Humber / Hillman / Rootes / Chrysler / Peugeot

Hi Foxcote The car was registered here & looks new. It is a pity that we cannot see the other reg's.

Hi A study in slide-rules. The top one, a ten inch engineers that was my dad's, for doing his Hillman Minx sums on. The one below is mine, designed for accountants & cost estimators. For doing my sums on.

Just found another interesting photo - Humber Hawk?

Could be a 1950s Super Snipe rather than a Hawk.

This is a pic of me when I was 17, the car is a Super Snipe, the only difference I can see is 2 extra lights, and the Snipe has a Snipe mascot

That's a cracking photo Normk I found an Estate.

That Hawk Estate is late 1950s or early 1960s, the first of that style was c.1957. Quite an interesting photo as the car seems to be parked on waste ground! I've had another look at the Super Snipe photos. Looks like a Mk II/III Super Snipe from the early 1950s as that model was in production from 1948 to 1952. It was designed by the Loewy studio. A very impressive car if you see one in real life. The distinctive feature is the larger sidelights below the headlamps. The Humber Pullman from the same period had a longer wheelbase but a similar front-end, however the lights below the headlamps were different. The first post-war Hawk in 1948 looked a bit similar, however it had small sidelights below the headlamps. The first photo of the Snipe looks to be at the factory so would probably be around 1950. They were the preferred vehicle for royal tours of the empire/colonies.

Another good shot of the car but the background? Hillman, but where?

Hello I have never been a motorcar enthusiast, but I love reading all of these posts, as each one stirs up memories. Even my mum had two, part-time shoe shops, inside two of our local motor manufacturers. The nearest that I ever came to the motor industry, was during the construction of the Gaydon Herritage centre. The car in the photo Foxcote, the reg rings a bell with me. Members posting on the King Henry site might remember that Mr. Brotherwood had several Hillmans, including a California which is the last one that I remember him having, which would have been 1958ish. The car at the pool might have been his, Foxcote, but I do cannot identify the location. I do not usually forget numbers.

Thanks for all those photos and memories, Philip. Your family had very strong connections with the Rootes car development in the 50s and 60s, probably earlier too. Many people have forgotten the design was all done with slide rules. I certainly used one all the time at university in the late 1960s, and even as a design engineer at the electronics company Hewlett-Packard in the the early 70s, I used a slide rule most of the time for design work, particularly for log and trigonometric functions. We did get HP pocket calculators around 1974, and the slide rule got put away. I still have my slide rule, but doubt if I know how to use it now. As a Rootes enthusiast, I'm an admirer of the solid engineering in these cars, particularly the engine and gearbox in the light car range you've been writing about. The overhead valve engine used in the Minx from the mid-1950s was firstly 1390cc, and went to 1490 cc around 1958 with the first Series III Minx. Rootes then enlarged it again to 1592 cc around 1960/61 for use in the Minx/Gazelle/Rapier and also the heavier new Audax range including the Super Minx. My 1965 Sceptre has this engine with an alloy head and twinchoke carburettor for higher performance. The final iteration was the 1725cc engine with 5 main bearings. This continued in production, slightly modified, until around 1976, a total production life of the same basic unit of 20 years. Still does well today. They are very robust engines, probably all that field testing done by your Dad and his colleagues. Thanks again for that bit of Coventry history, from a time when it was an engineering capital in the UK.

Just to correct an earlier post, the car JHP327 on the tpt photo posted by Foxcote, looks very much like a Humber Pullman made between 1948 and 1954. Looked pretty similar to the Snipe but with longer wheelbase for a larger rear passenger compartment having fold-down seats. The Pullman has those rectangular sidelights, whereas the Snipe from the same period had the larger round sidelights, as in JHP3 in NormK's photo. This is all based on photos in the Rootes books.

Hi Rootes66, Hi NormK I love your enthusiasm for what then was state of the art engineering. I am going to get an expert to remount some colour slides. Many of which are from Africa when Mombasa was all set to become a Rootes car plant. Some are of the ill-fated Simca of which only two were built. Later, in the seventies, a Simca was revived as a production car, but in the words of of the main-dealers it was a flop. The bigger Alpine of the seventies was a hybrid of the Simca, at least on paper, I was told. I had one from new, but it was the worst car that I ever owned. The colour slides have taken a hit for the periods that they were in storage between my parents moves to Cornwall & so on. They were all in protective cases but I should have taken better care of them. I still use my slide-rule now & again. It is still good for constants. My nine inch has a deferred top scale so that it reads off almost as though it was a circle rule. I don't keep having to swap the 1 to 10 or 10 to 1, for the readings that are off the scale. I will look out some more pictures. I even have my dad's letter from Humber where he was appointed as senior development engineer in 1948 at the huge salary of £700 per annum. Actually, that was some salary then. I love the pics that you keep coming up with Norm.

I found a 'Husky' PRW313