talking about MGBs and Austin Healeys, they came into the Group 3 category and the requirements were similar to those of Saloon and Touring cars, or Saloon cars. A major difference being that the manufacturers of Saloon and Touring entering cars for competition cars had to have built a thousand identical cars within twelve consecutive months, whereas GT cars, it was a hundred cars. For a mass producer like BMC that wasn’t really difficult, at all.
I: It would be more difficult for a company like Allard or even Ferrari, for instance. I guess that Austin Healeys would be in the GT category.
BP: Yes it would and yes, anything that’s only got two seats is automatically in the GT category.
I: Whether it be an open sports car or coupe?
BP: Porsche managed to work a fiddle one year in somehow managing to get the dimensions within the car acceptable for four seats, and they got it homologated as a Saloon car. With the Austin Healey, you had the same flexibility in Group 3, or GT, as you had in Group 2, as regards machining and changing of the bits and pieces. There was also a few extra things like, you could change body panels but the restriction was, theoretically, that you shouldn’t reduce the weight to such an extent that it was less than the kerbside weight declared on the homologation form. So, it was a bit peculiar.
I: Strange. So, you would swop steel for aluminium panels for instance.
BP: Yes. But I think, at the time, and I’m talking from my point of view now, as from the early ‘60s onwards, there didn’t seem to be a great deal of vetting by the FIA Technical Commission. I mean, there was some vetting in those early ‘60s because they, the Technical Commission, were the panel operated by the FIA who would look at the homologation forms. So, when it came to 1960, the homologation form consisted of nine pages with about six or eight photographs of different parts of the car, three-quarter view of the car complete, suspension, under bonnet, certain details, cylinder head and that sort of thing. We had to produce three master copies, with actual photographs on the forms which were supplied, they were called the Forms of Recognition. People talk about them as homologation forms but printed on the top is ‘Royal Automobile Club Form of Recognition‘. This was the nine page document with the pictures on and details of the car, mechanical details, you know, the track and the weight and the width, the bore capacity, the gear ratios, the final drive ratios, all that detail. You had to be sure, from a mass-produced point of view, that you got the accurate information because there was always changes going on during the production life of a particular model.
You were allowed to use an alternative carburettor set-up on the car.
I: So you could swop SUs for Webers, for instance.
BP: I think that there was a little bit of manipulation went on there. I recall preparing an Austin Healey 3000 homologation form and I think the first one would have been the Mark II; in the
section under carburettors I listed the three Weber 45 DCOE carburettors as standard and the SUs that were fitted to the car as it came off the assembly line as an option.
It was a bit of a fiddle I suppose but because the Appendix J was not too specific on that
point, we seemed to get away with it.
A similar thing – on the very first page, no, on the second page, you had the front cover with a picture of the car with the details of its chassis number, engine number, all the prefixes; who it was made by, how many cars had been made and the dates of manufacturer, i.e. the two dates between the start and the finish of production of the prescribed number of units. Turn the next page and there are the photos, the general photos of the car, three-quarter rear, I think, bits and pieces. But at the top of the form there was a little general description where you had to just describe the car. I would describe an Austin Healey as a two-seater sports car.
Then there would be a little bit of manipulation with the wording,
whether using steel, aluminium or glass-fibre panels. That was a try-on, really, to see whether the FIA would cross out, because all the Healey 3000s came off the line with steel panels. So there was quite a bit of manipulation went on there.
I: It was a very steep learning curve for you. By this time, you would have been well-versed in the homologation process, so, you’d learnt a lot in that time, hadn’t you?
BP: Well, I learnt a lot from Neil Eason Gibson who worked at the Royal Automobile Club, they were responsible for Motorsport regulations in the U.K.
I: That sounds like a famous name to me?
BP: Well, he is the son of John Eason Gibson who was a great BRDC man and a very, well-known man in motoring matters in the ‘30s and ‘40s and so on. He was most helpful.
