Nevil Shute's "On The Beach": A Very Fifties Apocalypse

Content Warning: Includes discussions of suicide, and euthenasia of a child.

On The Beach is not a famous novel ("famous" in this context defined as, "even people who don't read books have heard of it"). But it's still pretty well-known, and I was prompted to track it down in dead-tree format after happening across Liam Pieper's mid-pandemic essay, On the Resolute Nihilism of an End-Times Classic. Pieper neatly described it as, "...a strange, dark novel – no plot and all coda … a book without villains, without antagonists, without conflict." Just the bleak inevitability of certain death, approaching at its own steady, measured pace.

Source: JSTOR Daily

For those who mightn't know, On The Beach is a 1957 novel written by British immigrant Nevil Shute, set in the not-too-distant future of 1963. It’s been roughly 18 months since World War III, a "short, bewildering war … of which no history had been written or would ever be written now." Atomic bombs have completely annihilated the northern hemisphere, and now all that radiation is slowly making its way south, drifting on the trade winds and poisoning everything in its path. Basically, it's HBO's Chernobyl if they never put the fire out.

Our dramatis personae are: Lieutenant-Commander Peter Holmes, a young RAN officer who loves his family and the sea in roughly equal measure; his wife Mary, a rather sexist caricature of a dutiful 1950s housewife, who spends most of the book in the denial stage of grief; Commander Dwight Towers, an American submarine captain whose crew survived the war, but whose wife and children were back in Connecticut; Moira Davidson, another sexist caricature, this time of a good-time girl who is nevertheless the most sympathetic character in the book; and Professor John Osborne, a CSIRO scientist who initially tags along to be the Spock to Dwight's Kirk, but slowly develops more personality than either of our two leads.

They're characters, barely, but they're not heroes, as their circumstances leave them without agency: there's nothing for them to do. The closest thing we have to a plot involves a pair of long-distance cruises aboard Dwight's command, the USS Scorpion, but there's no jeopardy to it because everyone already knows what they'll find. Everybody in the north is long dead, and everyone in the south will be following them soon enough. The only thing left to do is decide how to spend the handful of months they have left, months that become weeks, then days...

The War to End All of Everything
Shute's vision for World War III involved such an absurd sequence of events that I can only conclude the absurdity was the point. The first time we hear of it, he tells us very little:

...[Towers] learned for the first time of the Russo-Chinese war that had flared up out of the Russo-NATO war, initiated by Albania. He learned of the use of cobalt bombs by both the Russians and the Chinese...

At first I had to assume this was meant to reflect the confusion of events that moved too fast for anyone on the ground to keep up. Shute lived through both world wars, after all, and surely knew the strange texture of front pages full of propaganda, guesses, disinformation and the occasional stray bit of truth that slipped past the censors. During Scorpion's first cruise, Osborne and Towers discuss the war in more detail, Osborne revealing at least 4,700 devices were detonated if the seismic readings are to be believed – probably more. Which was a pretty pessimistic estimate when the novel was being written, as that would've been pretty close to all the nuclear weapons ever built. By the real 1963 however, the U.K. had 211 warheads, the Soviet Union just over 3,300, and the United States more than 25,000, which makes Osborne's numbers seem positively Polyannish. The expansion of the U.S. arsenal in the late 1950s was a feat of genuine insanity.

Although the Soviet stockpile was hardly comforting either. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The war supposedly started because Moscow needed a warm-water port (nothing ever changes...), their strategy to depopulate northern China so they could move in and take Shanghai; the Chinese counter-strategy was to revert the Soviets back to a pre-industrial people with no need for Shanghai. Both strategies involved blanketing large areas of the world with radioactive fallout, which brings about the consequences our cast spends the rest of the novel dealing with. It's worth noting, however, that although the novel technically has an omniscient third-person narrator, said narrator stays locked to our core characters and never weighs in on these matters. John Osborne has the seismic readings, but he doesn't actually know how the war was waged; similarly, Dwight Towers knows what the intel experts were predicting only weeks before his final cruise, but has no way of knowing if that's what actually happened. We only see what our main characters have see, hear what they’ve heard, so we’re allowed only a ground-level view of these vast events, creating a sense of realism and no small amount of claustrophobia. It's ironic that we feel most free during the chapters spent cooped up in a nuclear submarine – at least for that time we’re doing something.

