Thomas Harrington & Sons was a coachbuilder in the county of Sussex from 1897 until 1966, initially at Brighton but from 1930 until the end in a purpose built Art Deco factory (an image of which was used on the builder's transfers) in Old Shoreham Road, Hove.Platt & Lukowski, The Harrington Grenadier and Cavalier, Wellington (Somerset) 1991
Overview The company began with the construction of horse-drawn carriages. With the rise of motor vehicle, Thomas Harrington began building on motor car chassis, and prior to World War I began to specialise in commercial vehicles, buses and coaches. After the armistice the company concentrated on luxury coaches supplementing these with some single-deck bus bodies and other general coachbuilding activity.
During World War II, it was selected by the War Ministry to build a specialised aircraft design and during their history they also produced ¼ - scale street-legal model coaches to entertain children, pioneered a minibus that bus operators found practical (and legal) to use and drove-forward coach design. They had an open outlook on developments in technology and an excellent grasp of marketing opportunities and an eye for a catchy press advertisement. They nurtured relationships with customers, one at least bought nothing other than Harrington for its entire existence.
In 1965 it was decided to close the factory. Although not a part of the Rootes Group, the operations were owned by a Rootes family investment company. Production ceased in April 1966 after which Plaxton purchased spares, stock in trade and goodwill.
The Cavalier (1959–64) and Grenadier (1962-6) luxury coach bodies for underfloor-engined chassis jointly won the Classic Bus reader poll as the most stylish coach of all time.Classic Bus issue 12, Edinburgh 1992 Many Harrington vehicles are preserved and Harrington devotees have a gathering of their own.
The 1930s There were huge numbers of small to medium-sized professional coachbuilders in existence around Britain as Thomas Harrington & Sons moved into its new Hove factory. The management of Harringtons decided that two things were necessary to stand them in good stead in this crowded market. The first was building good relationships with blue-chip customers, and the second was to produce designs with a distinctive Harrington 'look'.
Instances of the first were their long-term supply to high–class coach firms in the private and large company sectors. Such private customers included Grey-Green of Stamford Hill, London, Charlies Cars of Bournemouth and Silver Star of Porton Down. The large firms included the Tilling Group's North Western Road Car Company of Stockport and British Electric Traction (BET) group member Devon General of Exeter, but perhaps the most enduring relationship of all was as supplier to the local BET coaching powerhouse Southdown Motor Services.Booth, Gavin. Classic Bus 41-2, Edinburgh, May 1999 - July 1999
The styling distinctiveness was a major selling point. A Harrington body had a clear 'look' at a time when many coachbuilders, Duple especially, would oblige customers and produce an astounding variety of outlines from the conservative to the totally bizarre, sometimes building to order straight copies of another coachbuilders style.Townsin, Alan. Duple: 70 Years of Coachbuilding, Glossop, 1998
By the mid-1930s the Harrington 'look' included a half cab with no canopy over the engineBooth, Gavin. Classic Bus 42, Edinburgh, July 1999 and a stepped window line, all arranged in a distinctive flowing series of curves.Watson. Provincial buses in colour: 1960's, Ian Allan Publishing, Hersham (2001) By the end of the decade when streamlining was the vogue Harrington had devised and patented a new feature called the 'dorsal fin'. This appurtenance looked like a truncated aircraft tail and when applied to the rear of the vehicle allowed a rakishly curved rear-dome outline without compromising passenger access to the rear bench seat and was designed to act as an air-extractor as the vehicle moved, stale air exited the coach saloon due to the suction effect of the low pressure areas created behind the fin.Booth, Gavin (ed), Classic Bus 31, Edinburgh September 1997
World War II: new products, new materials, new methods But at this time Europe was returning to war, and coach operations ceased, many operators having their vehicles impressed into military service. By the middle of 1940 all non-essential production had been frozen on Government orders and the entire vehicle-building industry had to turn to war work.
Harrington were allocated the Westland Lysander aircraft to build. This was a short take off and landing STOL single-engine type, designed as an artillery spotter, which became noteworthy for its use in covert operations to and from occupied France. As well as the benefits of this to the war effort, it gave Harrington's workforce new skills in jig-building using lightweight alloy sections and extrusions.
Post-war After the war demand for new buses and coaches was somewhat pent-up as few had been delivered during the war. However, the country had a massive war debt to pay and all manufacturing industries were exhorted to devote at least 50% of output to export. Harrington was able to build a satisfactory export trade, particularly to South American operators and to those in British African colonies. For the home market most bodies were framed in steel-reinforced hardwood.
Because all the established firms were trying to export, and thus were not able to offer even their most loyal customers acceptable lead-times, the period from 1946 to the early 1950s caused a mushrooming of small coachbuilders. There were many new models and styles of coach. In Harrington's case these included (from 1948) the normal control Leyland Comet CPO1 with its small capacity 300 cu in direct-injection diesel and the Commer Avenger full-fronted forward control lightweight coach, with its big Humber petrol engine tilted over to 70 degrees so it hid under the coach floor. Commer was part of the Rootes Group, later the Rootes family bought Harrington and John C Beadle. For customers wanting a return to pre-war glamour, the 'dorsal fin' was available as an option even on the next generation.
