The Austin Seven was a car for the millions; a miniature conception of a modern tourer that would capture the imagination of everyone who dreamed of becoming a motorist in the ’20s.

Words: Eoin Young Photos: Terry Marshall

The Austin Seven was a scaled-down version of the real thing. It had three-stud wire wheels, the skinny tyres and the advanced design of four-wheel-brakes and room for a big man behind the wheel. It was a vintage version of the tiny affordable Mini that would amaze and excite the motoring world four decades later.

Sir Herbert Austin built over 300,000 of his baby Sevens between model launch in 1922 until 1939, when the Big Seven replaced the cheeky little Chummy. I owned a couple over the years, and drove several more, so I can appreciate the charm of Austin’s idea of motoring for the millions. I would have thought there were more than 300,000 built, but I suppose it just seems like that.

“I’d rather have given the world the Austin Seven, my dear fellow, than have won the Gordon Bennett race for England”

It was an outrageous little car with everything seemingly in miniature, including the miniscule 750cc four-cylinder engine that seemed to be hiding beneath the little bonnet. Everyone of a certain age either started their motoring life with an Austin Seven or owned one at some time in their career. Stories starring the unlikely little gem were legend. Aubrey Parnell flew Spitfires in the RAF and told me how he would leave a half-crown coin on the driver’s seat while he was upstairs at work — and when he returned, his fitter would have filled the tank with avgas.

Early Seven celebrities

Lotus founder Colin Chapman’s first competition car was a modified Austin Seven, and legend has it that this car grew the legend of the Lotus name when it failed to sell at auction, and was left with a label on the rad cap that read: LOT U/S — Lot Unsold — Lotus?

Bruce McLaren started to put his stamp on motor sport with a little Ulster sporting two-seater version of the Austin Seven, and when his international successes in Grand Prix and CanAm sports car racing with his own McLaren cars meant he could move into a splendid new home in a private Surrey park, he commissioned an oil painting. It showed the Earl of March, grandfather of present Goodwood promoter Lord Charles March, at the wheel of the Austin Seven he and SCH ‘Sammy’ Davis shared to win the 500-mile race at Brooklands. It hung in pride of place in his lounge.

SF Edge, the racing stalwart who championed Napier in the early years, won the Gordon Bennett race in 1902, and set a 24-hour record at Brooklands when the track had just opened in 1907. He was a power in the land, and he must have gathered attention when he announced in 1925, two years after the Seven first appeared, “I’d rather have given the world the Austin Seven, my dear fellow, than have won the Gordon Bennett race for England a dozen times over, and in 12 consecutive years. Hang it, you don’t realise what Austin has done. I wonder, indeed, if Austin himself realises what he has done? Ford had a unique market, on his own doorstep, for the Model T, one which had never existed previously and will never exist again. Austin had not. Austin’s case was an instance of that very uncommon phenomenon, a supply creating a demand, and filling it to the last ounce and penny piece.”

Birth of a baby

Herbert Austin was born in Britain in 1866, but spent his formative years in Australia as an engineer working on sheep-shearing machinery for the Wolseley company. He returned to his homeland in his early 30s to design a car for Wolseley, but left after an argument on design principles, and established the Austin Motor Company at Longbridge. Folklore has it that Austin sketched what would become the Austin Seven on the billiard table of his home.

Folklore has it that Austin sketched what would become the Austin Seven on the billiard table of his home

An enthusiastic young motoring man, Arthur Waite, married Austin’s daughter and was eager to go racing with a modified version of the baby Seven soon after its launch. At the Easter Monday Brooklands meeting on March 23, 1923, he was into the record books with a flying mile at 62.64mph (100.8kph). A few weeks later and he was down at the new Monza track in Italy, winning the 750cc class of the Cycle-car Grand Prix. Waite would take a special Seven to Australia and win the first Grand Prix there, run on the Philip Island circuit in 1928, thus boosting sales of the tiny car in the Colonies.

The ‘Ulster’ Austin was named for the Tourist Trophy races on the Ards course in Northern Ireland. Special Austins raced at Brooklands and all over the world, including New Zealand, where George Smith and others would race the ex-works ‘Rubber Duck’, so named because of the chassis flex. I tried to drive this car at Ruapuna, but we couldn’t re-fit the steering wheel once I had squeezed into the cockpit! In the 1930s, the Austin Company became more serious about competition and built the tiny single-seater twin-cams.

