Buses August/2002

Many articles have been published over the years about Weymann, Metro-Cammell and Metro-Cammell Weymann, individually and collectively among the biggest and most influential British bus builders of the 20th century. Yet the definitive histories of these businesses have not been written until now. John Senior (with the aid of captions from Alan Townsin) has begun to fill this gap with the first part of the story of Weymann, a bodybuilding business set up by a French-born aviator with ambitions in the car market, but which turned to buses when the Pressed Steel company altered the economics of car building. The delay in anyone getting this story into print can partly be explained by the sheer complexity of who owned what. For Weymann had five owners. Captain Weymann’s original venture was replaced after just two years by a restructure that brought it into the Central Mining & Investment Corporation, a gold and diamond mining business that also owned South African and Portuguese bus companies which, hardly surprisingly, bought Weymann bodies. The Prudential Assurance Company owned Weymann from 1937 to 1942, before selling it to United Molasses. Metro-Cammell took over in 1964 and promptly closed the business down. But that’s only half of the story, for John Senior has also unravelled much of the mystery surrounding the connections with Metro-Cammell and Vickers. Essentially, Vickers — a company that specialised in making things from steel — owned the Metropolitan Carriage, Wagon & Finance Company in Birmingham. It also had its own bus bodybuilding operation in Kent, but closed it in 1929 when the onset of the Great Depression prompted it to form a joint venture with Cammell Laird that became Metro-Cammell. As he explains, the Metro-Cammell Weymann joint venture was born of necessity. Although the Vickers connection helped Met-Cam harness the new technology of all-metal bodywork, Met-Cam lacked Weymann’s customer base. Each had plenty to gain by bringing the two together at a time of rapid change and upheaval into one jointly owned sales company. The book explains these and many other intriguing facts behind some of Weymann’s best years. It does this with the benefit of many meetings between the author and former Weymann employees. Indeed, this isn’t just a book for enthusiasts, but also for the Surrey local history market and some may feel uncomfortable with the emphasis on corporate affairs and detailed movements of personnel rather than on all of the products it built. Others with far more knowledge than I tell me there also are some errors in the detail, but the big picture of how the business was structured and the what-might-have-beens along the way make a useful addition to the history of the British bus industry. lf I have a concern, it’s that the author’s sources might have contributed to a one-sided view of Weymann’s eventual demise. More will emerge when Part Two appears, but references to ‘agitators’ on the shop floor suggest that the company’s later history may be made to fit a stereotypical view of post war British industrial relations. One in which management was blameless. No doubt there is another equally prejudiced stereotypical view that the workforce was entirely blameless. I hope that Part Two turns out to take a more balanced view.