Leyland Motors Limited (later known as the Leyland Motor Corporation) was an English vehicle manufacturer of lorries, buses and trolleybuses. The company diversified into car manufacturing with its acquisitions of Triumph and Rover in 1960 and 1967, respectively. It gave its name to the British Leyland Motor Corporation, formed when it merged with British Motor Holdings in 1968, to become British Leyland after having been nationalised. British Leyland later changed its name to simply BL, then in 1986 to Rover Group.
After the various vehicle manufacturing businesses of BL and its successors went defunct or were divested, the following marques survived: Jaguar and Land Rover, now built by Jaguar Land Rover owned by TATA Motors; MG, now built by MG Motor, and Mini, now built by BMW. The truck building operation survived largely intact as Leyland Trucks, a subsidiary of Paccar.
History
Beginning
Leyland Motors has a long history dating from 1896, when the Sumner and Spurrier families founded the Lancashire Steam Motor Company in the town of Leyland in North West England. Their first products included steam powered lawn mowers.[1] The company's first vehicle was a 1.5-ton-capacity steam powered van. This was followed by a number of undertype steam wagons using a vertical fire-tube boiler.[2] By 1905 they had also begun to build petrol-engined wagons. The Lancashire Steam Motor Company was renamed Leyland Motors in 1907 when it took over Coulthards of Preston, who had been making steam wagons since 1897.[3] They also built a second factory in the neighbouring town of Chorley situated on Pilling Lane.
In 1920, Leyland Motors produced the Leyland Eight luxury touring car, a development of which was driven by
Products
Buses
Historically, Leyland Motors was a major manufacturer of buses used in the United Kingdom and worldwide. It achieved a number of firsts or milestones that set trends for the bus industry. It was one of the first manufacturers to devise chassis designs for buses that were different from trucks, with a lower chassis level to help passengers board more easily. Its chief designer, George John Rackham, who had experience at the Yellow Coach Company in Chicago before returning to England,[13] created the Titan and Tiger ranges in 1927 that revolutionised bus design. After 1945, Leyland created another milestone with the trend-setting Atlantean rear-engined double-decker bus design produced between 1956 and 1986.
See List of Leyland buses for the list of bus products.
Trucks
1900–1910
Educational film
Leyland Motors produced a film in 1977 entitled The Quality Connection showing the importance of quality control. It featured well known actors including Frank Windsor, George A Cooper, David Suchet, Michael Robbins, Madeline Smith and Trevor Bannister.[24]
See also
- Ashok Leyland
- British Leyland Motor Corporation
- Leyland Band
- Leyland Bus
- Leyland Trucks
- List of car manufacturers of the United Kingdom
External links
References
- Ron Phillips. The History of the Leyland Bus Crowood, 2015^
- Lancashire Steam Motor Co. boiler parts^
- "The Coulthard Steam Wagon", The Automotor and Horseless Carriage Journal, Dec 1897, p84^