Standard, Triumph & related car companies

My photos from the Standard Motor Club International Rally today - enjoy

CKV 1D. All my bells are ringing all at once on this one. Often used the Radford bus to Beake Ave. at that time. However, it's the Triumph Herald that you mentioned. Believe it or not, we travelled to Wales for a wedding via the said car with another couple and 'he' had papered all the inside with a flowery patterned paper. Try and imagine that, we thought he was mad but it was his first car, and considering it was chucking it down with rain it felt quite cosy.

Be good to see an interior photo of that Triumph Herald, if one was ever taken (probably not?), as I've never heard of anyone ever doing anything like that to a car before ???lol. (Must have been quite a shock to see, when you got in it and saw that wallpaper ???lol). I think the Triumph Herald first came out in about 1959 and the bus here was withdrawn from service in 1964, so that gives us a rough idea as to when this photo of The Burges was taken?

Looking closely at the Herald I think it might be a rare version, a coupe.

matchle55 The shells of cars were dropped onto the track in a sequence that gave the men time to fit the components in the small space they had. At the same time they were put in sequence, typists typed out scores of sheets of the sequence distributed to all the stores people who put the corresponding parts on overhead cranes, wheels by forklift, so everything matched up to the sequence. The men on the track had a certain time to fit parts as the track moved along (with me) but the men could not have two cars the same. Hub brakes, disc brakes, overdrive, TR2, saloon, the variety was endless, so the guys dropping the shells had to be spot on and so did the typist. Now, if a mistake was made it cost the company a huge lot of money to stop the track and put things right, it also took some time to realise and stop the track, so if a saloon engine met a TR2 because of error by the typist or the shell droppers, the car would be built, a 'bastard' car would be placed on the park and sold to employees at a discount, and it happened quite often (still with me). The most common mistake was an overdrive just had a little 'o' typed over the engine, if the typist missed it, then the wrong engine was forced in even if they knew it was wrong. So cars in Coventry could be bought LH steering with everything else right hand (get the picture?) - it was a brilliant system but we showed it to the world and they copied it and undercut the price. If you want to know more, then ask. I'm sure Rob won't mind.

Kaga, in 1960 my father bought a new Triumph Herald and suffered numerous niggles with it, these were common not just to dad's but to all Heralds at the time. As these niggles were ironed out at the factory a neighbour who worked on the track at that time kindly brought the modifications home for dad to fit, by what arrangements I never knew. Yes, he used to tell the same tales about life there and I can well believe it.

My uncle worked in car factories all his working life, the last decades of which were at the Standard. In the sixties, he bought a Vitesse (with staff discount). It was turquoise (weren't they all?). It had twin carbs, and a 2 litre engine, which in a small light car gave rapid acceleration compared to most cars on the road at that time. I don't recall him having any problems with it, but he would have fixed the car himself (and kept quiet about it!). As a young man, he thought nothing of replacing the big ends in my father's old banger, at the roadside, when they failed on the way to Birmingham. That was in the days when replacing the big ends was not an engine-out job, i.e. the sump was easily removed by crawling underneath the car on one's back. I daresay parts were supplied gratis from the Canley works. He would give my father the odd set of 6 brand new Champion N5s (or N9Ys, can't recall) for his Rover. I heard all sorts of tales about what went on at Canley from my uncle and from a friend's father who also worked there. In later years, a resident of Canley Road was jailed for heading a business of organised theft from the Canley works, but more of that later. It amazed me that the company was still in business! My uncle's Vitesse was still in pristine condition in its garage at Wyken when he died in his eighties.

Slim, The top managers brought round a top Russian group of engineers. They had been asking me about the electrical panel I worked to drop the shell bodies and the sequence etc, then they turned to the managers and asked two questions - one was the thickness of the shell body (forget the other question), but there were red faces and panic stations as none of them knew either answer, took them nearly half an hour to send out and find the answers. A worker was found to have locker full of stolen car parts. When the police visited his garage he had an almost complete car built from stolen parts - a copper on the quiet asked him how the hell he got the shell of the car out of the factory. The guy just tapped his nose, the copper said "you can come and work for me". We had those chaps that had the yellow number plates, picked up the cars off the park and drove them to the docks, but one guy stole one - they wouldn't have found out, but he brought it back in to be serviced. I decided to get married, so had to give up my gambling life in '59 and joined the Standard at Canley for 5 years.

