I left school wanting to be a geologist and study geology at university. I changed my mind and graduated from university intent on a career in the motor industry. I applied for positions with Ford and BMH. I was accepted by both but chose BMH. Ironically I ended up working for Ford years later when they purchased Land Rover from BMW in 2000.
The first two weeks of my motor industry career were spent on an induction course as part of a small group of graduates at the Pressed Steel plant at Cowley near Oxford in the UK in August 1968. The location is important to this story. There were only a handful of graduates starting that year as the behemoth British Leyland Motor Corporation (BLMC) had only been formed a few months earlier and the Chairman and Chief Executive, Donald Stokes-Lord Stokes, had ordered a headcount freeze and no new recruits. Fortunately for me the instruction took some time to percolate down the ranks. Or maybe it was just ignored.
BLMC was created by the merger of British Motor Holdings (BMH) and the Leyland Motor Company (LMC) which had recently taken over the well respected and moderately succesful Rover Car Company and the ailing Standard Motor Company.
BMH was formed from the merger of BMC (British Motor Company), Pressed Steel and Jaguar. BMC itself was the result of an earlier merger of the Austin Motor Company (Austin) and Nuffield Motors (Morris) and the Austin men and the Morris men were still fighting their own turf wars when BLMC was formed.
The Pressed Steel plant at Cowley produced car bodies for the Morris Minor, Morris Mini, Morris 1100 and the Morris Oxford. They were Morris cars because Cowley had been the heart of the Nuffield/Morris empire. Up in Birmingham, at the old Austin HQ, they made Austin versions of the Mini and 1100. The cars and bodies were identical apart from the badging and the trim.
Now a rational person like someone running the rapidly growing Volkswagen in Germany or the diligent folk at Honda, Toyota or Datsun in Japan, would have made all the variants of the Mini in one plant and all the variants for the 1100 in one plant to achieve economies of scale. That was not the British way in the 1960s. Their mantra could easily have been-add complexity and cost at every stage-and boy were they succesful.
The naive British Labour Govermnent had hoped that LMC's expertise would revive the ailing BMH. The problem was that there was no Leyland expertise. Donald Stokes was just a truck and bus salesman. His most visible claim to fame was selling buses to Cuba at the time when the communist Cuba, under Fidel Castro, was very much on the nose. He was totally out of his depth running a large corporation.
However to be fair to Donald Stokes, and I find that very difficult, even Superman probably could not have run BLMC succesfully. It was the ultimate dog's breakfast of a company-an amalgam of over 100 companies. It had dozens of factories scattered over the British Isles. It made everything from cars, trucks and buses to forklift trucks, earth moving equipment, refrigerators and even pedal cars for children. It had militant unions and weak management, worn out facilities and decades of under investment. It was a total basket case.
On paper it does not sound like the ideal place to start one's career but fortunately for me I was at the heart of the action from the start. I initially worked as an analyst in the so called Strategic Planning Department. There was actually no stategy or planning.
The first project I worked on was a board review and recommendations for the future of the Nuffield Tractor agricultural tractor business which was, of course, bleeding money. I just collated and analysed numbers but in my first lucky break I flew with my boss to the HQ of the European Tractor Manufacturers Industry Group to collect the numbers-no Internet or Dropbox back then-which was in either Stuttgart or maybe it was Frankfurt. I cannot remember. Anyway in 1968 flying on business was still a very big deal. We flew with BEA-British European Airways-in a BAC 1-11 and I remember it well because my seat faced backwards. Weird and very disconcerting.
We pulled the study together and I had an opportunity to read the final report and the recommendation which was definitively to get out of the tractor business. The BLMC board, presumably, considered the report, and agreed, yes, you guessed right, to put more investment into the tractor business! Surprisingly the tractor business continued as Leyland Tractors right into the 1980s but I suspect it continued to lose money and just survived because it was overlooked in the larger mess.
After a few months the Strategic Planning Group moved to the heart of the empire-the BLMC head office in Berkeley Square House in Berkeley Square, right in the middle of Mayfair and some of the most expensive office real estate in London. A wonderful location to work but not, you would think, the ideal location for the head office of a company which was bleeding money from every pore and which had almost all of its business activities in the Midlands and North of England. Sadly very little made sense at British Leyland.
Let me insert the hero of the story, the Mini, into the narrative at this point. The Mini had been launched by BMC in 1959. It was a big deal because the designer, Alex Issigonis, had come up with the then revolutionary idea of making the Mini compact by putting the engine tranversely across the engine bay at the front driving the front wheels. It was a very brave move at the time and it is an idea which has since been widely adopted. Someone must have spiked the BMC Board's coffee with brave pills the day they signed that proposal off.
I lived in Ewell in Surrey until 1964 and I used to cycle up to Surbiton to watch the Cooper racing cars being constructed by the Cooper Car Company in a little sidestreet garage. In 1961 BMC launched the Mini Cooper variant -a higher performance Mini badged with the then respected Cooper name. I actually saw the first Mini Coopers being shown to the locals at a newly constructed go-kart track in Tolworth on the Sunday before the public announcement of the car. I do not know who thought of the Cooper Mini tie up - was it Cooper or BMC? Whoever it was got that one right.
