The Arrol & Johnstone Motor Car Co.

I joined the The Arrol & Johnstone Motor Car Co. in 1903. They had their works in an immense building which had been at one time a thread mill (Kerr&Co.). The thread mill was taken over by Coates and the machinery transferred to the larger factory of the Coates Thread Mills. The drafting room was large and about a dozen draughtsmen were employed. There was only one girl tracer and she was in a separate room so that she didn’t disturb the thinking of the rest of us. One of the younger draughtsmen was engaged to be married to her anyway. All we could do was tease him occasionally by getting ahead of him on the stair when going out so that we caught up to his young lady before him. He had to step lively if he wanted her company. He didn’t like these tricks and gave us black looks sometimes but his girl seemed to like the disturbances she caused.

The Arrol Johnstone car at that time was a queer looking vehicle. Mr. Johnstone, the chairman of the company, was the designer or at least it was designed to his ideas. Sir William Arrol, the president of the company, was the man who built the giant Forth Bridge, the largest railway bridge in the world. The motor car building was just a sideline for him. I only saw him once in the drafting room as he was being showed around by Mr. Napier and Mr. Johnstone. I happened to be making a plan of the gasoline motor for some alteration in it. He looked it over and asked me, “What thickness is the metal in these cylinder walls?” I told him 5/16^th of an inch. “Oh, my goodness, five-sixteenths. I would put on another eigth part if I was you. He pronounced the “eight” in the Scotch fashion: “eich”. They all smiled at his advice and then moved to the next board. The Chief Draughtsman, Mr. Webster, heard Sir William’s suggestion and gave me a wink. Later on when our visitors had gone he did come across and tried to give the impression that Sir William had just been joking. Nothing was done about the extra “eich” part but I knew it hadn’t been a joke. The old fellow had been accustomed to thinking of stresses on bridges. In car design, the factor of safety was only three at the most.

The engine had two horizontal cylinders working opposite to each other. The explosion of gasoline vapour took place between the ends of each pair of pistons. The power was transferred to the shaft under the cylinders by piston rods and cranks. It was a well-designed engine and worked very smoothly but was expensive to make. The car body then built was of the dogcart variety. One seat faced forward and the other back. The engine was under the seats. The radiator was on the dashboard and steering was with a wheel unlike the Ford which used a tiller. The wheels of the car were large and had solid rubber tires. The body was fairly well sprung and ran quite smoothly except on cobbled streets as most were at that time. The total weight of the Arrol-Johnstone car was over two tons. It was not easy to push when broken down.

After being a few months at this work and rather liking the progress so far the staff were invited on the spring holiday for a tour of about a hundred miles to try out several of the cars that had been completed. It was a test of the springs and the power mechanism to see which parts needed improvement. It had been a spell of dry weather, the roads were very dusty and the windshields were not very high. In fact the car I was in had no dashboard at all and at twenty miles an hour we had to hold onto our hats with both hands or stow them under the seats. The string of cars crossed the Clyde on the Erskine Ferry, ran through Dumbarton to Luss and then away up to the north end of Loch Lomond where we had a picnic in front of a hotel. We then drove back the same way but crossed the Clyde on the Renfrew Ferry to Paisley. It was claimed a great event that some of the cars had raced at the high speed of thirty miles an hour in some places and none had broken down. I had the bad luck to be in the last car of the procession and we got the dust from all the others. We ran in a cloud of dust the whole way. For a week or so after this adventure my nose wouldn’t work. It was choked tight and I had to breathe through the mouth. I didn’t stay off work but most weekends my mother kept me in bed and bathed my nose with hot cloths until I began to breathe through the nose again.

The result of that first journey in a motor car without a dashboard was that my nose became very sensitive to dust and I took an attack of hay fever every summer thereafter. Only in my old age does it seem to be relaxing. Possibly because I don’t breathe any dust on the waterfront of the city of Victoria. The tendency to suffer from hay fever may be hereditary as my Uncle John Hepburn had the same trouble, I remember. He had to give up his job as a baker due to the effects of flour dust. Also, the same trouble has been passed to one of our sons, unfortunately. Perhaps if I hadn’t gone on that dusty trip to Loch Lomond it might have put a stop to the evil going any further. Who knows?

