BMC BUYER’S GUIDE. HOW BMCs WERE SOLD

For the sake of argument, let’s assume for a moment that we’re in the market for a modest fleet of new commercial vehicles at some time during the mid-to-late 1950s, or possibly the early 1960s - arguably the period during which the whole manufacturing and marketing muscle of BMC should have had the best opportunity of presenting itself as a leading player in the Global Market for commercial vehicles. And for that matter, cars. This was, you’ll remember, supposedly the key reasoning behind merging Austin and Morris in the first place.

Let’s assume we’re a ‘home market’ customer here in the UK. In the mid-50s, we would of course have a far greater choice, both in terms of picking a favourite brand, but also in terms of actual model ‘weight brackets’, which were then clearly defined. So there would be little point in looking at an imported Foreign vehicle, other than perhaps for ‘novelty value’. But as we want to use our new fleet for some serious transport and distribution work, any ‘novelty’ (like in a van having an air-cooled engine in the back under the floor, for example) is the last thing we need. So let’s see. For vans, we have products from the Rootes Group, Standard-Triumph, the misleadingly named ‘Ford of Britain’ (it always was American-owned of course), Vauxhall-Bedford (ditto) and… Well, while there are over thirty makes of commercial vehicle listed in our 1960 ‘Buyer’s Guide’ publication, it seems like a good idea to buy our whole fleet from one source, so that narrows things down a bit.

For a start, it rules out Leyland (which hasn’t taken over Triumph yet, but will do shortly), as well as the likes of Trojan (about to