The Way We Were
We kick off our bumper selection of 1950s and 1960s scenes with a scene encapsulating America’s onceinsatiable appetite for British cars
Six pages of 1950s and 1960s motoring nostalgia
What we see here is a glimpse of the steady stream of British cars that crossed the Atlantic in our long-lasting attempt to choose correctly – ‘export or die’. Britain had been stuffing as many of its home-made goods as possible into freighters to keep the foreign coin rolling in since the Pathé-made Ministry of Information film coined the phrase in 1946.
No currency, no food… or fuel, steel, timber, tobacco or cotton. We’d been at it more for than a decade by the time this shot was taken in spring 1958. As such, things were finally starting to change.
Harold Macmillan had told us ‘ We’d never had it so good’ the previous year. All restrictions on hire-purchase agreements were lifted by October 1958 and suddenly a great many more people could aspire to owning a new car. Britain made a million cars in 1958, but half were exported and most of those went to the USA despite economic improvements.
Here we have a small queue of Triumph TR3As and Hillman Minxes (either Series II or III), both of them originating from the labour of Coventry, out of the Canley and Ryton plants respectively.
The original sidescreen TRs on the leftmost transports encapsulate the sort of Stateside sports car success to which many other British manufacturers aspired. Both the TR2 and TR3 were deliberately aimed at America so US buyers got an overlap model called the TR3B with this shape when the Michelotti-styled TR4 was introduced, but sporting a TR4 engine – just in case the new sports car upset any Triumph traditionalists in America…
As for the Hillman Minxes, they’re all two-tone, but only one is an estate, which you can tell at a glance from the short-wheelbase Husky by counting the doors. Minxes that arrived in 1956 were designed with help from Raymond Loewy. If you squash one and stretch it a bit, it does look like Loewy’s 1956-58 Studebaker Hawk – and you can bet your bottom dollar that Rootes was banking on Americans recognising the resemblance. It’s also intriguing to note that whitewall tyres were clearly supplied as a factory fitment, if ordered, and not something that the dealership added in America. This lot are about to board the
Cape Hawke, a 5000-ton freighter built in Glasgow in 1940 and notable for its part in bringing part-assembled Spitfires in wooden crates to Malta during WW2.
Hanging around the docks we can see two Morris Minors – one of them a Traveller – partly hidden by men standing on the left, where we can also see a white Ford Popular.
Today, Queen Alexandra Dock remains in operation, albeit on a much smaller scale following redevelopment work carried out to the Cardiff Bay area in the 1980s and 1990s. There are also far fewer British cars (read almost zero) making the trip across the Atlantic these days.