The wheel turns: My Mini story

I left school to study geology at university. But I changed my mind and graduated intent on a career in the motor industry. I applied for positions with Ford and British Motor Holdings. I was accepted by both but chose BMH, and, ironically, I ended up working for Ford years later when they purchased Land Rover from BMW in 2000.

I spent the first two weeks of my motor industry career in August 1968 with a small group of graduates on an induction course at the Pressed Steel plant at Cowley near Oxford. The location is important to this story.

Stokesing trouble

Only a handful of graduates started that year as the behemoth British Leyland Motor Corporation (BLMC) had been formed only a few months earlier. The chairman and chief executive, Donald Stokes—Lord Stokes—had ordered a headcount freeze and banned new recruits. Fortunately for me, the instruction took some time to percolate through the ranks. Or maybe they just ignored it.

BLMC was created by the merger of British Motor Holdings (BMH) and the Leyland Motor Company (LMC) that had recently taken over the well respected and moderately successful Rover Car Company and the ailing Standard Motor Company.

BMH had been formed from the merger of BMC (British Motor Company), Pressed Steel and Jaguar. BMC itself was the result of an earlier merger of the Austin Motor Company (Austin) and Nuffield Motors (Morris). Confused? You will be. But sad to say, the Austin men and the Morris men were still fighting their own turf wars when BLMC was formed.

The Pressed Steel plant at Cowley produced bodies for the Morris Minor, Morris Mini, Morris 1100 and the Morris Oxford. They were Morris cars because Cowley had been the heart of the Nuffield/Morris empire. Up in Birmingham, at the old Austin headquarters, they made Austin versions of the Mini and 1100. The cars and bodies were identical, apart from the badging and the trim.

Now a rational person like someone running the rapidly growing Volkswagen in Germany or the diligent folk at Honda, Toyota or Datsun in Japan would have made all the variants of the Mini in one plant and all the variants of the 1100 in one plant to achieve economy of scale. But that was not the British way in the 1960s. Their mantra could easily have been to add complexity and cost at every stage. And boy, were they successful.

The naive Labour government had hoped that LMC’s expertise would revive the ailing BMH. The problem was that there was no Leyland expertise. Donald Stokes was just a truck and bus salesman. His most visible claim to fame was selling buses to Cuba when communist Cuba, under Fidel Castro, was very much on the nose. He was totally out of his depth running a large corporation.

Dog’s breakfast

However, to be fair to Stokes, and I find that very difficult, even Superman probably could not have run BLMC successfully. It was the ultimate dog’s breakfast of a company—an amalgam of over 100 companies. It had dozens of factories scattered over the British Isles. It made everything from cars, trucks and buses to forklift trucks, earth moving equipment, refrigerators and even pedal cars for children. It had militant unions and weak management, worn-out facilities and decades of under-investment. It was a total basket case.

On paper, it does not sound like the ideal place to start one’s career but, fortunately for me, I was at the heart of the action from the start. Initially, I worked as an analyst in the so-called Strategic Planning Department. The problem was that there was no strategy and no planning. All that could be said for it was that it was a department.

The first project I worked on was a board review and recommendation for the future of the Nuffield Tractor agricultural tractor business, which was, of course, bleeding money. I just collated and analysed numbers but, in my first lucky break, I flew with my boss to the HQ of the European Tractor Manufacturers’ Industry Group to collect the numbers in person—no Internet, let alone Dropbox back then.

Anyway, flying on business in 1968 was still a huge deal. We flew with BEA—British European Airways—in a BAC 1-11, and I remember it well because my seat faced backwards. It was weird and very disconcerting.

We pulled the study together, and I had an opportunity to read the final report and the recommendation, which was clear: get out of the tractor business. The BLMC board, presumably, considered the report and agreed—yes, you guessed right—to put more investment into the tractor business!

Surprisingly, the company staggered on as Leyland Tractors right into the 1980s, but I suspect it continued to lose money and just survived because it was overlooked in the larger mess.

Missing strategy

After a few months, the optimistically named Strategic Planning Group moved to the heart of the empire—the BLMC head office in Berkeley Square, right in the middle of Mayfair and occupying some of the most expensive office real estate in London.

It was a wonderful location to work but not, you would think, the ideal home for the head office of a company which was bleeding money from every pore and which had almost all of its business activities in the Midlands and North of England. Sadly very little made sense at British Leyland.

Let me insert the hero of the story, the Mini, into the narrative at this point. The Mini had been launched by BMC in 1959. It was a big deal because the designer, Alex Issigonis, had come up with the then-revolutionary idea of making a compact car by putting the engine transversely across the engine bay at the front, driving the front wheels.

It was an audacious move at the time, and it is an idea that has since been widely adopted. Someone must have spiked the BMC Board’s coffee with brave pills the day they signed off that proposal.

I lived in Ewell in Surrey until 1964, and I used to cycle up to Surbiton to watch the Cooper racing cars being constructed by the Cooper Car Company in a little backstreet garage. In 1961, BMC launched the Mini Cooper, a higher performance variant badged with the then respected Cooper name. I saw the first Mini Coopers being shown to the locals at a newly constructed go-kart track in Tolworth, Surrey, on the Sunday before the public announcement of the car. I do not know who thought of the Cooper Mini tie-up—was it Cooper or BMC? Whoever it was, they got that one right.

Off with his head

The Mini Cooper was a sales success and was instrumental in enhancing the Mini range’s reputation through motorsport success in rallies and race circuits. Any right-thinking person would have wanted to build on the Mini Cooper’s reputation, but sadly Lord Stokes was not a right-thinking man. He was reviewing the 1971 BLMC Budget—a massive tome full of woe and disclosing utterly depressing numbers—when his eye caught the fact that the company was paying some trifling royalty to the Cooper company for every Mini Cooper sold.

