McLaughlin Motor Car Company Limited was a Canadian manufacturer of automobiles headquartered in Oshawa, Ontario. Founded by Robert McLaughlin, it once was the largest carriage manufacturing factory in the British Empire.[1]
Around 1905, Robert's son Sam started building automobiles. By 1907, this enterprise had grown to include the manufacture of McLaughlin automobiles with Buick engines. In 1915, the company manufactured Chevrolet vehicles for the U.S. and Canadian market. The carriage end of the business was then sold to Carriage Factories Limited of Orillia, Ontario.[2] James Brockett Tudhope's Carriage Factories ended carriage production and changed to manufacturing truck and car parts.[3] The Tudhope firm was sold in 1924 to Cockshutt Plow Company and merged into the Cockshutt Plow owned Canada Carriage and Body Limited of Brantford, Ontario.[4] The Brantford-based firm is now Trailmobile Canada.
McLaughlin was taken over by General Motors in 1918 and merged into General Motors of Canada.
History
McLaughlin Carriage Company
Robert McLaughlin began building carriages in 1867 beside the cutters and wagons in his blacksmith's shop in Enniskillen, a small village 20 km northeast of Oshawa, Ontario. In need of more workers to build his horse-drawn carriages, staunch Presbyterian McLaughlin moved to Oshawa in 1876.[5][6]
McLaughlin developed and (in the early 1880s) patented a fifth-wheel mechanism, which greatly improved comfort and safety. Attracting a great deal of demand, he ignored tempting offers and elected to sell the mechanism to his competitors rather than license other manufacturers. This enthusiasm, now for his complete carriages, spread across Canada. Before the end of the century, there was a McLaughlin sales office in London, England.[7]
On 7 December 1899, the carriage works was destroyed by fire.
The automobiles
The first McLaughlin automobile was the 1907 Model F.[16]
Until 1914, the cars were finished with the same paints and varnishes used on carriages. This meant each vehicle required up to fifteen coats of paint.
In 1927, the company produced two identical specially built touring cars for the Princes’ Royal Tour of Canada, one to be shipped ahead to the next city while the other was in use.[25]
In 1936, a custom tailored McLaughlin-Buick Town Sedan was purchased by the Prince of Wales.[26]
In 1936, the Dunsmuirs, a coal magnate family in Victoria, British Columbia, ordered three special-order 1936 Buick-McLaughlin Phaetons for three of their daughters.[27] In 1937, the convertible phaeton bought for Elinor Dunsmuir was used to drive U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt around Victoria during his state visit. This is verified by photos appearing in the Times Colonist
Duties and other import taxes
Residents of other rapidly developing countries living under conditions not unlike the U.S. and Canada had a strong preference for well-engineered and robust American cars. The countries of the British Empire – England, India, South Africa, Australia, and others – gave preference by charging much lower import taxes on goods from another member of the Empire, such as Canada. Taxes were adjusted to the proportion of Canadian content. Canada made and supplied General Motors vehicles to those countries, fitting them with right-hand drive. During World War I, Britain erected high tariff barriers to protect their industry from America's low-priced mass-produced but good-quality cars. By 1923 Canada had the world's second-largest automotive industry. These exports fell to a trickle after World War II[30] because Canada was part of the dollar area and therefore set apart from the British Empire's sterling area. The British were struggling to repay U.S. War Loans and unwilling to allow their businesses unrestricted access to Canada's currency to buy Canadian cars.
See also
- Canadian Automotive Museum
- List of automobile manufacturers
- McLaughlin Motor Car Showroom
- Reynolds-Alberta Museum
Bibliography
- Heather Robertson, Driving Force, The McLaughlin Family and the Age of the Car, McClelland & Stewart, 1995, ISBN 0-7710-7556-1.
External links
- Ingenium – Canada's Museum of Science and Technology
- McLaughlin family fonds, Archives of Ontario
References
- McLaughlin Motor Car Co., the forerunner to GM Canada Limited, is formed 20 November 2018^
- R.S. McLaughlin. The Men Cars Made Famous Maclean's, 15 October 1954^
- James Brockett Tudhope (1858-1936) Coach Built