: Brian Laban
: Classic Jaguar XK The 6-Cylinder Cars 1948 - 1970
: The Crowood Press
: 9781785001949
: 1
: CHF 25.70
:
: Auto, Motorrad, Moped
: English
: 208
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
There have been other generations of Jaguar XK since, but the definitive incarnation is the family of 6-cylinder sports cars that stretch from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, from XK120 to the E-Type. On road, on track and on rally stage, they built the foundations of Jaguar's sporty image and giant-killing reputation, not to mention its commercial roots - especially in America. By any definition, the 6-cylinder XKs are at the heart of everything that Jaguar grew into. This is the complete story of the whole 6-cylinder XK generation, the circumstances, the people and the events that created it and made it a sports car legend - and guaranteed that forever after, in Jaguar's vocabulary, XK would always mean 'sports car'.

Brian Laban has been writing about cars, the motor industry and motor sport for more than forty years, for magazines, newspapers, broadcast and online content. He has written around forty books, edited several magazines and worked with many car manufacturers and race teams. He is a member of the Guild of Motoring Writers, and member (and former chairman) of the Fleet Street Group of Motoring Writers.

CHAPTER ONE

FRESH AIR AND FUN – FROM BLACKPOOL TO BROWNS LANE

Blackpool is the archetypal British seaside resort, on Lancashire’s Irish Sea coast, between Liverpool and the Lake District. It is known around the world for its seven miles of flat sands, its Tower (closely modelled on M Eiffel’s construction in Paris, but a little smaller), its Pleasure Beach funfairs, its traditional piers, popular shows, ‘Golden Mile’ of amusement arcades and its Promenade tramcars. It is famous, too, for its annual festive Illuminations, devised to stretch Blackpool’s summer season (founded on the annual ‘Wakes Weeks’ holidays of neighbouring industrial towns brought in by the railway) into winter. And the opening lines of the famous monologue ‘Albert and the Lion’, written by Marriott Edgar and delivered by music-hall great Stanley Holloway, tell us that: ‘there’s a famous seaside place called Blackpool, which is noted for fresh air and fun …’.

It is generally less noted as the birthplace of what eventually became Jaguar Cars, but ultimately, Black-pool is where this story starts, with the birth of Jaguar’s founder and creator of the XK generation, William Lyons, on 4 September 1901.

Blackpool in the early years of the twentieth century, much as it would have been when William Lyons was growing up there.

In 1925, William Lyons was in his early twenties and the Swallow Sidecar Company was already starting to grow out of its original premises, but was still firmly rooted in Blackpool.

Lyons was born less than a year after Queen Victoria died, exactly a year after the end of the Boer War and just days before US President William McKinley was assassinated. It was a time of scientific exploration and the year when Marconi first sent wireless messages across the Atlantic. Lyons was also born into a world where the motor vehicle was still in its infancy and still exciting. It was the same year that Gottlieb Daimler built his first Mercedes car, named after Mercédès, the daughter of Emil Jellinek, Consul-General of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Nice, and the year when Rudolf Diesel revealed his first engine to the public.

Blackpool was already a teeming holiday resort for Britain’s northern working classes, but was yet to become the brash entertainment centre it is today. In 1901, Blackpool had a ‘permanent’ population of around 47,000, but the annual tourist influx, soaring since the opening of the railway in 1846 and further boosted by the introduction of holidays-with-pay for the working classes, already ran into the low millions.

It was the entertainment business that brought William Lyons’ father, also William, across the sea from his native Ireland to Blac