Sir Herbert Austin (8th November
1866 to 23rd May 1941)
Not many graves I visit
accommodate knights but Herbert Austin was one. He was a tenacious car
designer, employer of tens of thousands of folk and a huge help in World War
One. He owned the Austin Motor Company and as a lad I can remember seeing lots
of his cars. The Austin family still have a crest of arms and the Northfield
bypass is called "Sir Herbert Austin Way" after him. Here I am at his
fairly small grave (was expecting a big whopper) and at Lickley Grange the
mansion where he lived in splendour.
Early beginnings didn’t suggest he’d build a
massive car company as he started life on a farm in Buckinghamshire. Aged 18
Herbert emigrated to Australia to live with his uncle in Melbourne. He had
various jobs and but were no hints he’d become an immensely successful
businessman except that he liked designing. He entered a competition held by
the government and submitted a design for a swing bridge over the Yarra River
(didn’t win.) Aged 21 got married to Helen and they’d go on to have three
children. He started working for a company that made sheep-shearing machines.
After being sent to a sheep station to study these machines he patented his own
improvements and exchanged it for shares in the company he worked for. Oddly
his employer was Frederick Wolseley who would go on to build his own car design
company.
When the company was wound up both Herbert and
Frederick returned to England and set up a factory manufacturing sheep-shearing
equipment. Sales of equipment were high before the long Australian summers but
he needed to make something else to keep his workers busy. First they built
bicycles but Herbert became interested in these new things called motor cars.
Aged 34 he had built three different designs (all three-wheelers) but the
naively the board saw no future in making things for the motor industry. The
big Vickers Company did though and Herbert was 35 when they bought the
company’s car interests.
Aged 39 Herbert resigned and set up his own
company, taking vital staff with him. He borrowed what equates to £4.5 million
and searched for a factory where he could transform his idea into a car. He
found a 400 acre site - now the whopping Longbridge plant. By 1908 cars were
rolling off the lines and glittering success loomed. The First World War
interrupted things and the factory made munitions instead of cars. Herbert was
later knighted for his services to the war effort - also for employing 3,000
Belgian refugees. The war nearly killed things though and the business almost
went bankrupt (a receiver was appointed.) Herbert was now 56 and had to come up
with something. He did: a budget car called the "Baby Austin" for
sale at £225 (about £12,500 now.) People who hadn't been able to afford a car
found they now could and within four years 25,000 cars per year were being
built. The Austin 12/6 and then the Austin 12/4 followed.
Away from the car plant Herbert was Conservative
Member of Parliament for about six years and a philanthropist donating huge
sums to educational institutions. The family home was Lickey Grange, a large
mansion befitting a hugely successful employer. He died at home aged 74 of a
heart attack and a bout of pneumonia. The title would have continued down the
line but his son Vernon was killed fighting in the war and the peerage became
extinct.
His grave isn’t far from his former home at Holy
Trinity Church in Lickey. I soon found it by a hedge at the rear. I thought
there'd be a bigger stone but it's humbly small. He'd come a long way from the
lad who spent hours at the large table making freehand drawings of machines.
There wasn’t a single flower on the headstone nor a “Sir” before his name. It
says “1st Baron Austin” on it though and perhaps this was due as
just when his car company was advancing he gave it all up to make stuff for the
government. The company specialised in making everything from jerry cans to
tommy guns, Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns, aircraft fuselages, specialist army
vehicles, machine guns and marine engines. Yeah he deserved that knighthood.
I drove to Lickey Grange, the former home of the
Austin family where Herbert finally conked out. I couldn’t get in though - too
secure, too many cameras. When Herbert was 44 he moved here with his family, a Victorian
house with a 100-acre estate. The small Austin 7 was designed here in the snooker
room in private (the other directors preferred the bigger 12 hp-engine cars.)
After his death a charity for blind people took over the estate and then it was
a school in the fifties. Houses were built for the teachers as were hostel
blocks, classrooms and a swimming pool for the pupils. Nowadays it’s a gated
community of up-market homes so I scruffy, dirty, smelly man like me could only
salute at the main gate.
At the entrance
to Lickey Grange...
The Longbridge plant these days...
