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    Hillman Cars
    Hillman Cars
    Hillman Cars
    Ebook87 pages43 minutes

    Hillman Cars

    By James Taylor

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    About this ebook

    William Hillman started manufacturing cars in Coventry in 1907 before selling his company to the Rootes Brothers in 1928. Three years later came the Hillman Minx, the first of a line that would endure in multiple forms for nearly half a century, even after the remarkable Imp arrived in 1963 to claim a slice of the market opened by the BMC Mini. Rarely revolutionary, Hillman cars nevertheless carved out a special place in the hearts of the British people as well as many overseas customers. This beautifully illustrated introduction to a classic British marque traces Hillman's history from its first cars at the turn of the century until, weakened by industrial disputes, it disappeared in the mid-1970s.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateApr 19, 2018
    ISBN9781784422745
    Hillman Cars
    Author

    James Taylor

    James Taylor is a writer, podcaster, and jack-of-all-trades media producer. Over the years, he's been a barista, a professional gambler, and a tech support phone jockey. When he's not tucked into a corner at a random Starbucks working on Trouble, you can find him road-tripping around the west coast, drinking a pint of Dunkel by a fire pit, or playing video games in his office when he should be doing something productive. He lives in the Golden State.

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      Book preview

      Hillman Cars - James Taylor

      Title Pagetoc

      CONTENTS

      HILLMAN’S EARLY DAYS

      THE LARGE HILLMANS OF THE 1930s

      THE HILLMAN MINX, 1932–48

      CARS FOR EVERYMAN

      DEPENDABLE TRANSPORT WITH STYLE

      DECLINE AND FALL

      FURTHER READING

      PLACES TO VISIT

      LIST OF HILLMAN MODELS

      HILLMAN’S EARLY DAYS

      William Hillman was already sixty years old by the time he started making cars in 1907. He was also a very wealthy man, having made a considerable fortune in the bicycle business during its boom years at the end of the nineteenth century. Born in Stratford, which was then in Essex but is now in east London, he had initially been apprenticed to a marine engineer called James Penn in Greenwich.

      Penn had engaged a young man called James Starley as a gardener, but Starley had quickly demonstrated an affinity with mechanical devices. He had also become good friends with William Hillman, and the two of them had decided to move to the Midlands to find work in the burgeoning light engineering industry. Both joined the Coventry Sewing Machine Company, but it was not long before they turned their hands to a new product – a bicycle whose design they based on a velocipede imported from France. The company thus became the first British bicycle manufacturer and was able to ride the wave of a new interest in cycling.

      ../img/SLI848_009.jpg

      The new Hillmans for 1930 were ‘the ideal combination of comfort, appearance, performance and price’ – or so the company’s advertising claimed.

      The boom in cycle sales encouraged Starley and Hillman to set up their own bicycle manufacturing business in Coventry, and there they patented and built the Ariel, an all-metal penny-farthing or ‘ordinary’. A third partner joined them in 1871 and the company became Smith, Starley & Co., but William Hillman decided not to stay and left in December 1872.

      The next we hear of him is in 1875, when he set up his own bicycle manufacturing company, Hillman & Herbert, with finance from William Henry Herbert, the brother of Alfred Herbert who founded the famous Coventry machine tool company.

      Hillman & Herbert made penny-farthing cycles and also developed their own pioneering designs, including the 1884 Kangaroo, a sort of scaled-down penny-farthing with a gear-driven front wheel. Meanwhile, the company had taken on a third partner in 1880, becoming Hillman, Herbert & Cooper. In the later 1880s, they adopted the diamond-frame ‘Safety’ cycle – a design pioneered by James Starley, who had now become a hugely important figure in the Coventry cycle industry.

      ../img/SLI848_001.jpg

      William Hillman turned to car manufacture after making his fortune in bicycles.

      Revenue came from patents as well as sales, and Hillman set up more companies. In the early 1880s he founded the Sparkbrook Manufacturing Company to make Sparkbrook cycles. This was followed in 1887 by the Auto Machinery Company, which pioneered the mass production in Britain of ball and roller bearings. In 1891, Hillman, Herbert & Cooper was sold to the Premier Cycle Company, which was soon able to claim that it was the world’s largest manufacturer of cycles.

      ../img/SLI848_002.jpg

      At the wheel of this 1907 Hillman is its designer, Louis Coatalen.

      By the mid-1890s, Hillman had become a millionaire and was able to purchase a large and impressive property called Abingdon House at Stoke Aldermoor, near Coventry. But an easy retirement was clearly not his idea of enjoyment. By 1905 his interest in motor racing had led him to look at building his own car, and in 1907 he joined forces with Louis Coatalen, a French-born engineer who in

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