British Leyland

~ the obituary ~

Three letters on the back of a Turkish municipal bus explain most of why this one is here. BMC Otomotiv was set up in İzmir in 1964 by Ergün Özakat with the British Motor Corporation holding 26 percent of it. Austin and Morris vehicles were built there under license, seventeen years after the first Austin trucks arrived in the country in 1947. Anyone who grew up in Turkey has seen those letters ten thousand times without once thinking about where they came from. They came from Birmingham, and the British half of that arrangement is dead while the Turkish half is still making buses.

British Motor Corporation went into British Motor Holdings, and on 17 January 1968 British Motor Holdings merged with the Leyland Motor Corporation to create the British Leyland Motor Corporation. The new company had about 40 percent of the British car market on day one. Only four manufacturers anywhere built more vehicles than it did: General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Volkswagen. Donald Stokes came over from Leyland to run it. The government of Harold Wilson had encouraged the whole thing on the theory that Britain needed one national champion rather than a dozen squabbling factories.

It lasted seven years as a private company. Sir Don Ryder was commissioned to look at the books and handed his report to Tony Benn on 26 March 1975, fourteen weeks after starting. It was published that April, and by the end of June the state owned the company in all but name.

~ the case file ~

~ forty percent of a country ~

The problem was visible from the first week and nobody could solve it. British Leyland owned ten car marques: Austin, Morris, Rover, Triumph, Jaguar, MG, Riley, Wolseley, Land Rover, Mini. It also owned Leyland trucks and buses. Most of those marques sold cars that competed directly with each other, and the Austin dealer and the Morris dealer on the same high street now answered to the same head office and still fought over the same customer.

What came out of it was the Austin Allegro in 1973 and the Morris Marina before it, both of which stayed in production for about a decade and both of which are still used in Britain as shorthand for something built badly. The engineering talent was real enough. The Mini was in the building and so was the Range Rover. None of it added up to a company that could fund its own next model.

~ what the state bought ~

On 17 June 1975 the government became the majority shareholder, and on 27 June the British Leyland Motor Corporation ceased to exist and became British Leyland Limited. The price was an initial 246 million pounds for roughly 95 percent of the equity. Existing shareholders were offered ten pence per share against a nominal value of fifty. The holding was parked with the National Enterprise Board and grew over the following years, though the state never actually owned all of it.

This was not nationalization in the way the coal mines were nationalized. It was a rescue that left the shell of a public company standing, which made it possible to argue about British Leyland in Parliament every year for a decade.

~ the cars people remember ~

Michael Edwardes was appointed chief executive in 1977 and spent five years closing plants and fighting the shop floor, most famously dismissing the Longbridge convener Derek Robinson in 1979. The Metro arrived in 1980 as the car that was supposed to fix everything and sold well enough to keep the lights on. In 1979 the company signed a licensing deal with Honda, and from October 1981 it was selling a rebadged Honda Ballade as the Triumph Acclaim, built at Cowley. A British industrial policy project had ended up leaning on a Japanese design office to fill a hole in its own range.

~ how the name went quiet ~

By December 1978 the holding company had already been renamed BL Limited. The full words had acquired such a reputation that the company preferred two initials nobody had to say out loud. In 1986 BL plc was renamed The Rover Group in preparation for privatization, and in 1988 British Aerospace bought it for 150 million pounds. BMW paid 800 million pounds for BAe's 80 percent stake on 31 January 1994 and got rid of most of it six years later.

Leyland Trucks still builds trucks in Lancashire under Paccar ownership. Land Rover and Jaguar belong to Tata. Cowley, which built the Triumph Acclaim, builds the Mini for BMW today. Longbridge, which was the center of the whole thing and employed tens of thousands, was largely cleared after MG Rover collapsed in 2005 and has been redeveloped since.

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