I: How many mechanics were assigned to each event, did they specialise in each marque, Healey, MGs and Mini?
BP: No, they were not dedicated to one make or model. There were about a dozen mechanics in the workshop. A foreman, the chief mechanic and two under-foremen. The chief mechanic would allocate the job-sheet to a particular mechanic and he would build the whole car, the engine and everything!
I: Amazing. One week it could be a Mini, the next week it could be an MG.
BP: Yes, to build a car from scratch would take several weeks. Once it’s come off the production line, of course. With MGs and Austin Healeys, they were assembled in the MG factory, so they would drive them round the corner and into the shop and you would start stripping it down. So, yes, the BMC Competition Department mechanics built the whole competition car. This practice was based on the fact that the Competitions Department team was made up of skilled people who were previously employed in other parts of the MG factory such as the Development or the Experimental Departments, or the Service Department. They were used to this way of building cars.
This was different to how the Ford Motor Company, in the mid ‘60s and on, built their competition cars. They would have the engines and gearboxes built in a separate department and the mechanics would build the car, all the chassis work, brakes, suspension etc. and everything. The guy in the next shop would deliver the engine.
I think, to a certain extent, our way of working was a morale booster because the guy knew he was building the whole car. When that car went out of the door to the start of the Monte Carlo Rally, he could say “that’s my car” – “Paddy Hopkirk is going to drive that car, I hope he wins”. There was no secrets between the work bays anything learned on campaign was shared with all.
I: Interesting. So at this time BMC Competitions Department is rallying these cars, what are you specifically doing or did your role change within that period?
BP: Well, it gradually changed, I was dealing a lot with, as I say, the requests for tuning information and taking visitors round, a jack-of all-trades, in a way together with doing all sorts of office work, helping out Jane with the entries to various events; filling in the details on the entry forms to be sent to the event organisers. Often these were required months in advance of the actual events.
I: So, were you going to any of the events themselves?
BP: Yes I did start to do that. Talking about Austin Healeys, one of the first trips I did was – I had the awful job of driving a Works rally car to Dusseldorf to meet up with one of the crews who was coming up from Switzerland. The reason for that was that Peter Riley and Tony Ambrose had been doing a reconnaissance of the Alpine Rally down in the South of France and Peter Riley’s parents lived at Lausanne.
I think, they’d moved to Montreux, they’d been using an Austin A40, which Pat Moss had used on the previous Monte Carlo Rally, winning the Ladies Prize if I remember correctly. My job was just to drive to Dusseldorf, meet Peter and Tony at the hotel, swap cars and bring the A40 back to Abingdon; they would then go off to Sweden to do the Midnight Sun Rally.
I: So, you were driving this well-tuned rally car,
BP: Oh yes, it was a full Works rally car.
I: From Abingdon to Dusseldorf. Were you by yourself or did you have company.
BP: I was by myself.
I: So that must have been an incredible experience then. Did you enjoy it?
BP: Oh yes. I mean who wouldn’t? I’ve always loved driving. It was just absolute magic, really. On that particular trip, I do remember crossing the channel in a Bristol freighter belonging to British United Air Ferries. In fact I’ve got a photograph of the car going up the ramp into the front of the Bristol freighter. When I arrived at the hotel in Dusseldorf there was no A40.
Peter said “the steering idler had tore out of the chassis when we were in the Alps and I’ve left it in the BMC dealer at Montreux near where dad lives and he’s loaned me his Citroën ID
19”. He then told me “I’ve been in touch with Marcus and he want’s you to take the ID 19 down to Montreux and pick up the A40”. So, that was one of my first trips in a Healey 3000; very eventful!
Not long after I had another trip, just mentioning Healey’s again and Pat Moss. She won the 1960 Liège Rally, an incredible result that was. She was such a lovely person and a brilliant driver, she bought the car from the factory when we’d finished with it and she said to Doug Watts, the chief mechanic, “Can you make sure you put some bumpers on it because I don’t want it backed into when I’m down shopping in Tring”. 🙂
I: [Laughs]. So, she used this highly tuned Rally car to do her shopping in!
