british anzani archive:

© British Anzani Archive

of similar capacity to his predecessors but had hemipherical heads and a chain driven overhead camshaft. Burt’s draughtsmen built Maclures engine and used it in a test-bed racing car called the Slug (for it's low slung appearance) and the engine proved very powerful. Things changed dramatically again for Anzani’s in 1929. Archie Frazer-Nash temporarily retired from the firm with ill health and the new managing director H. J. Aldington decided to make some major changes. Firstly he decided to use the Meadows 4 ED engine in their cars only using the side valve in supercharged form for racing engines - he also decided against incorporating Anzani into the business thereby casting adrift what had become their specialist engineering arm. The situation was made more awkward because Anzani and A.F.N shared stores and drawing offices in the factory. Some benefit came Anzani’s way in the fact that they no longer did subsidized work for AFN but the fact remained they had lost by far their biggest customer. It is also widely recognised that 1929 marked the end for the specialist independent manufacturers of cars and engines. The surviving builders of cars and motorbikes now built their own engines and the era of mass production had finally won through. A decision was made to not look for new orders for engines although they were still made to order and Burt did his best to help his company through this difficult time by giving them contract work from Mowlems and for a time they became builders of concrete mixers and pneumatic road drills. The next traumatic change came when Aldington announced that the company should move to a new site in London Road, Isleworth in Middlesex. In 1931 Frazer-Nash, now out of hospital, resigned from the company and with Plunkett-Greene already gone after Aldington took over in 1929 many of the old faces were no longer there. Significantly one new face to join was T.D. Ross from Austin. Ross argued for the company to manufacture a new racing engine which would

be sold in a detuned state to sports car manufacturers; an argument which flew in the face of the current industry thinking. The decision was agreed however and the R1 (the Ross 1) was put into development. It was a very powerful motor, producing over 100bhp through it twin Solex’s and twin overhead camshafts. Much of the internals of the new engine were based on Ross’s experience at Austin and he was later to comment that it was basically an Austin design and the tappets he said were pure Austin 7. The problem was there were no customers for the new engine until one day the young manufacturer Adrian Squire came to see Ross and his new engine. The deal was clinched when Ross agreed to cast the Squire name in the cam covers and thereby make his new car appear an all Squire Car Manufacturing Company product. Ross made his second engine the R2, a redesign of the old V-twin, for a 500 engine order for the Bristol Tractor Company for a small tractor they were building and later he got a further order from Bristol for another 1,000 R2 engines. He was also involved in working on a new order from holiday camp entrepreneur Billy Butlin for their Dodgem Boats and generally things were looking up for Ross when in August 1933 he fell out with Burt and offered his resignation on a point of principle and to Ross’s amazement Burt accepted it! Ross left and joined the Army and Burt went back to his contract work.