Thread: Nammon's 1955 S1 86"

I think that when looking at questions such as this you need to cast your mind back to 1955. Today we assume cars are built by enormous companies, designed by huge teams of experts, and produced in tens of thousands of identical vehicles on largely automated assembly lines.

In 1955, it was only ten years after the end of the largest war in history, and Solihull had been effectively on the front line (they were a target for bombing), as well as a major supplier to the war effort. The factory was only a few years past being changed over from military production to civilian, and this small company was making a vehicle unlike anything they had ever made previously, and which was selling in larger numbers than anything they had ever made. And they were built largely by hand.

The vehicle was designed and production managed by a group of only a few dozen, at most, and, faced with post-war shortages and changes in priorities as orders changed and production ramped up, it is certain that a lot of vehicles would have gone out with differences for various reasons that were never documented, either to meet customer requests or just deal with, for example, a temporary shortage of "the right" paint.

There was no such thing as "just in time" management in those days (for example, Rover stored the kits for supply to Minerva for years to meet their contract, which had repercussions when they were still supplying Minerva with 80" kits after Solihull was making 86s!). In a world where communication was by mail, and even phone calls were only a small part of business life, production changes had to be made pretty much at shop floor level to cope with problems. And unless deemed important, never documented.

John

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