BP: Well, it was just, pretty well, as it was, you know? It was the same spec car, we hadn’t detuned it or put single two carburettors on it, or anything. I took that car to Milan, this was ’62 I think, and Pat Moss had decided to enter the Mille Miglia, which had become a rally after the fatalities on the event had really knocked it on the head as a road race.
She was going to do the Mille Miglia with her regular co-driver, Ann Wisdom. So I drove, I decided I’d take the car the scenic route, sort of Grenoble, over the Col du Lautaret and Izoard, whatever, to Milan. I met them at the airport and I flew back. The extraordinary thing was, when they went to the start of the event, there was some argument about the insurance, they couldn’t get insurance, so they never started the rally, they didn’t do the Mille Miglia in that car.
Another trip I did was to I collect a Healey, I think it was a Pat Moss car which had broken down in Yugoslavia. I collected it from Tarvisio or somewhere in Italy and drove it back to England. So, I was a sort of car collector really, as well as doing my office duties.
But, in answer to your earlier question about my involvement in the actual events themselves; the first event I went on was the 1962 Monte Carlo Rally. I was in one of the service cars which was an Austin Westminster with Den Green, who became deputy foreman. Also sharing the car was Cliff Humphreys who was our main development man, he was a really good engine guru, he did a lot of our development work, particularly on the Minis but on the Healeys as well. We were all involved in servicing the cars on that Rally.
I: I suppose the main product then was the Mini, Mini Cooper?
BP: Yes. I think ’62, or was it ’61 we had a Healey in it? Yes, I think ’61 we had a Healey in it. Timo Makinen with Christabel Carlisle drove a Healey.
I: I remember her name. She was more famous for track racing, wasn’t she, in a Mini?
BP: Yes, she wasn’t a rallyist at all really but she did one or two events. She did another event with Timo in Finland, the Snow Rally, in a Mini Cooper, as co-driver.
I: Interesting. Was there any interaction with the Healey factory, with Donald Healey and Geoff? Did you see them at all? Did they come down to Abingdon, or was it very much a separate entity?
BP: Yes. It was very separate, I never actually went to the Healey Works at Warwick, when they were running the cars there. I mean, there seemed to be so much work to do at Abingdon. I didn’t have any reason, or, I wasn’t asked to go and pick up drawings or parts or anything, or deliver, or collect anybody, which I was disappointed in a way, that I never got there, but Geoff Healey was the main contact,
I think they dealt with parts of the Corporation with regards to engines and engine tuning and that sort of thing, but they had their own engine people building their own race engines at Warwick anyway.
I: I must say, that that’s the impression I gained, just by reading bits and pieces. I didn’t see, from what I’d read, that there was much inter-change between Abingdon and Warwick in that respect.
BP: I think it was probably 1966, I think the RAC Rally in 1965 was one of the last events with the Austin Healey 3000 seriously.
I: The Austin Healey 3000 was coming towards the end of its production life in any case.
BP: Yes it was and it stands to reason, really, that the Company was not going to enter a Works team car in an event using a model that was now out of production, you know? Or, there was just a few left in the showroom.
I: So did the focus turn to MGs?
BP: Well, no. The focus was on the Mini, really. The ’65 RAC Rally, I did a few chauffeuring jobs for the Team Manager, which was then, by 1965, Stuart Turner. So I chauffeured him in a service car on that rally with a riding mechanic in the back. So I did all the driving and he did all the navigating and that was the year that we all hoped that Timo was going to win the RAC Rally in the Healey and on one of the last icy stages, Rauno Aaltonen in a Mini Cooper got up this very steep hill, whereas Timo lost time on the ice with the Healey not having as good a traction as the Mini. Timo finished second.
