SENT FROM COVENTRY

That Canley became Triumph’s spiritual home is all the more remarkable considering that its spell making only Triumphs was remarkably brief – from 1963 to its closure in 1980. Before that it had been the home of the Standard Motor Company, which had built an aircraft factory there during WW1 and moved its car operations there in stages between 1919 and 1936. The factory tripled in size when two ‘shadow factories’ were built there by the government in the late 1930s and Standard moved into these post-war. This was when Standard acquired the moribund Triumph Motor Company, which had declared bankruptcy in 1939 having been split from the famous Triumph Engineering firm (which dated back to the 1880s and had made motorcycles in Coventry since 1902) in 1936.

The Triumph Motor factory on Holbrook Lane had been destroyed in the Coventry Blitz of November 1940, leaving only the name for Standard boss Sir John Black to acquire in 1945. Sir John saw the potential in Triumph being used on more upmarket cars than the well-regarded but rather dull Standard products and began with the swoopily-styled Roadster in 1946 and the big razor-edge styled saloon series (the 1800, 2000 and Renown) in 1949, followed by the unsuccessful Mayflower and then hitting it big with the TR2 sports car in 1953.

Throughout the 1950s Triumph made only the globally-popular TR sports cars. None the less the fortunes of Standard and Triumph swapped places, as the Standard saloon cars became squeezed