Mulliners (Birmingham)

Mulliners Limited of Birmingham was a British coachbuilding business in Bordesley Green, with factories in Bordesley Green and Cherrywood Roads. It made standard bodies for specialist car manufacturers. In the 19th century there were family ties with founders Mulliners of Northampton and the businesses of other Mulliner brothers and cousins but it became a quite separate business belonging to Herbert Mulliner.

A Northampton coach building family founded this business in Leamington Spa for the prosperous custom attracted to the newly fashionable spa town early in the 19th century. Direct ownership and control by Mulliner family interests was lost in 1903 when it was sold to Charles Cammell, which then merged into Cammell Laird. H H Mulliner ceased to be a main-board director of Cammell Laird in 1909. Mulliners Limited continued under various ownerships until the end of 1960, when Standard-Triumph International closed it down.

Herbert Hall Mulliner

Henry Mulliner (1827-1887) of Leamington Spa, second son of Francis Mulliner (1789-1841) of Leamington Spa and Northampton, had six sons and six daughters. Henry published his book Carriage Builder's Tour in America in Leamington in 1883. Henry's Leamington Spa coach building business in Bedford Street and The Parade later had its carriage works in Packington Square and showroom in Chapel Street. Henry's second son Arthur Felton Mulliner (1859-1946) on Henry's death took over the family's Northampton business.[1]

Henry's third son, Herbert Hall Mulliner (1861-1924), in the light of the decline in quality of the Spa's visitors moved in 1885 to Birmingham.[2] Following his father's death in November 1887 and consequent rearrangement of family ownership[3] he made his home in Rugby and took up other interests including in 1895 the manufacture of scientific instruments. In 1897 he converted the coach and carriage making part of his business to motor vehicle bodies and was then employing 200. Used as well as new carriages were sold from the Mulliner showrooms in Broad Street, Birmingham, and H H Mulliner was the first to offer insurance of his carriages against accidents.

Mulliners Limited

After Calthorpe failed in 1924, the managing director of Mulliners, Louis Antweiler, who was also on the Calthorpe managing board, arranged to buy the coachbuilding company which he renamed Mulliners Limited. He obtained contracts with Clyno and Austin for whom he made many Weymann style fabric bodies for the Austin 7. When the fashion for fabric bodies declined, the business with Austin went but was replaced by orders from Hillman, Humber, Standard and Lanchester.[13]

Bus and coach body building

Military contracts for aircraft and vehicles were given to the company with the advent of World War II. These included the supply of single-deck austerity bus bodies for Bedford OWB chassis. Duple Coachbuilders designed and built a few bus bodies after the war, but were up to capacity in building their Duple Vista coach body, so they sub-contracted their bus body building to Mulliner in 1947, built on the OWB successor, the OB chassis. Vauxhall dealers also ordered bodies direct to Mulliners and the body was built until 1950, of which many were exported, some to oil companies in the Middle East and South America. In the 1950s they secured large contracts for utilitarian bus bodies for the three armed services and government agencies (on the Bedford OB and later Bedford SB and Bedford SBG chassis) and also some for some municipal bus operators, such as Douglas, IOM who, in 1957, had bodies built on Guy Otter chassis, at least one surviving into preservation.

One of its last efforts was an adventurous coach body appearing on a modified Guy Warrior chassis, registered 647BKL, displayed at the 1958 Commercial Motor Show and now preserved. Later that year, when Standard-Triumph purchased the company, it sold the bus-building division to Marshall’s of Cambridge.

Standard-Triumph

After the war, body-building for cars resumed with Aston Martin, Armstrong Siddeley and Triumph joining the list of customers. Standard-Triumph had, by then, a shortage of body-building capacity and this led them to buy the company in 1958, by which time Mulliners were building 700 car bodies each week.[13]

Closure

On 7 December 1960, a shock announcement by Standard-Triumph International, which was about to be sold to prosperous trucks and buses manufacturer Leyland Motors Limited, revealed that the factory would close. "Mulliners Limited, one of the oldest body firms in the motor trade, employs about 800 workers having recently laid off some 750 as redundant because of a shortage of orders". Their products would "continue to be made by other Midlands factories within the S-TI group".[14]

See also

• Arthur Mulliner of Northampton
• Mulliner (London) Limited
• H. J. Mulliner & Co. of Chiswick (later Mulliner Park Ward)

External links