Timo had led the event by several minutes at that stage, but he lost, I don’t know, a minute and a half or more, so I think many of us in the shop, mechanics and all, were personally disappointed that Timo didn’t win in the Healey because I think we knew it was going to be one of its last events.
I: That really is a nice story.
BP: Then for the 1967 RAC Rally, the organisers, the Royal Automobile Club, decided to introduce a separate class for Prototype cars. So, we built, the best Healey we ever built in the shop, it had the registration number was PWB 57, which was Peter Browning’s own personal number plate and the reason for that was that the car had already been sold and Peter Browning had bought it and he’d started as Team Manager during ’67 replacing Stuart Turner (who had taken up a position as Castrol’s deputy PR manager, a position he held for two years before joining Ford’s Competition Department at Boreham, Essex. ed.)
When the Regs came out it was decided, wouldn’t it be nice to build the best Healey we can in the anything goes category; in other words a Prototype class car. The main opposition there, that I recall without looking at the entry lists were, fuel injected Triumph 2000s running with Denny Hulme driving one of them. Anyway we had a go at that and we built this wonderful car with an alloy engine because a handful of cylinder blocks, six cylinder blocks for the MG C Series (BMC C type engine) had been manufactured on the quiet and we built it with an aluminium cylinder head, an aluminium cylinder block and all the latest tweaks with the exhaust recessed into half the passenger’s door. We cut the passenger’s door in half horizontally, to allow a space to bring the exhaust silencer box up into the chassis. It was the best Austin Healey 3000 that we built.
On the eleventh hour the Rally was cancelled due to a break out of Foot and Mouth disease. It was so disappointing, all the work that went into that particular car, we never saw the result.
I: Was it ever used anywhere else? It sounds as if it could have been turned into a circuit car, in the right specification, but probably, there wasn’t a category that it could have been entered into.
BP: No, I can’t remember its exact history after that, but, it ended up in the Arthur Carter collection.
I: Okay. Which I think is broken up now, isn’t it?
BP: Yes it was. Back in 2005 Arthur Carter decided to sell his massive collection. No-one ever saw his complete collection at any one time. I think, Marcus Chambers and some of the drivers went up and saw all the Healeys one year.
I: One of the Austin Healeys he had in his collection was one of the two works coupes that were built, ONX 113. That car is now on display in the Healey Museum in the Netherlands.
BP: Yes, well, Mick Darcey who has collected several cars over the years, he’s got another Healey 3000 Works rally car and he owns JB 876 which is now got its original registration number back because it was ARX 91B as run. He doesn’t race it. He’s been out on one or two events with it, but he doesn’t do much with it but he has rallied his other Healey, which is one of the BRX cars. You know, my memory might not be that good, but I can always recount all of the registration numbers of the cars. If somebody asks me, is this number a Works car, I know exactly if it was or wasn’t.
I: Yes, that’s a good attribute to have.
BP: I can remember so many things that happened, you know, fifty years ago and I can’t remember what happened last week.
I: [Laughs] No, it’s good that you can do that. So, if we just work towards a conclusion now, so you left in 1970.
BP: When the department was closed by Lord Stokes in 1970, to save money, all of the personnel in the department were offered jobs in the factory, or within the company. I had the opportunity to work in the Special Tuning Department which had been formed in 1964.
I: Interesting, because a lot of people might not see the distinction between those two functions, but as you were describing it, clearly there was.
BP: Well, yes, going back to ’64 it was a relief really, that the Special Tuning Department was formed, because it would relieve me of an awful lot of correspondence and research with regard to tuning information and answering peoples’ awkward questions. We had no retail shop at Abingdon. The Service Department had been closed, the Service Manager was offered the job of Manager of Special Tuning, which he took on very briefly. Then Basil Wales took over, they developed tuning kits, a range of parts which were available to retail customers. But after the Service Department had gone, there wasn’t a till that you could go and pay money to, so it was all a bit undercover.
