PEDAL POWER

The venue is Goodwood and the drivers are lined up for the Le Mans start. The cars were all built between 1949 and 1971. The flag drops, drivers rush to their cars and they’re away. The race only last about 90 seconds, but the competition is furious. There is a fair bit of jostling for position and some exciting passing through the chicane, even though none of the drivers are older than 11 – this is the Settrington Cup and the cars are all Austin J40 pedal cars.

While the idea of Austin building pedal cars for children may seem of minor importance or even laughable, there was a very serious side to the enterprise. Not only were more than 30,000 built in a dedicated factory, but that factory played an important role in the overall Austin and BMC empires, and revealed a side of Leonard Lord rarely seen. In the dark days of the Second World War, when the coal industry was crucial to the war effort, serious concern was given to the number of miners succumbing to the insidious lung complaint Coalminers Pneumoconiosis – known to the miners simply as The Dust – a blocking of the lung tissue from inhaled coal dust. The more advanced form of the disease is called Complicated Pneumoconiosis – or Progressive Massive Fibrosis.

To indicate the seriousness of the problem, by 1945 some 5000 Welsh miners had been diagnosed. The British government established a special department, the Ministry of Labour Rehabilitation Unit, to find alternative work for miners no longer able to do manual labour. Part of the scheme was for the government to subsidise the