That narrow, subjective view however is the only thing that salvages the weirdness that comes next. So far the course of events hasn't involved Britain at all, and for our extremely British author that cannot be allowed to stand. It takes a leap of imagination, but Shute finds a way to get nuclear weapons on London – a false-flag attack from that noted nuclear power, Egypt.

"The very first attack. They were Russian long range bombers, Il 626s, but they were Egyptian manned. They flew from Cairo."

"Are you sure that's true?"

"It's true enough. They got the one that landed at Porto Rico [sic] on the way home. They only found out it was Egyptian after we'd bombed Leningrad and Odessa and the nuclear establishments at Kharkov, Kuibyshev, and Molotov. Things must have happened kind of quick that day."

The Ilyushin Il 626 is a fictional aircraft, but it's also the least implausible part of that exchange. We don't need to look far for a reason a British author might be hostile toward Egypt, but come on. Ol' Nasser really must've been the Saddam of his day (as far as being the west's bogeyman, at least).

"The first one was the bomb on Naples. That was the Albanians, of course. Then there was the bomb on Tel Aviv. Nobody knows who dropped that one, not that I've heard, anyway. Then the British and Americans intervened and made that demonstration flight over Cairo. Next day the Egyptians sent out all the serviceable bombers that they'd got, six to Washington and seven to London. One got through to Washington, and two to London. After that there weren’t many American or British statesmen left alive."

So the course of this war is a bit strange, even a bit silly, but I'm still fairly sure that was the whole point. Events were confusing, and major decisions had to be made on the spot by low-level commanders. I have to wonder if a fair bit of this book is actually leftover trauma from the Second World War rather than anxiety about a Third. Shute didn't immigrate to Australia until 1950, but his description of the radiation coming south, of the cities of the Pacific going dark one by one, it sounds a bit like an echo of the nightmare days of 1942, when Hirohito's finest were popping up everywhere and seemed unstoppable. Similarly, his description of a society suddenly without oil hits harder when you remember petrol rationing wasn't that far in the past.

The Scorpion's Tale
I was a bit taken aback to realise Dwight Towers was the commander of USS Scorpion (SSN-589). Scorpion was launched in 1959, a couple of years after the novel's publication, and it sailed until 1968 when it was lost in an incident the U.S. Navy has never deigned to clarify. Someone almost definitely knows what happened, but speculation is rife that the Americans and their Soviet counterparts agreed not to talk about it publicly, so we'll probably never know. What we do know is that, along with USS Thresher, it was one of the two submarines Robert Ballard was searching for when he found the wreck of the Titanic in 1985 (the Navy's deal was, more or less: "We'll need a cover story so the Red Fleet doesn't come snooping... Titanic? Perfect! We'll even let you use any leftover budget to search for real, as long as you find our subs first...").

Scorpion's launch in Connecticut, 19 December 1959. (Source: Wikipedia)

Scorpion was highly-classified military tech at the time, but Shute still makes her sound far more advanced than she actually was. Holmes ends up seconded as Australian liaison aboard the American vessel, and early on he takes a tour of her engine spaces:

[Peter] had never served in an atomic powered ship, and as much of the equipment was classified for security a great deal of it was novel to him. He spent some time absorbing the general layout of the liquid sodium circuit to take heat from the reactor, the various heat exchangers, and the closed-cycle helium circuits for the twin high-speed turbines that drove the ship...

Nevil Shute had an engineering background, so he likely had contacts within the emerging nuclear industry who could pass on rumours of what was in the pipeline. The sodium-cooled reactor wasn't made up like the Il 626 (it was an experiment briefly tried in the 1960s), but it would've been massive overkill for a mere attack submarine. Sodium's big advantage is that it runs hot, allowing it to transfer much more energy in high-output use cases, but it comes with matching disadvantages – such as the fact sodium explodes when it touches water. Might not be the best thing to put on board a Navy vessel, especially when they don't need nearly as much power as an entire city. The real Scorpion ran a very basic water-cooled S5W reactor, because that was all she needed (sound military reasoning, I'm sure you'll agree, especially when it would be maintained by edgy 19-year-olds).

There's some irony that the only vessel capable of traversing the rad zone is a nuclear sub. With spicy rocks providing infinite electricity, Scorpion was able to make drinking water and breathable oxygen out of seawater, so the only limit on her endurance was food stores (today, the standard line about how long a nuclear sub can stay submerged is, "120 days, or 5 days after the coffee runs out"). Their first cruise is a simple recon trip up Australia's east coast and around the Top End, checking in on Cairns, Port Moresby and Darwin. Darwin would've looked much like it did in Baz Luhrman's Australia, but the mention of Cairns and Green Island cut deep for Yours Truly. We as a family went on holiday there in 2000 to get away from the Sydney Olympics, and made some fantastic memories along the way. The whole section reads like a reverse Mary Celeste, where the ship is inhabited and it's the rest of the world that's eerily vacant – except we know why everyone's gone in this story. The radiation levels are so high an unshielded person would survive only a few days in Cairns, and even less in Darwin.