So, I was offered a job in the Special Tuning Department but I didn’t feel very happy about it, it was a bit like going back into a BMC garage. It was still going to be an interesting job, but there wouldn’t have been the travel and the competition activity with all the work involved in entering cars in rallies etc. It would have been a much more nine to five job and I just didn’t fancy it. Sometimes I did regret not taking it but I left. I was living over at Standlake near Abingdon and eventually, after some months’ delay, got a job with a BMC dealer in High Wycombe, that’s why I moved house here and I’ve been here ever since.
Brian Culcheth, was a great friend of mine and I almost went into business with him after Abingdon, but, he was retained by British Leyland International and was doing promotional events in locally prepared cars all round the world. I kept in touch with him and in 1974 he gave me the word that Leyland Cars were thinking of coming back into Motorsport. To cut a long story short, I was asked to go for an interview with Keith Hopkins who was the PR boss of Triumph and was offered a job as Workshop Supervisor in the Special Tuning Department at Abingdon, They were going to start rallying again and I thought, this is all I ever wanted to do, get back to work in Motorsport at Abingdon. Doing anything other than that was boring.
So, I actually went back to Abingdon, to the old factory, with most of the people I knew. This was now the Triumph era but you know, I couldn’t help but remember the interesting BMC times. I found the BMC period more satisfying and more exciting, in a way. One didn’t have the political problems, you know, the background political problems and the difficulties with British Leyland. There was no real money to run a decent programme. In the BMC days there was the BMC Competitions Committee with John Thornley as the much respected General Manager running the MG factory. He was a great Motorsport fan. Each Team Manager had great support from John Thornley, all the decisions with regard to the next year’s programme would be discussed by the Committee; this would involve some of the hierarchy at Longbridge, and the programme was agreed. Also at Abingdon we had a very good, Chief Accountant for the MG Car Company called Norman Higgins. He looked after all the finances for the MG factory and as we were one of the small departments within the factory, he looked after our interests as well. All the budgeting figures and the invoices and stuff would go through his office. When I talked to him subsequently, about the inter-company help we had from other departments such as Morris Engines, in Coventry, Austin at Longbridge etc, Norman told me that Abingdon was rarely invoiced for the services or parts!! provided by these other BMC companies.
If I just mention the British Leyland time, and that was subsequent to ’74 when I went back to Abingdon and this was also Leyland Cars, the Special Tuning Department had been changed to Leyland ST with the relaunch. It wasn’t long after, probably within three years, the Motorsport Department as it became known, we had our own finance manager as part of the staff in the office. A man who was dedicated to all the finances.
I: So from ’74 how long did you stay with them?
BP: Well until the end of the Abingdon period which was in 1981. The Triumph TR7 V8 was getting better and was good on tarmac. We got some quite good results and the plan was to retain Tony Pond to target certain tarmac events where we thought we could get good results. Then, lo and behold, just about the RAC Rally time that year, the company decided they were stopping production of the TR7 so there was going to be no TR7 rally programme the next year, when production had been stopped.
I: Right. Almost a repeat of the Healey situation in the way the car was coming to an end. No point in having a competition programme.
BP: Going back to the Healey period, for example on the Monte Carlo Rally, I can remember Austin A40, Mini Cooper, MGA, Austin Healey 3000, all in that one event. The Team Manager would be looking at a way of winning something. If you didn’t win outright, the next best thing was to try and win your Class. So we perhaps put a car in a particular Class with a view to winning that class.
I: Yes. Because it’s all about publicity and advertising in the newspapers and that kind of thing.
BP: What amazes me now, is that with the World Rally Championship now, you hardly ever see any National newspaper advertising. It was not unusual on a Monday morning after winning a Class in the Tulip Rally, that there’d be a half page in the Daily Express and the Daily Mail etc. A BMC advert and in big letters it would say ‘First’ and then in small letters include the Class. There was really good advertising, I thought. That’s what subsequent Team Managers always used in the argument for funding, ” What are we in rallying for?”. Well, first of all, it’s to develop the cars and secondly, for the PR, persuading the public that the engineering of these cars was what you were going to get from the car you buy out of your local car dealer’s showroom”.