It was at this time that the office was busy on the design of an Arrol-Johnstone truck and an English draughtsman whose name was Larry______  had the full charge of the layout or assembly plan. The rest of us were making plans of the details. For instance, I was making plans of the gear box, another had the back axle, etc. The drawings were finished and white prints made. The shop was busy manufacturing the various parts and then came the assembly. Then the trouble began. Larry had made some awful blunders. First, it was found that the steering pillar ran through the radiator. Then the front wheels couldn’t clear the frame when the load was on because the front springs were too weak. When that was corrected and the truck was ready for a trial run, lo and behold, the steering was wrong. When the steering wheel turned to the right the front wheels turned to the left. The thread on the steering column had been a right hand one instead of a left. Larry didn’t wait to be fired. He picked up his drawing instruments and left for home and Olde England. Many a laugh we had over him. It took us a while to live it down and the Chief Draughtsman had a bad time of it for neglecting to check the plans properly. I never thought he had much of a head anyway and now I wasn’t getting along well with him and decided to look elsewhere.

I moved to Coventry (~1905) and worked at Daimler for about a year when I was offered a position to return to Paisley and the Arrol Co.. I was a bit sorry to leave Coventry and my landlords, the Elliotts, were not very happy at losing me as a boarder for we had got on so well together. I was myself looking forward to getting home to Lochwinnoch every night. Mrs. Elliott declared that they wouldn’t try to get another young man as a boarder because they were sure to be displeased with anyone after having me. I heard later that they got an old lady to take my room. The next time I was in Coventry, about a year later, Mrs. Elliott had twins and little Katy had more than dolls to play with.

Back home again in 1906 I was soon into the old rut with a season ticket from Paisley to Lochwinnoch to get home every night. The work in the office went well under the new Chief Draughtsman, Mr. Cameron. He was one of the old school but an expert designer although a strict taskmaster. He kept very strict discipline in the office. As I was in charge of the new work I had more leeway and had two junior draughtsmen directly under my orders that worked beside me. I also was overseer when some of the other draughtsmen were detailing from my plans.

My two junior draughtsmen were smart lads and if I had only known how they turned out I might have taken more interest in them. One of them was A.V. Roe, an Englishman, who later in life became the founder of Avroe Airplane Co. one of the largest manufacturers of aircraft in England and Canada. He made a worldwide reputation in that business. The other was also an Englishman, Rupert Vaughan, who was to come to Canada some years later. I met him again when he was an engineer with the E & N Railway on Vancouver Island in 1916 and later still when he and I were engineers from 1927 – 1945 with the BC government. I was then Chief Designing Engineer to the Public Works Department and he was Resident Engineer for some road construction jobs in the same department where he had the job of again working to my plans in bridge and road work. Rupert died in 1955 in Victoria after retiring. He left a widow and a married daughter but I never met them. As for A.V. Roe I never met him again after leaving Scotland but his name has been prominent in airplane news for many years. Every time I see his name it reminds me of the times I had to get him to correct mistakes in his drawings in the Paisley office. I asked Vaughn once why he and I didn’t see into the future and line up with Roe in his aircraft work. “What a chance we missed,” I said. ‘No, no,” said Vaughn. “If we had we would be dead men now. Don’t you remember the number of Avroe men who crashed in the early planes?” “Well, perhaps we were lucky we didn’t,” I said. “You bet,” said Rupert. “A live engineer in BC is better than a dead one in Birmingham.” (A.V. Roe has also passed on. It is an odd thing, an older man like myself should still be alive and writing gossip).

The work in making plans of the new Arrol-Johnstone car was interesting. Mr. Napier, the manager, left the details of the designing to the drafting office. Mr. Johnstone had left the firm and was on the point of starting a new motor car works in Glasgow. We did not have to work out his curious ideas that had handicapped us before. His new company did not live long. It struggled along for a few years. He spent great sums of money and then collapsed. Mr. Napier’s method of working was efficient. We would take each part of the new car and make plans of several designs for the same purpose. For instance, I was asked to make several designs for the steering gear. I had ten different designs before I quit, all more or less in use in French and English cars of the period. Then we had a talk. Old Cameron would pull over a high stool and Mr. Napier another and I would be asked to show each design separately. They would consider it, ask my opinion and then discuss the problems in making each one. Then finally one would be chosen and the detailed plans rushed out. The same method was used in designing gear boxes, back axles and engine parts. Cameron was responsible for the engine design. At last, plans were finished, white prints taken of all the tracings and then the shop got busy on the manufacture and assembly. The racing car was ready just a few weeks before the date of the race. It was held on the Isle of Man with over thirty cars competing. The Arrol-Johnstone car came in first. It beat all the expensive cars from French and English factories. I got a few pounds as a prize for my share of the work.

