The Great Arragonis
Alec Issigonis deserves a short aside in the narrative, a space for himself. He not only designed the Morris Minor but in 1959, the year Macmillan, at the height of his reputation, called a particularly successful election, he produced the Mini too. This was the nearest thing to chic Macmillan’s age produced, though of course Macmillan himself would never have bought anything so small and vulgar. Issigonis can lay claim to being one of the more influential figures in the history of the car in Britain as well as being about the only industrial designer anyone has heard of. The son of a Greek engineer living in Turkey who had taken British citizenship, and a German brewer’s daughter, his early years had been lived on the site of his father’s marine engineering business, watching the drawings transform themselves into engines.
He is as good an example as any of the benefit that immigration brought to the country. He was a war refugee: the First World War peace treaties had carved up the Ottoman empire and given Smyrna, the port where Issigonis lived, to Greece. The Turks won it back and many foreigners fled. Issigonis’s father died on the way and he arrived with his mother in London in 1922, virtually penniless. He learned engineering and industrial drawing in London before getting work first for Humber, then Morris. An unconventional designer, he loathed teamwork and mathematics, describing the latter as the enemy of every truly creative man. He learned in part by hand-making his own racing car, which he raced himself before the war; later he would ridicule such innovations as car radios, seatbelts and comfortable seats.
Issigonis’s Morris Minor had been radical in design and structure; it was the nearest of any British car to the Hitler-era Volkswagen Beetle. His Mini-Minor was commissioned in the immediate aftermath of the Suez crisis when petrol shortages had focused attention on the case for cheap, economical cars. The country was already latching on to the cheap bubble cars being imported from Italy and Germany, and soon being made in Britain too, at a Brighton factory. Issigonis’s brief was to produce something for the British Motor Corporation that could take them on, but was also a proper car, not a motorbike with pretensions. He not only made it look good, but by turning round the engine and placing it over the wheels, he found a way of packing far more space for passengers into a smaller area than any previous car. His design was so radical it needed a complete set of new machine tools to produce; Issigonis designed them, too. The Mini would become an icon of British cool, a chirpy, cheeky little car we liked to think represented the national character at its classless best. Yet the true story of the Mini is not quite as flattering to British industry. The early Minis were shoddily built, with a series of mechanical problems and poor trim; more importantly they leaked so badly people joked that every car should be sold with a free pair of Wellington boots and one journalist said he was keeping goldfish in the door pockets. Issigonis was short-tempered and intolerant with more junior design and production colleagues, who called him Arragonis and Issigonyet? He had spoken before about building a ‘charwoman’s car’ but the lower-income families the Mini was aimed at initially took against its unfamiliar shape, small size and austere lack of trim.
In fact, for a while, the car looked as if it would be a thundering disaster. The economics behind it were also, to say the least, obscure. The basic model sold at £350, much cheaper than rival small cars such as the Triumph Herald (£495) and the Ford Anglia (£380) and indeed BMC’s own old Morris Minor (£416). Yet it had been very expensive to develop and required its own machine tooling to make. How was this possible? Ford tore one apart to cost it and decided it would cost them more to build than BMC were selling it for. It seems unlikely there was any profit: in their urge to undercut its competitors, the makers of the Mini were ignoring the development costs and selling the car at a loss. (Company people say they continued to sell it at a loss for years.) BMC would eventually sell more than five million Minis but its success only came about thanks to what we would now call celebrity endorsement, and even spin. Issigonis happened to know Princess Margaret’s new husband, the photographer Lord Snowdon, and presented the glamorous couple with one as a birthday present. They were duly photographed whizzing round London in it. The Queen tried one out, and soon Steve McQueen, Twiggy, the Beatles and Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, were seen in them too. This was completely the opposite image to BMC’s and Issigonis’s original idea of a cheap, no-frills car for the working classes; conservative-minded people found their car taken up as a chic emblem of youthful impertinence. In the end, of course, whatever works, works. Yet the mechanical problems, lack of good teamwork and unbusinesslike pricing strategy show that there was a darker side to the Mini story from the first. Issigonis’s biographer concluded that ‘far from being a business triumph for the shaky British Motor Corporation, the Mini was the first nail in their coffin.’
Issigonis was a naif in the world of business but he was prescient in one respect. He hated mergers. The Austin-Morris one produced huge internal pain with two mutually hostile company bureaucracies locking horns. The results were not immediately obvious. Through the fifties BMC rationalized its cars and cut the number of engines used, while keeping its old Austin and Morris dealers happy. With fast economic growth and an insatiable appetite for affordable cars, the domestic industry did well. There was American competition but then, there always had been – General Motors had been a big player in the UK since it took over Vauxhall in 1928, and Ford had chosen Britain as its European base even earlier. By the sixties, German and French imports were also frequent sights on British roads.
Still, there were few signs of a domestic car industry in crisis. Other producers were marketing long-lived and successful models, from the sleek Jaguars to the stolid and stately Rover Eights and Rover 50s. Issigonis was not the only free spirit of the times – Rover went far down the road (at 150mph) towards a commercial jet-powered car. Yet industrial action was growing, despite managers who bought off the unions with generous settlements in an era when they could easily sell every car they made. There was a particularly bad strike at BMC in 1958. There were some strange management decisions, egged on by politicians. Ministers trying to bring employment to run-down parts of Scotland and the North of England persuaded BMC to create a cumbersome and expensive empire of new factories which it did not have the expertise to manage properly. Little of this was apparent to the ordinary observer then, the first years of popular motoring mania.