Personally I would like to see the World Rally Championship going back to showroom cars. I know it’s not going to be as fast, but, when the cars are fully tuned to what they can do with today’s technology, they are still going to be pretty quick. There’s still going to be the competition there and the public could identify the cars they can buy. I suppose when you think about it I don’t think the general public would be swayed one way or the other now.
I: Just to conclude Bill, so you leave in 1981, what did you do after that?
BP: Well, Peter Browning had published a book called ‘The Works Minis’, he’d also written a book with Les Needham about the Healeys. This covered the Motorsport side as well and made me think of all the other BMC cars over those years, that hadn’t been covered. I thought it would be quite nice if there was a book covering this history. I’d never written a book before but I thought I would give it a go. I think it was June ’81 when the Motorsport Department closed, the MG factory closed towards the end of 1980 and so we were there with the factory closing around us. We were the last department working on the MG factory site and surprise, surprise, the Company agreed to continue with Motorsport. They found a place beside the Unipart building at Cowley for Motorsport to move to, because the MG factory was going to be sold off. It was not until about November that I got another job so, in the meantime I decided to have a go at writing a book. I realised the BMC Competitions Department had existed for twenty five years, from 1955 to 1970, a quarter of a century. So, I bought twenty-five folders and wrote a year on the top, quite naively really, not having a clue how people put books together. I then started compiling all the documents that I had retained or gathered from other sources of the years. I was always a bit of a hoarder of paperwork so putting stuff together, building up the folder was a little easier than I initially thought. Eventually I built the folders into a rudimentary book and I got to the stage where I’d got about 170,000 words. I went to Haynes based on some advice I had received and they eventually agreed to publish it. In 2005 Haynes also published another book I wrote with Paddy Hopkirk called the Paddy Hopkirk Story.
Brian Culcheth phoned me again to say “I’ve just been out on the RAC Rally spectating and I saw Peter Bryant”, Peter was an international co-driver that I knew but he hadn’t been in any of our cars. Brian went on to tell me that Peter had a place at High Wycombe and was looking for somebody to work for him for three months as a temporary job. He ran a small pipeline company called Pipeline Induction Heat. He had developed a method of heating up steel pipes by putting a coil around them and passing a current through them to heat them up via induction prior to the welding them. This improved the quality of weld by ensuring even heat all the way round.
I’m talking about overland and undersea pipelines of all sorts of sizes. He just wanted somebody in the office to help coordinate a job he’d got in Australia. It meant getting visas for the engineers who were going to work on the project in Australia. I was up at the Australian Embassy getting visas for them and organising shipment of material and paperwork etc. After a couple of months he asked me “Would you be able to go to Australia for six weeks?”. I replied “well, not really because I haven’t got a proper job yet and if I’m in Australia I can’t try and get one”. I hadn’t got anything in the offing, I hadn’t got any interviews lined up and hadn’t got a clue really. So, after reflecting, I said “Well, I’ll take a chance, I’ll discuss it with my wife”. I decided to go, what it was, he’d got a job on a pipe laying vessel on the Australian North West Shelf. It was going to be an eighty mile long undersea pipeline and he’d got the job on the pipe-laying vessel to install and maintain his induction heating equipment. But the Australians were very careful with foreign labour coming in, and they wanted the bulk of the welders on the vessel to be Australian nationals. The requirement was for three operators on each machine and they had to be trained up. To simulate what was going to happen on the vessel, they set up a unit in the outskirts of Perth city, in a small factory unit there. They set up a pipeline and Peter had to provide an engineer for twenty-four hours maintaining our equipment, he was one operative short so, it was eight hours each. I went out there on that job and I was just operating equipment, heating the pipe up, taking it off and sitting back while the welders did their job and then I’d have to do it again. After five weeks, Peter came out to Perth to finalise the contract with the French company that operated the vessel.
