Laurence Pomeroy: The Postmaster's Son

In Edwardian corporate life, there were two ways to lose your job. The first was public failure - a scandal, a catastrophic error, something undeniable. The second was quieter and far more civilised: your superiors would create the circumstances for someone else to prove you obsolete, then express regret that change had become necessary. This second method was preferred by gentlemen who valued discretion over confrontation. In the winter of 1907-08, while F.W. Hodges, chief designer of Vauxhall Motors, toured Egypt on an extended holiday, the board decided to test whether their competent, conservative engineer was still the right man for a company with sporting ambitions. They gave his junior assistant, a 23-year-old draughtsman named Laurence Pomeroy, an interesting assignment. What happened next would define British sports car engineering for a generation.

The Postmaster's Son

Pomeroy arrived at Vauxhall in 1905 as assistant to chief designer Frederick Hodges, having worked his way through a locomotive engineering apprenticeship and various draughting positions. He was the son of a postmaster, which, in the class-conscious world of British engineering, marked him as an outsider among the gentleman-amateurs who dominated the industry. What he lacked in pedigree, he compensated for with a ferocious work ethic and an engineer's understanding of what made engines work properly.

Hodges was a marine engineer by training, competent and careful, entirely satisfied with producing reliable motorcars for people who viewed speed as vulgar. By 1907, Vauxhall's board was beginning to wonder if careful was enough. The motor industry was moving fast, and Hodges's conservative approach was starting to look less like prudence and more like timidity. When the RAC announced its 2,000 Mile Trial for 1908, the board saw an opportunity to test their suspicions.

The Winter Invitation

In the winter of 1907-08, Hodges was given an extended holiday. The sources describe it delicately as "an extended winter holiday," which in Edwardian corporate language meant somewhere between two and three months - long enough to tour Egypt properly, short enough that you could still pretend you were coming back to the same job. While Hodges was photographing pyramids, the managing director Percy Crosbie Kidner walked into Pomeroy's office with an interesting proposition.

Hodges had designed an engine for the RAC Trial. Would Pomeroy, purely as an intellectual exercise, you understand, care to see if he could design something better? It was the sort of question that ends careers, and both men knew whose. Pomeroy had a few months to prove that a 23-year-old draughtsman knew more about engine design than the company's chief engineer. If he failed, he'd remain a promising junior forever. If he succeeded, well, Vauxhall would have to make some difficult decisions.

Pomeroy locked himself in the drawing office and proceeded to apply everything he'd learned about engines from studying French technical texts. Where Hodges had proposed a conservative design that might produce 12 to 16 horsepower, Pomeroy designed an L-head valve layout with large valves and a free-flowing exhaust that could deliver 38 brake horsepower at 2,500 rpm from the same capacity. It was nearly double the power from the same-sized engine. Either Pomeroy was a genius or he'd made catastrophic miscalculations that would embarrass everyone involved.

The Uncomfortable Return

When Hodges returned from Egypt, tanned and refreshed, he discovered that his understudy had been given carte blanche to redesign his engine. Worse, management clearly believed Pomeroy's approach was superior. The board hadn't sacked Hodges, but they'd done something perhaps more professionally humiliating - they'd invited someone else to prove he was wrong while he was away.

What followed must have been one of the more awkward periods in British engineering management. Hodges remained chief designer in title, but everyone knew Pomeroy's engine would represent Vauxhall in the RAC Trial. For the next several months, Hodges watched his junior build the car that would determine both their futures. If Pomeroy failed spectacularly, perhaps management would remember that experience and seniority mattered. If Pomeroy succeeded, Hodges would be finished.

The Long Road to Vindication

The 1908 RAC Trial was 2,000 miles of systematic torture spread across the worst roads Britain could offer. The route wound through Scotland and back, over unmade tracks that turned to swamps in rain and rattled machines to pieces in dry weather. It wasn't a race but an examination, where cars lost points for mechanical failures, and a perfect score required machinery that simply refused to break regardless of what physics attempted.

Three Vauxhalls entered, designated A-Types, powered by Pomeroy's redesigned engine. What followed was a masterclass in mechanical endurance. While Rolls-Royce entries suffered ignition failures in the Scottish Highlands and heavy tourers from established manufacturers shed components on rough tracks, the Vauxhalls simply kept going. One of them won the speed trials at Brooklands, part of the overall event. Another took the fuel economy award for its class. Over 2,000 miles of punishment, they proved that Pomeroy's high-revving design wasn't just powerful but reliable - the combination everyone claimed was impossible.

The implications were unavoidable. Pomeroy had taken Hodges's conservative approach and doubled its power output with no increase in size or loss of reliability. Vauxhall's advertisements began boasting "buy a 20 hp Vauxhall, pay tax on 20 hp, but get near double the horsepower in your car."