The Saline Solution
The thing that made me want to read On The Beach was the question of radioactive fallout: What did Shute know, in 1957? When did the public become aware that atomic bombs weren't just big firecrackers, and a radioactive Sword of Damocles was now dangling over all our heads? Because it manifestly wasn't 1945.

The guru on this stuff is of course Alex Wellerstein of the Nuclear Secrecy blog, and way back in 2012 he wrote about who knew about radiation sickness, and when. The scientists who developed the bomb certainly knew there'd be radiation effects, but apparently that intel never got passed up the chain.

J. Robert Oppenheimer never seemed to be very interested in that. Why not? It remains something of a mystery — how do you find out why someone wasn't interested in something? ...

Because Oppenheimer didn't know/care about radiation effects, General Leslie Groves didn't really, either. Groves actually thought he could march American troops through an area that was recently atomic bombed — had he been given the opportunity to do so, his ignorance would have actually cost American lives.

If Groves didn't know/care, then the Targeting Committee and Interim Committee, Secretary of War Henry Stimson's turf, didn't know at all. If Stimson didn't know, Truman didn't know. … They didn't really care, they didn't really know, and it never got passed up.

So I did some digging, expecting the tipping point to be the Crossroads Baker test, or maybe Castle Bravo (which I've briefly mentioned before). But the real moment appears to've been a radio broadcast by physicist Leó Szilárd on 26 February 1950. The true author of the Einstein-Szilárd letter, which kicked off the Manhattan Project (Einstein merely signed it to give it some clout – celebrity endorsements aren't new), Szilárd was a pacifist who, in the post-war world, was vigorously campaigning for nuclear disarmament. He was trying to scare us straight, warning that nuclear weapon technology would soon reach the point where we could end human life on Earth. I've been able to find neither a recording nor a transcript of this broadcast, sadly, but all the sources agree this was when Szilárd described the cobalt bomb, also known as the "salted" nuke – as in salting the Earth, to ensure nothing could ever grow there again. Which handily also answered my question about why this book (and films like Dr Strangelove) were all obsessed with cobalt.

The 27th element, cobalt is named after kobold, the German word for "goblin", because miners in the Holy Roman Empire found its bluish ores were poor in known metals and gave off toxic arsenic fumes when smelted. When isolated in 1735, it was the first new metal to be discovered since antiquity, and was named "cobalt" in honour of those long-suffering German miners. The human body needs it in trace amounts, as it's a component of Vitamin B12. Virtually all natural cobalt is Cobalt-59, a stable isotope with 27 protons and 32 neutrons. But if you place it beside a neutron source – say, a working nuclear reactor – it can absorb an extra neutron and become Cobalt-60, one of the most dangerously radioactive substances on Earth. Cobalt-60 has a half-life of 5.27 years, or right in the sweet spot to be harmful to humans – any shorter and it wouldn't hang around long enough to cause trouble (nuclear blasts result in some seriously spicy fission products, but they're virtually gone within 72 hours), any longer and the radiation would be so mild it's barely above background. Instead, Cobalt-60 emits three main decay release, one beta and two gamma – and the gamma decays both have extremely high energy. For this reason, cobalt rods are engraved with one of the most famous warnings in the industry: "Drop & Run".

Some joke it should just read, "You Poor Bastard".

At the time of Szilárd's speech, cobalt rods were just being introduced as sources for radiotherapy machines – a revolution in cancer treatment – so the element was already in the public eye. Szilárd theorised that it wouldn't be hard to jacket a nuclear weapon in stable cobalt and let the neutron release of the explosion convert it all to Cobalt-60, which would then be vapourised and carried on the winds to God-knows-where.

According to Wellerstein (again), a 30-year-old physicist named Frederick Reines did some back-of-the-envelope calculations back in 1947 to work out what it would take to irradiate the entire planet. Assuming a uniform spherical shell around the Earth (that "spherical chickens in a vacuum" joke is barely an exaggeration), he worked out that it would take a staggering 900,000 devices to give the entire world acute radiation sickness, or ARS. However, the only devices available in 1947 were Fat Man implosion bombs of around 20 kilotons, so...

