Well welcome back to the Optional Extra video and thank you for joining me on the journey
through the history of the Hillman Imp. I was very fortunate to be able to look at a few
different very useful sources. The first of them was a website called “imps4ever.info”. They have
so much information about everything to do with the Hillman Imp that was fascinating to read.
There are another couple of videos that I also found useful. One of them you may already be
aware of. It's a video called “The Car’s The Star” A guy called I think Quentin Willson His name is
Quentin Willson, did a whole load of videos about different cars in the 1990s. It's
probably where the idea for these videos came from, and he looked at various different cars.
He did one of them on the Hillman Imp and that was very interesting itself. There was another
BBC documentary in 2006 called “Linwood and the Hillman Imp” that goes into a lot of detail
about the union problems, and there's a lot of detail about that which is also worth a watch.
One thing I noticed though when watching “The Car’s The Star” video, and I noticed this when
also watching another one about the Austin Allegro is they make so many mistakes in the video,
and I’m thinking it's the BBC - they've done lots of research and they know what they're doing!
But for example they talk about the Imps designers being influenced by the Mini. Well,
how could they be doing that because they started in 1955 and the Mini wasn't launched until 1959.
It wasn't even thought about until 1956. So I don't think that makes any sense. So, anyway
maybe it's a bit of a wake-up call for me to take everything that the BBC says with a pinch of salt
because generally they're pretty reliable. Anyway another thing I put in the video and
sometimes I write stuff in the script and I just stretch a little bit. I take fact A and fact B and
I sort of from fact A and fact B think “Okay, well therefore that must have happened. So fact C must
have happened.” And sometimes that isn't true. So, I thought that the Government was trying to get
the Rootes company to invest in Linwood because it's a marginal seat, and therefore
they want to get votes for doing it. But I did a bit of digging
and the Governments at the time in between 1955 and the early 60s were Conservative Governments
across the UK and Linwood was the Paisley district. It's changed to various other
districts now but at the time it was the Paisley district, which was staunchly Labour. So, it
definitely wasn't the case of them trying to win the seat. There was no way the Conservatives were
ever going to win that seat! So, it really was a case of the Conservative Government trying to
make sure that there were more jobs around in different areas, which is a noble goal.
Which is after all the idea of a government right! It's trying to help all the people.
So, Rootes is creating the car that will become the Imp, and then in 1959 BMC launch
the Mini, and it's a bombshell for the car industry, but particularly for Rootes.
And one thing I noticed about that is they decided to essentially double down with the
bad choice of a rear engine and a conservative styling that they'd gone through. So,
they thought “Okay, we'll just keep going and we'll just try and sell it as fast as possible,
then we'll try and fix it later on.” It's something called the “sunk cost
fallacy” which you may or may or may not have heard of. The idea being that you made a decision,
and you keep going with that decision, and even though you found out find out later that it's
a poor decision you keep going because at the end of the day it's a decision that you
want to stick with because you don't want to lose face or you don't want to lose time. In this case
we don't want to lose time to try and get it to market. We can't just start again and restart
things. But in the end you end up with a product or a decision that isn't right. It's wrong,
and you just compound problem upon problem upon problem. It's better in some cases to just stop
and restart, even if it's going to take longer in this case to get to production. It would have been
better to have made better decisions and create a car that actually the market really wanted.
So, another thing that was interesting was the Imp name
came from a company called Ailsa Craig Ltd, who were a manufacturer of marine
engines. They had an engine called the Imp and they were acquired by another company,
and all their assets were for sale including the names. So Rootes Company decided to do a deal
to buy the Imp name, and they swapped it for a new Humber Super Snipe motor car - which was an
interesting trade I suppose! It was cheap and easy for them and the other company got a free car.
So, in the early 60s, where Rootes is very excited about the Hillman Imp and it's going
to be the next great new car, they're also looking at other variants, and another one was the Rootes
Asp which is this sort of sports car like thing. It would have been produced by Jensen Motors,
which may not have made sense because Jensen were down in West Bromwich which is very close
to Coventry, which would have meant even more money ferrying parts up and down from Scotland
and backwards and forwards. So, I’m not sure that would have worked. It would have used a larger
998cc engine. They would have checked to find out the weight of it, and if it was too heavy
they would have swapped the steel body for a glass fibre body. But in the end the thing that killed
it was the US reaction to it was lukewarm. They weren't really excited by it, which
is surprising because you had MGBs and Triumphs and things like that were being sold in the US.