The Wayfarer This was designed for the new underfloor-engined chassis from AEC, Leyland and others but was also to be found on three of the Foden rear engined coach chassis.Booth, Gavin (ed), Classic Bus 39, Edinburgh, January 1999 The Wayfarer ran to four marks and was produced from 1951 to 1961, the longest life of any Harrington design. It was the first to the new dimensions of 30 ft long by 8 ft wide and the first Harrington coach to feature a marque name.
Grey-Green bought every version of the type and also took Harrington-bodied Bedfords throughout the 1950s; Silver Star took marks 1, 3 and 4 on Leyland; Southdown only took the Mark I on Royal Tiger in 1952 and then deserted Harrington until 1960; Charlies Cars took Harrington-bodied Albion Victors and in 1958 had two Wayfarer Mark 4 on Albion Aberdonian chassis. North Western had been transferred from Tilling to BET during World War II and took Wayfarers of Marks 1, 3 and 4 for its touring coaches but went elsewhere for express types, notably toward the end of the decade to Alexander.
Mini coaches and minibuses From the early 1930s until the mid-1950s Harrington employee and former Southdown driver Ernie Johnstone constructed 63 quarter-scale road-legal coaches to give novelty rides to young children. Many of these were powered by Villiers 125cc two-stroke petrol engines. Bodies on 12 of these working models were constructed by Harrington, the rest he did himself with two friends in his spare time.
During the 1950s Harrington, like Plaxton and Readings offered small party coaches on Karrier and Commer delivery van chassis, whilst from the late 1950s until the factory's closure, Harrington was responsible for producing the Rootes Group's in-house PSV conversion of the Commer 1500 minibus. After Harrington's demise the minibus work went to the former Tilling-Stevens works in Maidstone.
Customers of the minibus included Crosville, the first time the state sector had been served by Harrington since 1949, when United Automobile Services took a batch of Bristol coaches bodied in Hove for their prestigious Newcastle to London service.
The state-owned bus firms' lack of interest in outside suppliers had one over-riding reason: In 1948 ECW and Bristol were served with a statutory ban on selling bodies to other than wholly government-owned organisations and thus ECW took care of almost all of the Tilling Group's bus and coach body needs, produced London Transport's first genuine coaches, and supplied some bodies to the Sheffield Transport C fleet and the Scottish Bus Group.
The Contender in a contracting market From 1953 to 1969 former Tilling-Stevens factory built the Commer TS3, a compact, if noisy, two-stroke opposed-piston diesel engine adopted in Commer commercials and later marks of its Avenger bus chassis. Harrington (like Beadle) employed units from the Avenger together with a mid-mounted TS3 engine in its Contender range of integral buses and coaches of the mid-1950s, some of these resembled the Wayfarer and others had the standard bus outline of the time, but there was a special design built for British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) this had a straight waistrail and a multi-paned lantern-type windscreen. (One at least of these was powered by an eight-cylinder Rolls-Royce petrol engine of military pattern, driving a torque-converter transmission. An odd choice of propulsion in the fuel-economy obsessed 1950s but they were probably a lot lighter on petrol than a Boeing Stratocruiser or a Lockheed Super Constellation). This style of Contender was sold in 1:76.8 scale model by Dinky Toys as their 'BOAC Coach' BOAC took 28, of which nineteen were used overseas making them the largest customer for the Contender, Maidstone & District Motor Services were second with 11 buses and one coach.Burrows, 'Ask Geoff' column, in Stenning(ed)Classic Bus 110, London, 2010
Although during its short life the Contender was less successful than Beadle's integral coaches, Beadle's comparable Chatham range were by 1957 almost their only line and when the BET group decided to reduce the number of its recommended suppliers only Southdown's liking for their coach body on the Leyland Tiger Cub kept the Dartford body lines going, but then Southdown switched to Weymann and briefly Burlingham (having taken Harrington Wayfarer Mark Is in small numbers and then deserted Harrington for most of the 1950s) and that was the end of Beadle in the coachwork game. Rootes decided that the car-dealership chain Beadle also ran was a better business.
During the life of the Wayfarer all of the mushroom coachbuilding businesses disappeared. The clear number one in coach bodies by 1959 was Duple at Hendon, who by 1954 also had a bus factory in the East Midlands at Kegworth and in 1958 purchased the bus builder Willowbrook in nearby Loughborough. Duple was strong in the lightweight end of the market, being first choice for bodies on the market-leading Bedford but was facing competition in the premium underfloor engined class from Plaxton and HV Burlingham of Blackpool. Like Harringtons, these were primarily builders of coach bodies who also did buses, Burlingham built double as well as single deck vehicles and had a respected if small list of customers for these. Weymann, Roe and Alexander were on the other hand bus builders who also did coaches.
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