The Professional Execution

Hodges handled his displacement with the dignity that British engineering culture demanded. He left Vauxhall within weeks of the trial's conclusion, moving on to other ventures where his careful, conservative approach was perhaps more valued. He never spoke publicly about being replaced, maintaining a stiff upper lip even as his career's defining moment became someone else's triumph.

Pomeroy, aged 25, was promoted to Works Manager, effectively replacing Hodges in everything but the exact title. By 1910, his position was formalised, and by 1914, he was Technical Director. It was a meteoric rise built on a single brutal demonstration: he was right, Hodges was wrong, and management had been correct to test their suspicions. The establishment never quite forgave Pomeroy for being a postmaster's son who proved more talented than the gentleman engineers, but they couldn't argue with results.

Building Thoroughbreds for Daredevils

Having proved himself, Pomeroy set about transforming Vauxhall from a builder of respectable motorcars into something altogether more exciting. The Prince Henry - named after Prince Henry of Prussia, whose enthusiasm for motoring lent royal prestige to the brand - combined Pomeroy's powerful engines with lightweight construction. For the 1910 Prince Henry Trial in Germany, he boosted the engine to 60 brake horsepower and sent three cars to compete against Austro-Daimlers and other Continental thoroughbreds.

The Vauxhalls didn't win, but they performed brilliantly enough that replicas were offered for sale at £580, complete with the Prince Henry designation. One customer was sufficiently impressed to order two: Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who apparently decided that if German princes endorsed these cars, Russian emperors could too. Vauxhalls began dominating British hillclimbs and speed trials, establishing the company as a serious performance manufacturer.

The ultimate expression of Pomeroy's philosophy was the 30-98, introduced in 1913. The name supposedly derived from its RAC horsepower rating of 30 and its actual brake horsepower of 98, though the real figures were more complicated. What mattered was that it could achieve 100 mph when most roads weren't designed for half that speed. It was raw, loud, magnificently impractical, and utterly glorious - engineering for men who believed that personal safety was something that happened to other people. The establishment had always maintained that you could have power or dependability, never both. Pomeroy's cars proved them comprehensively wrong.

The Quiet Betrayal

After the First World War, Pomeroy left Vauxhall. He'd proposed an overhead camshaft six-cylinder and a V12; the board wasn't interested in either. It was 1919, and he'd achieved everything possible there. He spent time in America working for the Aluminum Company, then returned to Britain in 1926 to join Daimler as a consultant to a joint venture with AEC. By 1928 he'd moved to the main Daimler operation as chief engineer, becoming managing director in 1929.

It was a choice that must have baffled those who knew him. Daimler was the automotive establishment personified, the official car of the Royal Family, a builder of vast, silent limousines for people who considered speed both vulgar and dangerous. Everything, in other words, that the young rebel Pomeroy had defined himself against when he redesigned Hodges's engine in 1907.

Yet here was the speed merchant, the man who'd built cars for daredevils, now designing engines for monarchs. Daimler's challenge was different but equally demanding: absolute silence and smoothness for passengers who believed that hearing your engine was a sign of mechanical vulgarity. Pomeroy became a champion of the sleeve-valve engine, a fiendishly complex design that eliminated traditional valves and springs entirely, using sliding sleeves inside the cylinders instead. The result was near-supernatural smoothness and an engine that whispered rather than roared.

It was ruinously expensive to manufacture and maintain, prone to oil consumption that would bankrupt lesser owners, but for royalty and maharajahs who measured wealth in palaces rather than pounds, such concerns were meaningless. The engineering challenge fascinated Pomeroy in ways that perhaps surprised him. Where once he'd studied French texts about maximum breathing and high piston speeds, he now pursued absolute silence - the ultimate technical problem for someone who'd already solved power.

From Outsider to Establishment

For the next decade, Pomeroy's superb Double-Six engines - twelve cylinders of whisper-quiet sophistication - powered the cars of kings, queens, and various hereditary monarchs who needed to arrive without being heard. It was about as far from the thunderous 30-98s as engineering could travel. The postmaster's son who'd been given his chance to prove the establishment wrong had become the establishment, designing engines for people who'd never dream of testing their superiors.

The British establishment had a particular talent for this: not crushing its talented outsiders but eventually absorbing them, channelling their abilities into projects that reinforced rather than challenged the existing order. Pomeroy died in 1941 at age 58, honoured and respected. His son, Laurence Pomeroy Jr., became technical editor of The Motor, writing with authority about the very cars his father had pioneered. The family had arrived.

But on those occasions when a 30-98 appears at a classic car event, still magnificently loud after a century, you can hear the 1907 version of Pomeroy - the young engineer who understood that when management asks you to prove your boss obsolete, you'd better deliver results so undeniable that nobody can question them. Hodges got his extended winter holiday. Pomeroy got his career. And Vauxhall learned that sometimes the best way to replace someone is to give them enough time away to realise they're no longer essential.