First hand experience

I bought my first Austin Seven in the late 1950s when I was a bank clerk in Timaru. In retrospect it was a peculiar little creature, a sort of ‘high chassis’ sports car compared with the ‘low chassis’ Ulsters as raced by my soon-to-be mentor, Bruce McLaren. I regarded it then as a legitimate piece of sporting machinery, and was immensely proud of it despite its lack of brakes. It was probably a case of ignorance having a lot to answer for. Throwing it sideways in moments of stress tended to help retardation. DB Tubbs wrote of the baby’s brakes: “Four-wheel brakes were proudly offered by Sir Herbert a couple of years before they appeared on Rolls-Royce. They were,” he said, “compensated and instantly adjustable.

“All brake parts were interchangeable. There is no doubt about the Seven’s complying with the law, which calls for two independent braking systems, for the back brakes worked by the pedal and the front ones by hand-brake only. Clearly the pedal was regarded as the service brake, for customers were instructed ‘when descending a long hill’ to ‘supplement the action of the foot-brake at intervals by the use of the handbrake for brief periods.’

“By putting the car on to full lock it was possible to jerk the handbrake cable taut on one side, thus causing the car to pirouette. This was occasionally done on purpose. Austin brakes, like those of many Bugattis, were notoriously feeble. And all the time I thought it was me!

Sound history

I remember a Model T trembler coil installed with a spark plug in the muffler down to the side of the passenger’s seat, and when a button on the dashboard was pressed after a few seconds with the choke out, there was a most impressive BANG! that I imagined to be hugely amusing. I bought my Seven from Wally Willmott, who would soon become Bruce McLaren’s racing mechanic, and we would share digs in Britain. Back then he was an apprentice, and I learned later that he had been immensely relieved to sell me the car¦ followed by a period of terminal embarrassment when he remembered that he had welded in the troublesome axle keys, which were always shearing under his enthusiastic driving style.

It had a polished alloy cylinder head and was good for 60mph

Wal remembers buying the car in 1953. “It cost 25 quid. I went halves with my sister and I soon bought her out, because I was always working on it and she never got to drive. The axle keys were a problem when I had the car, as were the rear wheel spokes which would snap with a loud PING! if you cornered too hard. “There were no brakes. The only way to make the Testing Station gauge register at all was to pull hard on the handbrake while pushing on the pedal with both feet. I bolted the seat so far forward that the fat testing manager couldn’t drive, and was happy to allow the owner (me) to perform the braking process.

“It had a polished alloy cylinder head and was good for 60mph, to the horror of my mother, who had always thought it was slow enough to be safe. I had also arranged for a removable floor on the passenger’s side so that, after the spark plug in the muffler ignited the choke-enriched mixture with a loud bang, I would kick out pistons and things to bounce down the road. Then I had to stop and gather them up again for another performance. We used to think that was great, as well as the oil can to squirt engine oil down the vacuum wiper hose to smoke out the girls in the Caroline Bay Milk Bar.” I was often passenger in those antics. I wonder if that made us milk bar cowboys?

Chummy

The original Chummy was effectively a two-seater with nominal seating space in the back. Sir Herbert had planned it that way. The sales catalogue in 1923 stated, “The space at the back of the driver’s seat has intentionally been restricted so that any attempt to overload the car with too many passengers will be militated against by the discomfort attached thereto¦”

The original Chummy was effectively a two-seater with nominal seating space in the back. Sir Herbert had planned it that way

London vintagent Sandy Skinner created what he called ‘The Wooden Austin’, a shapely little two-seater special with a lightweight plywood body. There was a vague suggestion that I would own the car when he had tired of using it in vintage events and as a mildly eccentric road car in London, and I borrowed it for a few days to try in Surrey. We snapped the little car beside a giant American sedan to get everything into perspective.

Our cameo car was on display in a new car dealership in Kerikeri when I discovered it in 1989, and I eventually became its owner. I had a holiday home in Opito Bay miles down a gravel road, so the little Chummy was probably the least practical car to have had in the Bay of Islands. I recall driving it and trying to recapture the fun that I’d enjoyed with the earlier Austin in Timaru during my bank clerk days, but somehow that magic seemed to have dissolved with the years. Maybe I’d become spoilt. It didn’t seem to do anything very well, except act as a magnet for onlookers every time I parked it in the main street. It looked like something out of Enid Blyton.

I eventually trucked the baby blue Austin down to Christchurch, and it was sold by Fazazz to a chap who took it to Singapore. It came back from there and was then bought by a new owner in Christchurch. I know Bruce Miles will be totally captivated with his new acquisition. The Chummy has all the charm of a true vintage car, with the added advantage that fresh air is free and while performance is modest, so are the running costs in this modern day and age.