So, in the end it was dropped because not only wasn't the great reaction from the US which is
going to be the main market for it, but also there was no more money to invest in it because Rootes
were having so many problems with the Linwood factory and got poor demand for the Hillman Imp.
And so there are all kinds of problems with the Linwood factory. It started up
in 1963 and it closes in 1976. I’m not sure whether they decided to close in 75 or 76,
but certainly the decision in 75 for the government to give Chrysler more money
certainly left it open until 1976, and then it closed down for a while - they retooled it for
the Chrysler Sunbeam and production actually started for the Chrysler Sunbeam in 1977. So,
there was presumably some sort of period where they were swapping things over. But they kept the
workers employed so that they could come back. But in the end the Chrysler Sunbeam
didn't do well either. It was just a stop gap, and at the end of the day Chrysler
were kind of done with Linwood and all the union problems and trouble, and the fact it was so far
away just didn't work. So production ended at the Linwood factory in 1981. So that's what 18 years
entire time the factory was open. So, you know they were keen to get
shot of it. The workers didn't make it easy for them to… well rather did make it easy for them
to make the decision by being so difficult to deal with and always complaining and
causing problems! If you compare this to the Nissan plant in Sunderland where they make the
Nissan Qashqai that I’ve talked about recently. The workers there they work hard, diligently,
very harmonious relationships, and they do everything in their power to keep their jobs.
There's been times when there's been decisions about well should Nissan keep
the Sunderland factory open, and every single time they've decided to keep it open, even though
the workers there are obviously paid quite a lot of money because the workers are paid
UK salaries. If you compare it to Poland or Romania or other places where they make cars
with lower wages, obviously they're being paid more. So, it's very important for the
Sunderland workers to do everything they can to keep their jobs. So, I thought it's interesting
to compare the Nissan Sunderland situation with the Linwood situation. It's not just Linwood. I’m
sort of picking on Linwood here, but if you look at almost every car company in every car factory
in the 60s and 70s with all the union problems that they had. They weren't making it easy
for the car companies first of all to make cars, and then secondly to want to keep them open.
So after editing this whole Optional Extra video, I wasn't happy with how I left it.
So, I thought I would add a bit more, especially after thinking about it a bit more.
So, the thing is that the 1960s, 1963 when the Hillman came out, it was a very different economic time.
So it was a boom time for the economy. The 50s and 60s it was full employment,
and certainly there was a feeling from workers that they should share in the profits
from the good times that were being had. So there was a lot of union action
to say “Well, we want a share of this”, and a lot of the workers who were working at that time
were relatively young and couldn't remember things like the depression of the 1920s
and the terrible times in the 1930s with the Jarrow marches,
and there was obviously a lot of high unemployment at that that time.
And they just felt the good times would never end.
But having said that, the reason why they built the factory up there was because
shipbuilding was ending just down the road. The shipbuilding industry was having problems.
They were building ships over in the Far East.
They were starting to build motorcycles over in the Far East,
and the motorcycle industry in England were starting to have problems.
But on the other hand you had unions in the factory, and this isn't just Linwood,
this is across the country, that unions were pressuring workers to strike.
And it was a big public vote, and if you didn't vote for strike you were maybe felt…
some people maybe felt you were weak. So there was pressure to vote for a strike.
So, it was a difficult time.
So it's a nuanced issue and that's really that's what I'm trying to point out.
It's not the fact that the people in Linwood were lazy. All the people in Sunderland aren't lazy.
There's more to it than this.
And this also wasn't just like a Conservative government versus a union issue.
That video I pointed out earlier on points out that the unions humbled the Labour party in the late 1960s.
So, the Labour party weren't even helping the unions as much as they wanted.
So, there was really big strong union pressure.
So, anyway, that's all I have for the Hillman Imp video.
Thank you for watching and thank you for getting to the end of all of this stuff!
I appreciate it and I'll see you in the next video.