British Motor Corporation

The British Motor Corporation Limited

Industry	Motor vehicles
Predecessor	Morris Motors Limited Austin Motor Company Limited
Founded	1952 amalgamating Morris and Austin
Founders	Leonard Lord William Richard Morris
Defunct	1966
Fate	Merged with Mini, 1100, MGB, Austin-Healey

The British Motor Corporation Limited (BMC) was a UK-based vehicle manufacturer formed in early 1952 to give effect to an agreed merger of the Morris and Austin businesses.^[1]

BMC acquired the shares in Morris Motors and the Austin Motor Company. Morris Motors, the holding company of the productive businesses of the Nuffield Organization, owned MG, Riley, and Wolseley.^[1]

The agreed exchange of shares in Morris or Austin for shares in the new holding company, BMC, became effective in mid-April 1952.^[2]

In September 1965, BMC took control of its major supplier of bodies, Pressed Steel, acquiring Jaguar's body supplier in the process. In September 1966, BMC merged with Jaguar Cars.^[3] In December 1966, BMC changed its name to British Motor Holdings Limited (BMH).^[4]

BMH merged, in May 1968, with

BMC was the largest British car company of its day, with (in 1952) 39% of British output, producing a wide range of cars under brand names including Austin, Morris, MG,

As well as the car manufacturing arms, the company had its own printing and publishing firm, the Nuffield Press, inherited from the Morris Motors group.

In 1958, BMC hired

The compact Farina model debuted in 1958 with the

The mid-sized Farinas were launched in 1958 with the

• Austin A125 Sheerline 1947–54
• Austin A135 Princess 1947–56
• Austin A40 Sports 1950–53
• Austin A70 Hereford 1950–54
• Austin A30 1951–56
• Austin A90 Atlantic
  1949–52
• Austin A40 Devon 1947–52

• MG TD
  1949–53
• MG TF 1953
  –55
• MG Y-type 1947–53

• Morris Minor 1948–71 (1972 in New Zealand)
• Morris Oxford MO 1948–54
• Morris Six MS 1948–53

• Riley RM series 1945–55

• Wolseley 4/50 1948–53
• Wolseley 6/80
  1948–54
• Nuffield Oxford Taxi 1947–55

Most BMC projects followed the earlier Austin practice of describing vehicles with an 'ADO' number (which stood for 'Austin Design Office' but after the merger 'Amalgamated Drawing Office'). Hence, cars that had more than one marque name (e.g. Morris Mini Minor and Austin Mini) would have the same ADO number. Given the often complex badge-engineering that BMC undertook, it is common amongst enthusiasts to use the ADO number when referring to vehicles which were a single design (for example, saying 'The ADO15 entered production in 1959'- this encompasses the fact that when launched, the ADO15 was marketed as the Morris Mini Minor and, later, the Austin Seven—soon replaced with Austin Mini). The ADO numbering system did continue for some time after the creation of British Leyland – notable models being the Austin Allegro (ADO67) and the prototype version of the Austin Metro (ADO88).

Most BMC-era commercial vehicles were sold as Morris, but there were sometimes Austin equivalents. Radiator badges on the larger vehicles were often BMC.

• Morris Z-series ¼-ton (Morris Eight Series E) 1940–53
• Morris ¼-ton O-Type (Morris Minor-based van) 1953–71
• Morris Cowley MCV (Morris Cowley#Morris Cowley MCV (1950–1956) van) 1950–56
• Austin A30 van 1954–56
• Austin A35 van 1956–68
• Austin A35 pick-up 1956–57
• Morris ½-ton (Morris Cowley#½-ton series III Series III van) 1956–62
• Austin A55
  van 1958–62
• Austin A55
  pick-up (Australian built) 1958–62
• Mini van 1960–82
• Mini pick-up 1961–82
• Austin A40 Farina van (export only) 1961–67
• Austin 1800
  Utility (Australia built) 1967–74

• Austin K8 1948–1954
• Morris J-type
  1949–1960
• Morris LD 1952–1968
• Morris J2 1956–1967
• Morris 250 JU^[8] 1967–
• Austin/Morris J4 1960–1974

• Austin FX3 Taxi 1949–58
• Austin FL1 Hire Car 1949-58
• Austin FX4 Taxi 1958-82
• Austin FL2 Hire Car 1958-82

• Morris LC4 1952–54
• Morris LC5 1954–60
• Morris FV-series (Series I) 1948–54
• Morris FV-series (Series II) 1954–55
• Morris FE-series (Series III) 1955–59
• Morris FG 1960–68
• Morris FM 1961–68
• Morris WE 1955–64
• Morris WF 1964–81
• Morris FF 1958–61
• Morris FH 1961–64
• Morris FJ 1964–68
• BMC VA 1958–76

With the merger of the Nuffield and Austin interests, the Nuffield Organization's tractor range, the Nuffield Universal, was incorporated into BMC.

