By the mid-1960s the finances of the British Motor Corporation were crumbling and the company needed serial government bailouts. To prime minister Harold Wilson and industry minister Tony Benn, a merger with the Leyland truck and bus company, led by the dynamic ‘super export salesman’ Donald Stokes (1914–2008), seemed the way ahead. In fact, the new Stokes empire swept up almost all the UK makers including Jaguar, Triumph, Daimler and Rover, along with the BMC conglomerate (chiefly comprising Austin and Morris brands), in an attempt to bring order and rationality to the ailing UK car industry.
The Allegro was a much-needed attempt to bring in a new mid-sized car by radically updating Issigonis’s excellent, but now ageing Austin/Morris 1100, which was losing sales badly to the Ford Cortina. With Alec Issigonis sidelined, newly imported ex-Ford designer Harris Mann (1937–) drew up a decent and fresh-looking replacement, but the process of internal engineering negotiations soon pulled the concept apart.
The final result was lacklustre in appearance but dynamically not bad – though inferior to the 1100, thanks to engineering compromises on the suspension. Its novel, squared-off steering wheel, promoted as the ‘Quartic’ wheel, was seized on by journalists as a symbol of the futile exercise in innovation that typified the car.
Overall, the Stokes programme failed to rationalize the UK car sector with its many overlapping models, engine producers and supplier lines. The postwar dispensation in which government industry ministries had given both broad direction and major national investment to companies was fading away, while labour relations were almost uniformly awful, with the Longbridge Austin plant sometimes suffering three or four separate strikes in a day. Perhaps no one could have reshaped this crumbling archipelago, but the Allegro, in particular, has been called ‘the vital stumble’.
Poor old Allegro. Its general proportions were not all that different from those of the Alfasud (see pages 86–7), which everybody liked, showing just how subtle and challenging car design is.