In 2000 HarperCollins published a paperback edition of a hardback book, “the mini: Forty Years of Fun” which had been published the year before. Sometime in 2003 one of the paperbacks was inscribed “To Peter, Happy Birthday/ Christmas With Love from Carol & Peter”. In 2024 I found this book in the Oxfam Charity Shop in Didsbury. As my regular readers know, when I go into any shop selling books, I can’t resist the urge to find the Transport Section and seek out any car books, preferably second-hand or at a heavily discounted price. I am disappointed more often than not but this time I was in luck.
Google identified an article which, sadly, told me that the author of the book, Brian Laban, died, aged 68, on 27 December 2016 in a hospital near his home in Sussex where he was being treated for bowel cancer. He was the author of more than 40 books and a contributor to many publications. In the Foreword to the mini, Jeremy Clarkson describes Brian as “a very funny man, and although he may well have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Mini, he’d never think to bore anyone with it”.
Brian describes himself belonging to a Morris kind of family, first a Morris Eight, then a very early Minor with split screen and side headlamps. In around 1964, the family bought their first Mini, a red nearly new Austin 850 Super De Luxe model, costing a princely £335. (It must have been about then that my mother bought her first premium bonds and promised my brother and me a Mini each if she won the first prize. Unfortunately she never won and we never owned Minis!).
The book tells us that Alec Issigonis was approached by BMC in 1956 to create a new medium-sized family car to replace the ageing Austin Cambridge. But before he could start, President Nassar of Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal and all our oil supplies had to be transported via the Cape of Good Hope. (Does this transportation sound familiar in 2024?). In 1957 Issigonis was told to drop what he was doing and concentrate on a response to the oil crisis. His brief was to design a car smaller than the Minor, with the maximum passenger space in the smallest possible vehicle. But it had to be passenger space for four full-sized people and, although it had to be super-compact, super economical and super-affordable, it had to be a “real” car i.e. not a “bubble car”. He was given two years to have it ready for production.
He achieved this and by mid-June 1959 production was running at around a hundred cars a week to provide a car for most dealers by the launch date of 26 August 1959.
Laban can’t answer the $64,000 question: what made the Mini socially acceptable? But it was connected to perceived class and its adoption, by the London smart set, film stars and aristocracy, as the perfect car about town. And the book is profusely illustrated with pictures of famous people and their Mini’s. And I can’t think of another car that was a film star but the Mini was and there is a still photograph from The Italian Job on the back page to prove it.
My advice? If you find a copy of this book in a second-hand or charity shop, snap it up. You won’t be disappointed.
Gary Whittle