Gentlemen's Agreement

We remember the days when imports from Japan were restricted.

- Paul Wager

While sifting through archive photos for our Classic Scenes spread recently, I came across this photo of a Datsun being unloaded from a ship by hand, the pencil caption on the back of the black-and-white print dating it at 1972.

That makes the Bluebird swinging from slings and ropes on the dockside one of the earliest Japanese cars imported in quantity to the UK, at a time when the bulk of British buyers would have dismissed it as a funny foreign car and the sort of thing that ‘would never catch on’ – even if it did come with a working heater, reliable electrics, generous warranty and a standard radio.

How very wrong that would prove to be. Although the first Japanese car to be imported into the UK had been the Daihatsu Compagno in 1964 (imported by a camera distributor oddly enough), it was Toyota that established a UK importer in 1965, swiftly followed by Honda in 1967, Nissan/Datsun in 1968 and then Mazda.

They may have been slow to take off in the face of patriotic British buying habits, but, by as early as 1977, the Japanese share of the British car market had jumped to 10 per cent, while BL’s share had already plummeted to just 24%.