The oddest of oddballs

By Jonathan Meades

Sixty years ago, at the moment of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, the ancient ceremony was shared by means of the apogee of technology, a flickering, 405-line broadcast received on a Bakelite box. The whole of Britain was gloriously united in an access of monarchistic fervour. Even carmakers were united, though they were otherwise in a state of utter confusion.

At virtually every other time in the century of internal combustion there had existed a broad consensus about what a vehicle ought to look like: design was (and is) afflicted by a marked homogeneity. Yet in the 1950s it was touched by an individualism that in retrospect appears both heartening and foolhardy. This is made manifest in the coronation edition of the Motor, from May 20th 1953, where the car trade pledges its Brylcreem’d fealty through, among other things, illustrations evoking the first Elizabethan age (the crew of Drake’s Golden Hinde, offering trinkets to native Americans) and exciting drawings of the valve springs and friction-type suspension dampers of tomorrow. The industry was in a quandary. Should its designs look back to the stately shapes derived ultimately from carriages—of which the coronation coach, drawn by eight Windsor greys in bling-strewn harness and Versace blinkers, was merely an extreme form? Armstrong Siddeley, Daimler, Alvis, MG and, of course, Bentley and Rolls-Royce were still producing cars of a distinctly pre-war mien, as unyielding and pompous as a statesman in a wing collar and pince-nez.