My whole career, 1959 – 2011, was spent in the motor industry, first as a design draughtsman with work on the Austin Healey 100 – 3000, Volvo P1800 and Jensen FF in my portfolio when working for Jensen Motors, West Bromwich and the Triumph Stag when working for Standard Triumph, Coventry. During a short contract in Detroit, USA, I worked on the 1971 model year Chevrolet Impala. When I returned to the U.K. in 1970 I decided I wanted a change of career whilst remaining in the motor industry. I joined Chrysler U.K. as a product planner at its Parts Division. I progressed in the company and when Peugeot bought Chrysler’s European operations I was appointed product manager for the Peugeot range in the U.K. My most enjoyable achievement was helping to launch the Peugeot 205, especially the 205 GTi in the U.K.
The purpose of telling you about my career is to introduce the topic of this post – Cuttings from UK Motoring Magazines – 1950s –1980s.
As you might imagine, during my career it was almost mandatory for me to read lots of motoring magazines, as did most of my colleagues. However, I took reading a stage further, I cut out articles that particularly caught my interest, particularly those of a technical nature. I put these cuttings into folders with the intention of using them as reference documents. Amazingly, I carted these folders around with me wherever my career took me. For the last twenty years or so they have been languishing in a filing cabinet in my garage. Now it is time to do something with them.
A number of options presented themselves –
- Leave them where they are for my children to dispose of.
- Throw them away myself to save them the bother.
- Pass them on to a museum or similar outlet.
- Photocopy the articles and put them on my website for others to read. A huge undertaking but personally satisfying.
You are reading this article because I elected for option 4. After fulfilling that option I will probably take option 3. too.
Having flicked through all the cuttings I realised that because of the nature of the majority of them, A4 pages of “copy”, they do not lend themselves to this type of post.
So, I have majored on those with pictorial content, divided them into sections and given them their own pages as follows (click on each image to be taken to the relevant page) –
CAR ADVERSTISEMENTS
This is something of a by-product, it wasn’t my intention to save advertisements but inevitably there were adverts amongst the cuttings I saved. At this distance they hold some interest.
FORMULA and SPORTS RACING CARS
ENGINE LAYOUT AND ENGINES
NOTE:-
© carsceneinternational.com Images shown are also the copyright of the current owners of the magazine titles from which the cuttings were taken.