Jaguar XJ-S

The Complete Story

James Taylor

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781785005848
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Automotive Transportation & Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

James Taylor remembers very well the disappointment among his petrol-head friends when the XJ-S was announced in 1975. It was not a replacement for the legendary E-type; its colours were uninspired; and its interior was drab. All credit, then, to those people at Jaguar who truly believed in the car and, over a period of nearly 20 years, turned the ugly duckling into a swan. From the moment the XJ-S HE arrived in 1981, there seemed to be renewed hope, and from then on, the car went from strength to strength to become the much-admired grand tourer it always should have been. The book contains a timeline of the key events in the history of the XJ-S and an overview of the evolution of the XJ-S from the XJ27 prototype. Packed with details it gives UK showroom prices through the year and sales in the US by year. Of great interest to all motoring and Jaguar enthusiasts, it is superbly illustrated with 192 colour and black & white photos. James Taylor has been writing professionally about road transport since the late 1970s, his primary interest is in those models that made the British motor industry great.

CHAPTER ONE

THE XJ-S PEDIGREE

Today, Jaguar’s XJ-S is a much admired classic of its period, and enthusiasts admire and cherish these cars, going to great lengths to keep them in good condition and paying quite high sums of money for the best ones. But it was not always like that. The early XJ-S coupés did not meet with universal admiration on their release in 1975, and it was several years after that before the car that the market really wanted – a full convertible derivative – became available. So what had gone wrong?

A large part of the reason for the car’s poor reception in the beginning was that it was not the car that Jaguar buyers expected, nor was it the car they wanted. What they wanted was a replacement for the legendary E-type sports car, and what they got instead was a suave and sophisticated grand tourer with a quite different character. The reasons for that are explained in the next chapter, but the fact was that Jaguar did not have a history as a manufacturer of grand touring models (even though the final E-types had definitely tended that way), and its introduction of such a car caused confusion among potential buyers.

Jaguar’s traditional strengths lay in sports cars and in high-performance saloons, and it is worth reviewing the company’s history to see why the XJ-S did not fit comfortably into the established Jaguar format.

THE ORIGINS

Jaguar’s roots lay not in cars but in coachbuilding. In the early 1920s, after William Walmsley moved his small motorcycle sidecar business from Stockport to Blackpool, he met and entered into partnership with the younger William Lyons. Walmsley’s sidecars were noted for their elegant design, and the enthusiastic Lyons, who had served an apprenticeship with Crossley Motors in Manchester before joining the sales staff of a Sunbeam dealership in Blackpool, developed his eye for a good line from Walmsley’s example. In 1922 the two men formed the Swallow Sidecar Company, and this business was so successful that as early as 1927 they were able to branch out into making car bodies.

Swallow stuck to a policy of offering bodies for relatively cheap cars, in particular providing special coachwork for the little Austin Seven. This made their cars attractive to the customer who could not afford an expensive luxury car but nevertheless wanted something that stood out from the crowd of everyday models. The origins of the market positioning that would later be associated with Jaguar cars probably lay in this early experience.

Pricing was inevitably an important issue for Swallow, and by adopting quite sophisticated production processes the company was able to minimize the cost of making its bodies. When the growth of their business forced them to seek larger premises, Walmsley and Lyons therefore looked carefully at how best to use this new opportunity to minimize costs further. They concluded that a move to the Midlands was in order, as not only would it eliminate the cost of transporting chassis to Blackpool from the Midlands, but being located in the heart of the British motor industry would make it easier to recruit the skilled staff they needed. And so, in autumn 1928, the Swallow business moved lock, stock and barrel into premises at Holbrook Lane in Coventry’s Foleshill district.

The Swallow business continued to expand. Lyons introduced further new production methods, and before Christmas 1928 the rate of production had increased from twelve car bodies a week to fifty. The sidecar activities meanwhile continued. In 1929, Swallow took a stand at the Olympia Motor Show, and that year they also began to work on a wider range of chassis; most important among these for the future of the company was the Standard. In all cases, their combination of attractive lines and striking paintwork completely transformed the perpendicular look of the originals, and created cars that were genuinely different from others available in Britain.

