Rootes Group: The Other British Empire
In post-war Britain, if you wanted to look like you had "made it," you bought a car from the Rootes Group. From the stately Humber that whisked government ministers around Whitehall to the chic Sunbeam Alpine that ferried film stars along the Riviera, their cars were symbols of a confident, stylish, and prosperous Britain. The company was an empire built on salesmanship and glamour. Which makes it all the more remarkable that it was brought to its knees by a tiny, unreliable, but brilliantly clever little car built in a field in Scotland.
The Salesman and the Spanner
The empire was the creation of two brothers. William "Billy" Rootes was the showman, a ferociously ambitious salesman who could charm a bird from a tree and then sell the tree back to it. His brother Reginald was the quiet, cautious financial brain. Billy was the engine; Reggie was the steering and the brakes. They started as car dealers in Kent and, by being sharper than everyone else, quickly became the biggest in the country. At nineteen, Billy, in an act of breathtaking audacity, quit his penny-an-hour apprenticeship at Singer, borrowed a pile of cash, and bought fifty cars directly from his former employer. He sold them all within months. The lesson was clear: it was much more profitable to be the boss than the tea boy.
A Car for Every Step on the Ladder
Having mastered the art of selling cars, the brothers decided to build them. They went on a shopping spree, buying up a collection of famous but struggling British brands: Hillman, Humber, Sunbeam, and Singer. With this stable, they became masters of selling a social ladder. They would develop one core car and then offer it in different flavours. The working man got the humble Hillman Minx. The aspiring office manager got a slightly smarter Singer Gazelle. The sporty chap having an affair got a Sunbeam Rapier. And the man who ran the whole factory drove a Humber Super Snipe, a magnificent, wood-lined drawing room on wheels. They were all basically the same car underneath, a cynical and brilliant reflection of the British class system.
The War and the Export Drive
During the Second World War, Billy Rootes's vast organisational skills were put to use by the nation, earning him a knighthood for his work organising the "shadow factories" that built thousands of bombers. After the war, he became a champion of the government's "export or die" mantra, travelling the world and selling his stylish cars to a recovering planet. For a time, Rootes was a great British success story, a symbol of the nation's industrial might.
A Bridge Too Far: The Linwood Disaster
The beginning of the end was a car: the 1963 Hillman Imp. It was a brilliant, rear-engined answer to the Mini. The problem was where it was built. The government, in its infinite wisdom, refused to let Rootes expand their Midlands factories and instead forced them to build a new plant in Linwood, Scotland, a place with high unemployment and absolutely no history of building cars. The result was a catastrophe. The factory was 300 miles from their suppliers, and the workforce, mostly ex-shipbuilders, treated the fine art of car assembly with the same delicate touch they'd previously used on the hull of a tanker. The Imp was notoriously unreliable, and the financial losses from the Linwood plant began to bleed the entire company dry.
The Detroit Intervention
By the mid-1960s, the Rootes Group was in serious trouble. The British government tried to broker a forced marriage with Leyland, but the deal fell through. Mortally wounded by the Scottish gamble, Billy Rootes, now Lord Rootes, was forced to turn to the Americans. He began negotiations with Chrysler, but died in 1964 before the deal was done. Without its charismatic leader, the company was rudderless, and Chrysler completed its takeover in 1967. The Rootes empire was now just the British outpost of a Detroit giant.
The Americans, of course, had no understanding of the subtle class distinctions that had made the company so successful. They saw a messy collection of overlapping brands and began to dismantle it. The story of the Rootes Group is a cautionary tale of a company that, for all its style and salesmanship, was ultimately brought down by one brilliantly flawed car and a dose of misguided government planning.