“Off with his head”,’ he shouted, totally disregarding the fact that the Mini Cooper was one of his company’s best-loved products and that every page of the document he was reviewing had details of activities which were losing millions of pounds every month.

So the Mini Cooper moniker was to be dropped, and a new name had to be found. There were three proposals. Firstly suggestion was Mini Climax because of the association with Coventry Climax—part of the BLMC empire—which made motor racing engines. The second was Mini Clubman. The third name I have forgotten.

Lord Stokes’s preference was for Mini Climax, but some embarrassed giggles from his staff, disuaded him from that probably fatal step.

Mini skirt

The Mini became a hot fashion item, and the name was adopted for the mini skirt—one of the 1960s greatest innovations. In 1969, my new wife Val and I bought our own Mini, and she bought (or, maybe. made) a few mini skirts to wear with it. The photo above shows my wife on our honeymoon with our second-hand Mini Traveller—a “woody” version of the Minivan. Like any first car, we loved it, but today I would consider it very unrefined and as slow as a wet weekend in Cowley. How the world has changed.

It would be 25 years before I owned another Mini, although in the 1970s Val drove several Mini company cars. One of the great benefits of being a senior motor industry executive at that time was that you had an entitlement to not just a company car for yourself but also, depending on your level, cars for your spouse and even your children. It sounds profligate, but in fact it was very profitable for the company as the cars were changed frequently and sold to the dealers at excellent prices.

I left the UK in 1977 for sunny Australia, missing the Thatcher years. But I did cross paths with the first British woman PM in a totally memorable, or maybe it should be unforgettable, boardroom lunch in Sydney in 1994. But that is a story for another time.

One success Margaret Thatcher can rightly claim is that she instigated the actions that finally pulled British Leyland out of its part-nationalisation and into privatisation and acquisition by British Aerospace in 1988.

Enter BMW

Exactly why British Aerospace bought the company, I don’t know. But six years later, they managed to package it up enough to make it attractive to BMW. And what a disaster that turned out to be, except for the Mini brand. BMW retained the Mini after disposing of Rover and Land Rover in 2000. Ironically, Land Rover now lives on alongside Jaguar under the ownership of the Indian Tata Group and has been successful in recent years.

My life was Mini free until 1994 when I built a Cooper S for motorsport. This was a really wonderful car. And the highlight of my motorsport “career” was winning a highly coveted Targa plate and coming third in the up-to-1600cc class in the exciting but dangerous 1996 Targa Tasmania.

Due to a combination of heavy rain—ideal Mini driving conditions—a very well-prepared car, and excellent teamwork with co-driver Owen, we did really well. See the photo of me driving in the rain somewhere in Tasmania with Owen telling me through the intercom, “leave the valves in the head mate” as I accelerated hard out of a corner.

My next Mini encounter was at a product familiarisation day at the Castle Coombe race circuit in the UK in the 1990s. I cannot recollect the year, but it was during the BMW ownership of Rover/Land Rover, and it was snowing. There was one Mini there to be driven. It was a sad car.

By that time, the Mini was well past its use-by date. It was embarrassingly slow, unrefined and uncomfortable. I remember driving it almost flat out round the circuit. It was so slow that braking was unnecessary. The Mini continued in production only as long as it did because it had become a cult car in Japan and still sold there right up to its demise in 2000 with interest sustained by special edition after special edition.

The new Mini

In 1998, the senior managers of Rover and BMW sales companies were asked to put forward their proposals for a new version of the Mini’s sales potential. I could not see it selling in vast numbers at the pricing they proposed. How wrong I was. The BMW Mini was a success from launch down to a great product and excellent marketing. Particularly surprising to me was that it was a big success in the USA.

Fast forward to late 2020, and I was giving serious thought to selling my 1977 2.7 Porsche 911 and replacing it with a Volkswagen Golf GTI or Golf R. I happened, by pure chance, to drive friend Laura’s Mini. It was a Eureka moment. How did I not have it on my consideration list? I had to have a Mini.

So, the week before Xmas, I was the owner of a brand new, fully optioned five-door Mini Cooper S, including the John Cooper works options. Yes, the same John Cooper “decapitated” by Lord Stokes. It was the ultimate impulse purchase. I had not done my homework. It was way over the budget I had in mind, and I saw the car come off the transporter at the dealership and decided to buy it there and then. However, I did take a very short test drive on trade plates to assure myself that I had not totally lost my mind.

Do I like it? Is the Pope a Catholic? It is brilliant. The build quality is superb. It feels super solid. The two-litre turbocharged BMW power unit is a gem. The seven-speed double-clutch automatic gearbox is a delight. The performance and handling are excellent, and it is economical. Mine has 18in wheels, whereas the original Mini had 10in wheels, so it’s a very far cry from the original Mini.

BMW has done an excellent job in developing the Mini brand from the initial three-door hatch product. Now there is even an electric Mini, but, so far, no Mini Climax.

Yes, the five-door model’s styling is odd and somewhat quirky and definitely not to everyone’s taste. The BMW Mini is much bigger than the original because it has to be much safer and has air-conditioning and a load of features not even dreamt of back in 1959. Also, people are now bigger and expect more space than when the original Mini was launched. It is, despite this, still a small car even in its “midi” five-door version.

The final twist to this story is that my new Mini was made in the BMW Cowley factory, located on the Pressed Steel factory site where I started my career way back in 1968. The wheel turns.

Read more from John Shingleton

You can find more from John Shingleton at The Rolling Road

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