Mechanically, however, the Swallow-bodied cars were as mundane as the standard factory coachwork their siblings carried. It was therefore only logical that Swallow should see as its next step a move into cars that were mechanically as well as bodily different from anything which could be bought elsewhere. In 1931, therefore, they took that step.

The stylish sidecar seen in this picture taken at the Coventry Transport Museum is a Swallow. The motorcycle is a 1935 Norton Model 18. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

From sidecars to saloons… Swallow soon turned to building car bodies that were very much out of the ordinary for their times. Among the most popular was one for the Austin Seven, and an example is seen here. CHARLES/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

THE FIRST SS MODELS

The new models that Swallow announced in October 1931 were not really the company’s first complete cars, although some commentators have called them that. Content with the special bodies Swallow had been offering on their chassis since 1929, Standard had agreed to supply Swallow with their 16bhp (2-litre) and 20bhp (2.5-litre) 6-cylinder engines, fitted at the Standard works into a special chassis designed to meet Swallow’s requirements. The key to this chassis was that it was much lower than those normally used for saloons of the period, and that enabled Swallow to clothe it with rakish new sporting bodywork.

This deal with Standard had been brokered by William Lyons, and with the new cars he introduced a new name: they were to be called SS cars, a name which is generally considered to stand for Standard Swallow. Swallow now had a marque of their own. The SS1, as the 6-cylinder car was called, went on sale in 1932, and was then joined by a much smaller 1-litre model based on the Standard Little Nine chassis. This became the SS2, even though it was more in the vein of Swallow’s earlier rebodying efforts.

Once again, the next step was a logical one: in 1933 Lyons and Walmsley set up a new company called SS Cars Ltd, which absorbed the old Swallow company at the end of July 1934. From that point on, Lyons worked towards establishing the company as a credible builder of complete cars. He wanted both individual styling and the best possible road performance, and the later SS models were offered with a variety of attractive bodies, and larger and more powerful new engines provided by Standard. Keen pricing was paramount. By 1935 SS had become firmly established as a small-volume maker of stylish sporting cars costing considerably less than their exotic looks suggested.

The second-series SS1 coupé introduced for 1933 had much better balanced lines than the earlier model of the same name. Those are, of course, dummy hood irons; rear-seat passengers couldn’t see much outside the car!

WATERSHED – THE SS JAGUARS

Inevitably, Lyons pressed for more performance, and to get it he turned to the legendary tuning expert Harry Weslake and asked him to develop the big Standard engine to deliver more power. Weslake redesigned the top end of the engine with a new cylinder head and overhead valves in place of side valves, and Lyons somehow managed to persuade Standard to manufacture this revised engine exclusively for SS Cars.

Lyons’ plan was to marry up this new engine with a new chassis and a new body. He was more than capable of designing the new body himself, but there was no one at the Foleshill works who had any experience of designing chassis. So in April 1935, SS Cars took on their first proper engineer. William Heynes, who joined the company from Humber in Coventry, was later to become a central figure in the Jaguar story.

Introduced in 1936 with the Standard-derived 2.5-litre engine, the SS 100 took on the 3.5-litre engine in 1938 and was then light enough to reach 104mph (167km/h). This example was built in 1938. JLR

Lyons wanted a new name for his new car, too, and he chose to call it a Jaguar, after the World War I Armstrong-Siddeley aero engine that had caught his interest. So the new SS Jaguars went on sale for 1936. The range of sleek sports saloons and open four-seat tourers was supplemented by a new short-wheelbase two-seat sports model called the SS90 – an important model historically because it was the first proper sports car from the company. The saloons could be obtained with either a 1.5-litre or a 2.5-litre engine, the smaller one being a production Standard side-valve 4-cylinder, while the larger engine had 2664cc and the Weslake overhead-valve arrangement. The open cars, meanwhile, came only with the larger engine. Although both SS1 and SS2 models remained available alongside the newcome...