Reminds me of Johnny Cash's hit "One piece at a time".

The promised tale of the organised cime. This happened a few decades agao, when the Standard was still in full swing. The company for whom I then worked had an a employee, Mr A, who was a "petrol-head". He had a Ford Capri Bullet, which according to Mr A's boasts was one of the fastest cars on the road (although I once raced him along Banner Lane on my 650 BSA and won). Then he started telling everyone about how it was going to go even faster, as he was scrapping the Ford engine and replacing it with a brand new Triumph Stag engine. It all went quiet for a while, and we had all forgotten about his car, which had not been seen for some time. About the same time, Mr A, we heard, had "left the company". An article in the CET named Mr A. He did indeed have the brand new Stag engine, and was out one Sunday when he pulled up at a garage and asked the attendant to check the oil and water whilst Mr A paid a visit to the toilet. A routine police car pulled up (this was in the days when we had a police force/service!), and a sharp-eyed copper noticed the non-Ford engine, then radioed its serial number back to HQ: it was stolen! Mr A was promptly arrested. When questioned, he said he had bought the engine off a bloke in the pub in good faith, couldn't remember his name, and denied any knowledge of a Mr B. Police searched Mr A's abode, and found on the writing pad by the phone Mr B's name and telephone number. Mr A was fined £400, and the judge warned him he had avoided jail by the skin of his teeth. Mr B, though, did get sent down for a few years. He had been the mastermind behind a professional criminal operation that had been stealing car parts to order from the Standard on a grand scale. He lived in a big detached house in Canley Road, roughly half way between our house and the Standard. People who knew him said he was a loveable rogue. If you said you needed 500 bricks, say, for your extension, a day or two later a lorry would drop off 600 of them outside you garden, no questions asked. Within a year or so of being released from prison, Mr B diversified. He was caught with printing equipment, and in possession of hundreds of thousands of fake US dollar bills (whatever the denomination) ready for export to the USA. He then started an even longer prison stretch. But this has nothing to do with the Standard!

And there's more. In the seventies, we had an apprentice whose father worked on the night or evening shift at the Standard Canley. He was on "rectification", which I understood meant driving the finished cars off the track and test driving them, then noting down any snags that needed to be fixed. The cars were not test-driven on the public highway, but on a selected route within the grounds of the Standard site. The men who did this had gotten into the habit of driving like nutters, presumably to relieve boredom. On one occasion, our boy's father went so fast round a corner, after it had been raining, that he completely lost control of the car, and it crashed into a building or a large stillage. Uninjured, he quickly got out and legged it back to the building where he was based, nobody having seen the incident, and this was in the days before CCTV. He thought the car was totalled. That's the story, sir. I guess it was only taxpayers' money that kept the business alive for so long!

Hi Doug, and everyone in the messages about Standard Triumph. My father, John Phillips worked at what I now understand to be Fletch North, as a Principal Design Engineer until he died in June 1983. I would be very interested to know if anyone remembers him! My uncle, Graham Phillips also worked at Masseys on Banner Lane.

If you mean the Canley end I left there in 65 after 5/6 years - a guy named Brown was in charge - but mainly I worked in the electrical room that dropped the car shells onto the track. When I met Brown, he said "Look, I'll take you down to where you will be working, but you will meet a guy who's hard to look at, he had his face blown off in the war". I said "The guinea pig club?" "I think so. Will that bother you or would you prefer this upstairs office?" "That's ok with me". This guy Dennis would be hard to look at for some - they had taken the whole of his forehead skin to remould his nose and face. When he knew me well, he told me, that when he was in hospital he could live with the wounds and the pain, but he could not meet his family, he was frightened of being rejected. They had shown photos to his wife and family. His wife insisted she wanted to see him, she visited instead of him being rejected. She marched to his bedside said something like "What the hell are you doing? You go off for two years, come back like this, and then don't want to see me" - and everything became easier after that, and now he was back in circulation and held a foreman's job. I liked the man immensely.

There is an interesting video on YouTube about Standard's history here

Very interesting. The factory in Maudslay Road later became the R&D site for Massey-Ferguson. Like most of our industry, it's now a housing estate.