In the 1950s and the 1960s, BMC set up 21 plants overseas, some as subsidiaries, and some as joint ventures, to assemble its vehicles. One was British Motor Corporation (Australia) which was established in 1953 at the Nuffield Australia site on the one-time Victoria Park Racecourse, Sydney.^[9] This facility went from a marshalling area for fully imported Morris cars (Austins were up until then being assembled in Melbourne from an earlier Austin Motors establishment), to a facility for making CKD cars, to the total local fabrication and construction of vehicles, engines, and mechanicals.^[10]

Denmark was a particularly strong market for BMC products in Europe. In the postwar period, the Danish government closely regulated exports and imports to maintain the country's balance of trade. High-value imports such as cars were heavily taxed.

From 1963 to 1975, a company was established in Spain to produce BMC cars under licence, its name was: 'AUTHI' -'Automoviles de Turismo Hispano-Ingleses' -'Spanish-English Tourism Automobiles'. The factory was in Pamplona, Navarra, Spain, and when the production of Austin and Mini cars was discontinued, Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo (SEAT), owned by the state and some banks and industrial investors, purchased the factory. After the takeover of SEAT by Volkswagen, SEAT made an 'internal' resale of the Pamplona factory, formerly Authi, to Volkswagen, which soon started producing there the 'Polo'.

In 1964, BMC Turkey was established in cooperation with the British Motor Corporation. The Turkish partners retained the 74% of the capital while 26% held by the UK-based British Motor Corporation.

The

In mid-1965 BMC offered to buy its major supplier Pressed Steel and took control in September with 27,000 employees.^[11][12] Twelve months later, BMC merged with Jaguar Cars adding a further 7,000 employees.^[13] On 14 December 1966 BMC shareholders approved the change of its name to British Motor Holdings (BMH) and it took effect from that date.^[4]

Little more than 12 months later in January 1968, under pressure from the

Within the new conglomerate, the various marques were grouped together into two main divisions, based largely on the original BMC and LMC businesses; with the former mass market BMC marques becoming part of the Austin-Morris division of BLMC, whilst LMC stablemates Rover and Triumph joined Jaguar in the Specialist Division.

This basic structure remained in place right up until the creation of the Austin Rover Group in the early 1980s, by which time BLMC had been nationalised and renamed British Leyland Limited^[15] (later just BL plc), although by this time both Jaguar and Land Rover had been placed in their own independent subsidiaries which were separate from the old BMC/LMC divisions.

Following the merger with Leyland, a review of company records undertaken with the support of the new board, author Graham Turner stated that at the time of the merger, 16 versions of the Mini were being produced, yielding an average profit of just £16 per car, while every Morris Minor sold lost the group £9 and every Austin Westminster sold lost £17.^[16] This helps to explain why the Westminster and Minor were among the early casualties of the merger, as well as the introduction of the Mini Clubman, capable of being built for less, but sold for more than a standard Mini thanks to simplified ("modernised") front panels.

Even the UK's best seller, the Austin/Morris 1100, had to be subjected to an emergency cost-reduction programme which removed about £10 from the cost of each car, applying changes that included the omission of lead sealing from body joints (£2.40 per car), removing provision for optional reversing lamps (£0.10) and "changes in body finish" (£0.75).^[16]

Rebuilding the Cowley plant to include "new automated body building facilities" saved £2.00 in transport costs per car for bodies that no longer needed to be transported from the corporation's Swindon plant and in the longer term further transport costs were saved by concentrating assembly of the model at a single plant, rather than splitting it between plants at Cowley and Longbridge.^[16]

Because of the high proportion of auto-production costs represented by fixed costs that needed to be allocated over a planned production volume, and the use in the 1960s of investment appraisal criteria that were ill-suited to accounting for volume fluctuations and the rapidly changing value of the UK currency in the 1960s, the precise figures quoted may be open to challenge, but the new management's diagnosis that BMC's profitability was insufficient to fund support and new model investment to cover its disparate range of brands and models was hard to refute.^{[citation needed]}

Throughout the 1960s, the failure of the United Kingdom to join the European Economic Community meant that the company could not exploit the lucrative European markets due to high import tariffs, whereas BMC's key rivals Ford and General Motors both had German subsidiaries producing and selling within the bloc, and were therefore immune from those import tariffs.^{[citation needed]}

In 2002,

• BMC engines
• Bathgate Lorry Plant
• British Motor Corporation (Australia)

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to British Motor Corporation.

• Austin Memories