How the History came to be

You can blame it on two Past Masters, Richard Dallimore and the late Victor Gauntlett. As a freelance motoring historian, I’d been commissioned to write the commemorative booklet for the Coachmakers’ celebration of the centenary of the British motor industry at Hagley Hall in 1996, and after this, the pair of them began gently twisting my arm to join the Coachmakers, which I duly did in 1999. Little did I know that there was an ulterior motive; the Company needed an Archivist, the previous incumbent having resigned.

1888 four in hand

The first task was to find a new home for the archive itself, which was housed in a cupboard in a storage area at the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu and was near enough inaccessible to researchers. That took a while, but eventually my contacts with the Aston Martin Heritage Trust, whose annual ASTON magazine I’d taken over the editorship on the death of my late boss at Ford and former head of Aston Martin, Walter Hayes, secured the use of a shelving unit in its archives in a former mediaeval tithe barn at Drayton St Leonard in Oxfordshire. The fact that Victor Gauntlett had been the saviour and chief executive of Aston Martin helped, too.

It was Victor who, with Richard’s backing, set the history ball rolling, and I was commissioned to write a book that brought the Coachmakers’ story up to date. After all, nothing had been published since the Tercentenary in 1967, when a rather scissors and paste compilation that leaned heavily on the 1938 history had been published.

1803 Trevithick

I found that neither previous history said much about the achievements of the Coachmakers in the 20th century, and that there was little information on that period in the archives – a diverse collection of material assembled after the Second World War to replace the original archives that had gone up in smoke when Coachmakers’ Hall was destroyed in the Blitz.

Fortunately, the archives contained members’ lists going back to the mid-1800s, so I could track notable members from those years, and was amazed to find how many leading lights from the motoring and aviation fields had joined the Coachmakers in the 20th century. Using the previous histories as a foundation for telling the tale of the early years, whose records had been lost in the 1940 bombing, I managed to expand and rewrite that part of the story, while recording the history from the late 19th century on meant much digging through bound volumes of motoring and aviation magazines to unearth nuggets of Coachmaker history. Sadly, Victor’s untimely death in 2002 removed the driving force from the Court and, though I had a draft manuscript ready for publication a couple of years later, it was put on hold.

1976 Concorde

In a way, that was a blessing in disguise, for over the next decade, with regular encouragement from Richard Dallimore, I continued the research, and added some 10,000 words of new material to the history. Finally, with the enthusiastic backing of Martin Payne during his Master’s Year, and the design skills of Ben Gibbs of Motion Ltd, the history was at last published. It was a long gestation period, but I think the end result was worth waiting for.