Jaguar XK120

During his early years in the English midlands,  William Lyons gave little inclination that he would eventually attain legendary status for the creation of sports cars. The son of an Irish musician-turned-piano-repairman, Lyons was a motorcycle  fanatic who was fond of racing his Harley-Davidson in local events during the gloomy  years of the First World War. He wasn’t particularly enamored of working the piano shop, so his father helped him acquire an apprenticeship with Crossley Motors, a Manchester-based car builder. But at just 17, Lyons was not ready to settle into the drudgery of the machinists business.

Temp car sales job inspires interest

With the Great War finished, Lyons returned home, puttered about the piano shop for a while, and started contemplating what he really wanted to do with his life. As have so many people before and since during this period of contemplation, he accepted  a temporary job as a car salesman for an agency that handled Morris, Rover, and Sunbeam.

The early turning point in his life came when he met William Walmsley, who moved into his neighborhood at the end of World War I. Walmsley was a bit older than Lyons, but the two both had an obsession for motorcycles, and they hit it off fairly well. Walmsley was a tinkerer, and after acquiring  a military surplus Triumph, he fitted it with a sidecar of his own design.

Now the British have always exhibited a peculiar affection for sidecars, as they do for other dubious materials like warm beer and cold toast. So Walmsley’s uncommonly attractive and well-made sidecar provided  a business opportunity that his ambitious young car salesman-friend encouraged him to pursue. With loans from their fathers,  Walmsley and Lyons  established the Swallow Sidecar Company.

Motorcycle sidecar business expanded

Under Lyons steady hand,  the business grew apace, and soon after,  it branched out from creating sidecars to the manufacture of automobile bodies. In those days,  custom coachwork was all the rage in Britain (much more so than in America, where it was largely confined to the most  pricey luxury automobiles) and Swallow began to earn a good deal of income building sporty and attractive  bodies for the ubiquitous Austin Seven.

In the Thirties, Lyons moved forward again, changing from coachbuilding to building entire motor cars, albeit with engines derived from the Standard line of vehicles. In 1935, he successfully floated a stock offering to help fund the new venture, then moved forward swiftly to display the SS 90, the company’s first sports model. Drawing on his car salesman experience, Lyons recognized  that he couldn’t base his business on sports cars, so he was very careful to build his line around sedans, but he always seemed to have a special love for 2-seaters.  Soon, the SS 90 begat the SS 100, one of the best all around sporting machines of the mid- and late-Thirties.

World War II put an enormous crimp in the progress of the British auto industry from 1939 until the late Forties, and it also cost Lyons his company’s good name. “SS,” as his company had come to be known (Swallow Sidecars) had taken on an ominous connotation because of  its connection with Nazi storm troopers, so the company adopted the Jaguar name that it had first used on a mid-Thirties sedan, and later on another version as Jaguar XK120.

Marketing move produced new car

Lyons, by 1948,   was chomping at the bit to kick his company up into a higher gear. The end of World War II created a boom of pent-up demand both in the United States and in Britain, but Lyons was forward-thinking enough to learn that the boom wouldn’t last forever. Ever the marketer,  he longed  to ride the wave of the next trend or, even better, create it. So he planned a bold stroke for the 1948 Earls Court Motor Show, a bold stroke that would be gravely plagarized by Chevrolet in the creation of its Corvette five years later.

Lyons knew his bread-and-butter was the building  and sales of sedans. He  set his engineering team, under the guidance of chief engineer William Heynes, to outline a thorough modern line of sedans that would have some longevity in the post-war market place. What they came up with were an all-new dual overhead cam six cylinder engine and  a new chassis, complete with a very modern torsion-bar independent front suspension.

The question was: how could Jaguar Cars Ltd. best  display these technical wonders?

Lyons  response  was a show car to be displayed at Earls Court. If public reception to the display vehicle warranted it, Lyons projected a limited production run for the vehicle, perhaps 100 or 200 copies all told.

Smooth body design created  swiftly

With this thumbnail plan in place and time short, Lyons set his craftsmen to start work on the project. The sedan chassis was duly shortened to  tolerate  a swoopy two-seat roadster body whose shape, legend has it, came together in a period of just two weeks. Whether that legend is  precise, we’ll never know, but there is no doubt that the lovely and, for its time, advanced body shape was conceived and then created  in very short order. In fact, the rapidity of its progress may well have saved it from unnecessary gee-gaws and busy-ness, the outcome of excess executive meddling.

The body shape was stunning modern for its time while retaining the sophisticated feel of classic roadsters like the BMW 328 and the  Mercedes-Benz 540K. The graceful sweep of its fenders provides an elegant transition from the pontoon fenders of the Thirties to the fully integrated fenders of today. Its long hood progressed from a tapered nosepiece to a wide cowl, and its round headlamps were housed in appealingly grafted nacelles between fender and grille. The high chrome-mounted divided windscreen was accented beautifully  by the low-slung doors.

Housed within the lovely body was the XK engine, whose stature would actually reach epic proportions before it was finally put to pasture after forty years of production. In a period when many production cars still provided flat-head engines, Heynes and his staff put together a dual overhead cam engine with hemispherical combustion chambers, not as a special “racing” powerplant, but for daily use in sedans. With exhaust valves and chain-driven camshafts operating huge intake, it was a brilliant achievement.

Very fast car, and was also comfortable

The XK engine rotated 160 horsepower from a displacement of 3.4 liters (210 cubic inches). Top  horsepower occurred at 5000 rpm, while peak torque of 195 pound-feet arrived at 2500. Not only did the engine  provide terrific high speed potential (the car was named XK 120 because of its 120-mph capability), it was also wonderfully tractable around town in top (fourth) gear.

Needless to say, the XK 120 show car was an instant sensation at Earls Court, and orders poured in so quickly that Jaguar was obliged to re-engineer the body from hand-formed aluminum over ash to all-steel construction. As a sports car for the street, it created an entirely new market for such vehicles, particularly in the United States, where its victory  spawned the Chevrolet Corvette, and in Britain it was the precursor to many fabled Jaguar sports cars, as well as  the D- and E-Types.

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Tagged with: Jaguar • motor race • sedan • sports car

Filed under: Top Classic Cars