THE GREY LADY

In the mid-1930s the New Avon Coachbuilding Co started to build luxury saloons and no longer concentrated on building smaller open sports cars. Phil Homer introduces a luxury product of the era, a six-cylinder Avon on the Standard Flying 16 chassis, and explains why it wasn’t a success.

The Avon Company was a well-established coachbuilder and produced many thousands of cars from their Wharf Road factory in Warwick. As the name of this road implies, the factory was in redundant canal-side warehouses on the Grand Union Canal, and some of the buildings can still be identified.

Though bodies were built on a number of chassis, including ones from Austin, Coventry Victor, Wolseley and Lanchester, by far the most numerous were Avon Standards. Indeed, the Standards virtually ousted all other marques on the Avon lines and by 1939 the Glasses Guide was listing no fewer than 32 different Avon Standard secondhand models and their values. Avon geared themselves up so that when Standard produced a new chassis, then Avon would not be far behind in cataloguing a body (or more usually two or more different bodies) to put on it. These generally consisted of at least a tourer and a coupé, and usually in both two and four-seater form.

Fairly early in the design cycle of a new chassis, it is known that Standard would produce a large-scale drawing so that coachbuilders such as Avon would be aware of the overall dimensions and positions of the body mountings. In this way they could quickly design a body around those datum points without the chassis being present. (At least one such drawing still exists in the author’s archive.) Avon boasted that it could turn around a body on a chassis that it had received only seven days previously.