The Mini Cooper was a sales success and was also very succesful in enhancing the reputation of the Mini range through motor sport success in rallies and on race circuits. Now, any right thinking person would have wanted to build on the reputation of the Mini Cooper name but sadly Lord Stokes was not a right thinking man. He was reviewing the 1971 BLMC Budget - a massive tome full of woe and utterly depressing numbers-when his eye caught the fact that the company was paying some trifling royalty to the Cooper company for every Mini Cooper sold. "Off with his head"' he shouted totally ignoring the fact that the Mini Cooper was one of his company's best loved products and the fact that every page of the document he was reviewing had details of activities which were losing millions of pounds every month.
So the Mini Cooper moniker was to be dropped and a new name had to be found. There were three proposals. Firstly Mini Climax was suggested because of the association with Coventry Climax -part of the BLMC empire-which made motor racing engines and secondly, Mini Clubman. The third name proposal I have forgotten. Lord Stoke's preference was for Mini Climax but after some embarrassing giggles from his staff he was dissuaded from using it and so lady drivers were denied the joys of experiencing a Mini Climax or at least an automotive one.
The Mini became a hot fashion item and the name was adopted for the mini skirt-one of the 1960's greatest innovations. In 1969 my new wife and I bought our own Mini and she bought or maybe made a few mini skirts to wear with it. The photo above shows my wife,Val, on our honeymoon with our second hand Mini Traveller-a "woody" version of the Mini van. Like any first car we loved it but today I would consider it very unrefined and as slow as a wet weekend. How the world has changed.
It would be 25 years before I owned another Mini but in the 1970's Val drove a number of Mini company cars. One of the great benefits of being a senior motor industry executive at that time was that you had an entitlement to not just a company car for yourself but also, depending on your level, company cars for your spouse and even your children. It sounds profligate but in fact it was very profitable for the company as the cars were changed frequently and sold to the dealers at very good prices.
I managed to escape the UK in 1977. Fortunately I went to Australia and best of all I managed to escape before the Thatcher years although our paths did cross in a totally memorable, or maybe it should be unforgettable, boardroom lunch in Sydney in 1994. But that is a story for another time.
One success Margaret Thatcher can rightly claim is that she instigated the actions which did finally pull British Leyland out of its part-nationalisation and into privatisation and acquisition by British Aerospace in 1988. Exactly why British Aerospace bought the company I don't know but they managed to package it up 6 years later to make it attractive for BMW to buy. And what a disaster that turned out to be except for the Mini brand which BMW retained after disposing of Rover and Land Rover in 2000. Ironically Land Rover lives on now with Jaguar under the ownership of the Indian Tata group and has been succesful in recent years.
My life was Mini free until 1994 when I had built a Mini Cooper S for motor sport. This was a really wonderful car and the highlight of my motor sport "career" was winning a highly coveted Targa plate and coming third in the up to 1600cc class in the really exciting and dangerous 1996 Targa Tasmania. See header photo. Due to a combination of heavy rain-ideal Mini driving conditions-a very well prepared car and excellent teamwork with co-driver, Owen, we did really well. See photo of me driving in the rain somewhere in Tasmania with Owen telling me through the intercom "leave the valves in the head mate" as I accelerated hard out of a corner.
My next Mini encounter was at a product familiarisation day at the Castle Coombe race circuit in the UK in the 1990s. I cannot recollect the year but it was in the BMW ownership of Rover/Land Rover era and it was snowing. There was one Mini there to be driven. It was a sad car. By that time the Mini was well past its use by date. It was embarassingly slow, unrefined and uncomfortable. I remember driving it almost flat out round the circuit. It was so slow that braking was unnecessary. The Mini only continued in production for so long because it had become a cult car in Japan and still sold there right up until its demise in 2000 with interest sustained by special edition after special edition.
In 1998 the senior managers of Rover and BMW sales companies were asked to put forward their proposals for the sales potential of a new version of the Mini. I could not see it selling in really large numbers at the pricing they proposed. How wrong I was. The BMW Mini was a success from launch due to a combination of a great product and excellent marketing. Particularly surprising to me was that it was a big success in the USA .
Fast forward to late 2020 I was giving serious thought to selling my 1977 2.7 Porsche 911 and replacing it with a Volkswagen Golf GTI or Golf R when I happened, by pure chance, to drive friend Laura's Mini. It was a Eureka moment. How did I not have it on my consideration list? I had to have a Mini.
So the week before Xmas I was the owner of a brand new fully optioned 5 door Mini Cooper S including the John Cooper works options. Yes, the same John Cooper "decapitated" by Lord Stokes. It was the ultimate impulse purchase. I had not done my homework. It was way over the budget I had in mind and I saw the car come off the transporter at the dealership and decided to buy it there and then. However I did take a very short test drive on trade plates to assure myself that I had not totally lost my mind.
Do I like it? Is the Pope a Catholic? It is brilliant. The build quality is superb. It feels really solid. The 2 litre turbocharged BMW power unit is a gem. The 7 speed double clutch automatic gearbox is a delight. The performance and handling are excellent and it is economical. Mine has 18" wheels whereas the original Mini had 10" wheels so it's a very far cry from the original Mini.
BMW have done an excellent job in developing the Mini brand from the initial three door hatch product. Now there is even an Electric Mini but so far no Mini Climax.
Yes, the 5 door model's styling is odd and somewhat quirky and definitely not to everyone's taste. The BMW Mini is much bigger than the original because it has to be much safer and have airconditioning and a load of features not even dreamt of back in 1959. Also people are now bigger and expect more space than they did when the original Mini was launched however it is still a small car even in its "Midi" 5 door version.
The final twist of this story is that my Mini is made in the BMW Cowley Mini factory which is located on exactly the site of the Pressed Steel factory where I started my career way back in 1968. The wheel turns.