He took me out of the office into the yard and said “would you be prepared to work as one of the engineers on the pipe-laying project?” That was going to be a six month contract. After a couple of phone calls home, with no job opportunity in the offing, I took it because he said “I’ll tell you what, when we get back to England, I’ll keep you on working for my company”. That clinched it for me. So, I worked as an engineer, twelve hour shifts, two weeks on and one week off, for six months in Australia.
I: Right. Brilliant experience. So what kind of time are we talking about, 1980?
BP: ’82. Yes. 1982. So I worked for him for at least two years here and, funnily enough, I was sent out to do the same job on the same vessel, which was brought back to this country and was working on a pipeline on the, in the Norwegian Stat Oilfield. So, I went out a couple of times and worked doing the same job on the same vessel. There were hour and a bit helicopter trips, which I didn’t fancy much. When you are putting your immersion suit on before you go on board you think if this thing goes down, I don’t fancy this much. I must have made this clear to Peter, so he made me redundant, eventually. I thought “what am I doing to do now?” I got a job with a Porsche dealer in St John’s Wood. It was Assistant Reception Manager, which is the worst job you could ever have in a garage, really. I did that for a year and that was going up at six o’clock in the morning on the A40 in the traffic, oh God, it was really horrible. One of the difficulties, having had the experience of my father’s garage, where, if the car wasn’t ready the blokes would stay over, do some overtime and finish the car off so that it was ready for the customer; this garage was underground with massive blocks of flats up above. and over the years the Residents Association had got in touch with the Council and they put a damper on the workshop operating after five o’clock. So if the customer’s car wasn’t ready, he didn’t get it. They had one or two loan cars, so that was always a pain because you couldn’t offer one to all who needed one.
Anyway, my wife saw an advertisement in a local newspaper, she said “There’s a place over at Maidenhead called Auto Data, they are advertising for a Technical Writer”. I applied and I got the job as a Technical Writer. I was able to chuck the Porsche job. From 1985 I spent the last few years until I retired as a technical writer.
I: Brilliant. Okay, I think we’ve done it justice and honestly, some of the things that you’ve mentioned are historical records. Very, very important, not only for you but as I said earlier, it’s for the British industry in general and some of the characters you’ve mentioned. I think they will be absolutely delighted with what you have recorded.
Editors Notes
- This is the first time that I have read the transcript of this interview I did with Bill. What a fantastic story it is both from a motorsport and a human experience standpoint. The things I remember about that interview are i) dropping my wife off at the High Wycombe John Lewis store ii) having a little difficulty finding the Price house iii) being warmly greeted by Bill and his wife iv) seeing Bill’s model car collection v) conducting an engaging interview.
- The reasons why the interview was so engaging is, one, Bill’s open personality, two, shared experiences of us both spending our lives working in the motor industry.
- At this time of high unemployment amongst our young people and employers complaining that they cannot find people with the right skills: I couldn’t help reflecting on Bill’s recollection of his apprenticeship with Morris Commercial in Birmingham. How structured it was, what a great foundation for a constructive and fruitful working life. But that was the norm for thousands of boys, in all type of industry, at that time. The Government and captains of industry realised that they had to invest in these young lives if companies and the Country were to prosper. What went wrong?
- I found the story Bill told about the later stages of his life a little sad, particularly the time he spent at the Porsche Dealer in St. Johns Wood. What he demonstrated was a determination to find employment rather than languishing at home, even though sometimes that employment was not altogether to his liking.
- From what I have heard and read, Bill enjoyed his retirement and put his motorsport knowledge to good use in helping individuals and car clubs.
- I would like to give credit to the WCRO Transcribers who have undertaken and successfully completed an arduous job in transcribing all of the ‘Oral History’ recordings.
This article is subject to copyright and should not be republished in part or as a whole without permission from the author or the Warwickshire County Record Office.
Nick
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