Thursday, 26 July 2012

An old-style Jaguar on a street near our house! How old, I don't know, because I'm no expert - and it's got personalised number plates (unlike most UK plates, that betray the year of registration).

Nottingham is not far from Coventry, home of Jaguar manufacture for many years. Grandad says:

"William Lyons, the founder of the Jaguar company, started off in Blackpool, of all places, making sidecars for motorbikes. Starting in the later 1920s, they built up a thriving business and eventually built sporty bodies on the basis of other people's cars. 

"Small at first, then bigger and leaner, they used the initials of the sidecar company, Swallow Sidecar, SS, as the name of a long-bonneted sporty vehicle, only to find that the Germans had taken the SS title and applied it to their sinister police force-army, producing quite the wrong image for the un-political SS Car company. So Lyons & co changed the name to Jaguar Car Company, making a series of  racy-looking cars that looked fast and eventually, with success, became superb creations with their own powerful engines and sporting records--and at a fraction of the price of Bentley, Alfa Romeo and Aston Martin- the rest is history! 

"Oh yes: as Blackpool wasn't brimming with experienced engineers and tradesmen, Lyons and associates moved to the Coventry and surrounding areas, developing the company, shakily at times, to its present stature."

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