It was while we were working on these plans that my old school friend, John A. Sloan, asked me to introduce him to old Cameron, our Chief Draughtsman. He was out of a job at the time and wanted to get into motor car work. I gave him a good recommendation to Cameron as an efficient draughtsman and he was hired. That was the third time Sloan and I worked together. The first time was at Allen Glen’s School, the 2^nd at Alley & McLellan’s office. It was fated that we would work together a fourth time but didn’t go so well. More on that later.

When the Tourist-Trophy Race was over and things slackened off a little in the drawing office I got my two-week summer holiday. I had been doing quite a bit of overtime work and needed a change. My lawyer friend, Dan Wright, was taking a holiday too. We decided to go well away from home so we got railway tickets and went way up north. We went to Findhorn, a fishing village on the coast of Elginshire, with a nice golf course. Dan and I had got quite keen on golfing. He was a member of the Milliken Park Club and I had often played with him on a Saturday Afternoon. It was a fine run on the train through the Grampian and other Highland hills. I took some photos with my old camera and they turned out well. Some Highland lochs we passed had to be snapped from the carriage window. We brought some sandwiches with us to eat on the way. Dan had some tomato sandwiches, the first tomatoes that he or I had ever tasted. They had only recently been introduced to shops in Scotland. At Forres we left the train and got to Findhorn in a horse wagonette. We secured a nice bedroom with two beds and a sitting room overlooking Findhorn Bay with its small wharf for reasonable rates. Every day of our stay had good weather and we would play a round of golf on the nine-hole course in the forenoon. Then we would wander the beaches and the Culkin Sands in the afternoon. We watched the salmon fishers casting their nets in Findhorn Bay. We even bought a salmon each. The salmon were put into a straw bag for shipping. Dan sent his to his aunt in Paisley and I sent mine to mother in Lochwinnoch. He had all the luck, however. Mine took a day longer on the way and my mother had things to say about a stinking fish. My sister chimed in with, “What a waste of money sending fish all that way.” So, my intentions were better than the results. However, we didn’t know about that until we got home so it didn’t spoil our holiday. Our last week was livened up when Dan met an acquaintance who was staying at an inn in Findhorn. I have forgotten the name of the old gentleman but he had a niece with him. We enticed her out the next day to the golf course after we had discovered that they had golf clubs with them. So, we had a little variety in our jaws with a threesome playing. The old gent was too stiff to play anyway. We had the niece out for both golf and long walks. She was an intelligent young lady and divided her attentions equally between Dan and I. While taking her home one afternoon we met the old gent and the innkeeper (A husky old Highlander) sitting chatting at a table in the inn’s parlour. The old Highlander had evidently been at the bottle. He welcomed us heartily and was in a talking mood. “Now young man, have something to drink. This is on me.” Dan chose a little wine but I chose a stone ginger. This didn’t please the old fellow. “Ho, ho!” he cried, “What stuff to drink, stone ginger. You must be tee-total,” he cried. “Of course,” I said, “And not ashamed of it either.” “Well, well,” was all he said to that but I had evidently fallen low in his estimation. The young lady had waited to talk to her father about our game and before she went upstairs, she gave me a smile and a pleased nod as much as to say, “You did right.” I never did meet that young lady again. I have forgotten her name. After I got home I received a long letter from her written from her home in East Kilbride. It was a nice letter but getting it was quite a surprise. I can’t remember whether I answered it or not.

Before we left for home, Dan had a college friend to visit at Fochabers, about twenty miles east of Forres on the other side of the River Spey. We took the train there and spent the day in the lovely scenery of Speyside. We visited Castle Gordon and its wonderful grounds having lunch at the Belie Manse, where Dan’s friend lived. He was the minister of Fochabers Church. We got a wonderful reception at the manse. The minister’s wife gave us such a meal with strawberries and rich cream to finish up with. We took photographs there. I still have some of them in an old album yet. Each time I look at them they remind me of a most pleasant holiday. I can only look back with longing to see some of the kind people again but the minister, his wife and Dan himself have all passed on and only their memory remains.

We came home by Inverness staying a night in a hotel there. The next morning we left on the steamer from Inverness to Fort William by way of the Caledonian Canal. This route passes through three Highland lochs:

 Loch Ness, Loch Oich and Loch Lochie. From Fort William we went by train to Glasgow and home. It was a wonderful holiday and my mother and sister had lots of questions to ask about it.

That was about the only summer holiday I took that wasn’t with my mother and sister. They went every summer for a few weeks to the coast somewhere, usually to Arran. Whiting Bay was a favourite spot. They also went once to Girvan, Oban and to Tarbert in Loch Fyne. Several times they went to the McCulloch’s at Kilkenzie in Kintyre. I would go with them for a weekend or two while they were away. Sailing on the Clyde steamers was very enjoyable and fares in those days were not very high.

I had another holiday with the Wright family the following year to a place on the west coast of Kintyre called Glenbarr. Dan Wright, Aunt Wright and Jack his blind brother were with us that week. Jack was a teacher for the blind in Paisley schools. Dan and I did some fishing in the burns there and caught a few trout. We took a trip by wagonette to Tarbert one day. The road ran along the coast where the Atlantic rollers rolled in with noisy vigour. We called at Dr. Low’s who had moved to Tayinloan from Lochwinnoch.  We met Gracie the daughter who we found getting ready for her wedding that was near. The Island of Gigha was visible from Dr. Low’s windows and he told us that he had patients over there. They were a very backward lot. Some of them could speak only Gaelic and the doctor did not speak the language. He had to take Gracie on the ferry with him to interpret for him. She had picked up a lot of Gaelic in a year’s time.

I remember that trip to Tarbert principally because I had the misfortune to lose my wallet with several pound notes in it. The back rail of the wagonette seat had worked the purse out of my hip pocket with the joggling of the vehicle. Despite our turning back several miles along the road to look for it we did not see it. We concluded that some Highland freebooter had been there before us. In the olden days they wouldn’t have waited to pick it off the road. The owners of purses often got their throats cut as well as a knock on the head. In the country of the Campbells law was for the stronger man to interpret to his advantage.

Dan and I had our bicycles with us that holiday. We were invited down to the Smiths of Kilkenzie for a dance with the seven Smith daughters at their big farm house. What an evening we had with them! I can remember dancing waltzes with all the girls. It took some energy to keep up with the big farm lassies. When I made a misstep, I was soon pulled right with hearty vigour. I was never a very good dancer. Dan and I were put through our paces that night and we were really tired men when we cycled the fifteen miles home to Glenbarr in the small hours.

We cycled down again to visit the McCullochs but it was a sad visit. Dan had met Maggie McCulloch often when she had visited us at Lochwinnoch. Maggie was a fine girl in her twenties. Sadly, her health had broken down and came to my mother’s for a change of air. Dan and Maggie took to each other right from the first meeting. They thought a lot of each other but she got tuberculosis and Maggie did not live long. She was within two weeks of her death when we called on this trip we were on. In spite of this she showed us a bright, smiling face she showed us when we called and were shown into her room. She chatted brightly for fifteen minutes and then we rose to leave. She held my hand first and a tremor came into her voice as she said, “Good bye, Tom. We will wait again sometime.” When Dan took her hand nothing was said. They just looked at one another. I saw the tears in Dan’s eyes. He let her hand go after a long while. Then he stroked her hair gently and then hurried from the room. Polly the younger sister and her mother, Mrs. McCulloch, were crying quietly in the kitchen as we said goodbye to them and left. We cycled along in silence and we were half way to Glenbarr before Dan spoke. Polly McCulloch later married John Hutchison of Glasgow who was known well by my wife’s family at Shettliston. He was a teacher in a Glasgow school.