That does, however, work out to "only" 18,000 megatons, which, in the thermonuclear age, is not so much after all – that is less than the peak megatonnage of the US Cold War nuclear stockpile.

That equation becomes even less comforting if you're talking salted bombs. Theoretically, around 500 tons of cobalt would be enough to cover the the Earth to a density of 1 gramme per square kilometre, with each gramme producing half a gray (0.5 Gy) of ionising radiation per minute (I know, I can hear physicists groaning in the background, but for our purposes we'll say 1 Gy equals 100 Roentgen. Yes, I know they're measuring different things). So 0.1 Gy would raise your lifetime fatal cancer risk but otherwise be unnoticeable; 1 Gy results in radiation sickness and unambiguous spikes in cancer rates; 3-5 Gy for just six minutes would kill half the population within 30 days; 10 Gy would mean 100 percent mortality rates within days. The timescale in the book, with total mortality occurring within a fortnight, seems consistent with exposures somewhere in the 8-10 Gy bracket.

It goes without saying, but ARS is one of the worst ways to die imaginable. Early symptoms include headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, fever and skin reddening (i.e. radiation burns). Following this there may be a latency period where the patient seems to recover, sometimes known (without the slightest hyperbole) as the Walking Ghost Phase. With sufficient medical care, such a victim might live long enough to die of thyroid cancer or leukaemia instead, though at higher doses it starts to get ugly. Like Chernobyl firefighter ugly. If you really want to traumatise yourself (and I mean that literally – genuine content warning here), look up what happened to Japanese nuclear worker Hisashi Ouchi in 1999. Yes, the man who suffered the most agonising, drawn-out death in history was named Ouchi; this reality is being written by a hack.

Everybody's Dead, Dave
Later in the book, Towers takes Holmes and Osborne for another cruise across the Pacific, this time to investigate an intermittent Morse signal coming from a naval base in Seattle. It's not a coherent signal – they speculate it might be a lone survivor never trained to use a Morse set – but it's still a signal, which requires power, and there isn't supposed to be any power up there. Of course, it turns out to be nothing. The bombs haven't touched the nearby hydroelectric plants, so the power grid is still live, and it just happened that a window blown open by the blast is now depressing the key of a Morse transmitter. Every time the wind blows, the window rocks, transmitting gibberish. With that, the last flame of hope is extinguished, and our trio sail back to Melbourne and, effectively, become unemployed. There's nothing else to do now but wait for the end to come.

The grimmest thing anyone could do is introduce a child into this situation, so of course that's what Shute did. Peter and Mary's baby daughter Jennifer is just starting to crawl (by the end of the book she's teething as well); Mary steadfastly refuses to confront what's about to happen to herself and her baby. She has Peter bring her home a playpen (on the tram, no less), then frets that it's painted green, which contains toxic verdigris ("No, it's Duco. She'd need to have acetone in her saliva to get that off."). When a case of measles breaks out on the sub, she makes Peter sleep outside to avoid giving it to Jennifer. When Peter, gently, explains how to use the provided syringe to euthanise Jennifer when the time comes, she flies into an incandescent rage. H.P. Lovecraft famously wrote: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." He was talking about a gigantic semi-divine squid monster, so we may be grateful he never lived to see the nuclear age: the horror would simply have been out of his league.

Letting her have her delusions, Peter obediently helps Mary plant a garden they'll never see, while Dwight and Moira carry on with their awkwardly chaste non-affair. That leaves John Osborne to save us by growing a personality. Late in his life (perhaps stimulated by the 1956 Albert Park meetings), Nevil Shute was bitten by the racing bug, and his new passion was written into On The Beach. Before the cruise to Seattle, Osborne shows off his new toy, a shiny red Grand Prix Ferrari: "It's the one Donezetti raced the year before the war," he says proudly. "The one he won the Grand Prix of Syracuse on." (Some echoes of Brooklands, there? The traditions of horse racing survived longer at Brooklands than anywhere else. Drivers were distinguished by coloured jersies rather than numbers, and were said to sit "on" their cars rather than in them.) Well, the Syracuse Grand Prix was real, but there was never a piloti named Donezetti (intriguingly, there was a Luis Donizetti, but he was a Brazilian F3 driver from the '90s). Although descriptions are vague, it's clear what Shute was imagining was a front-engined car, so despite all his engineering nous apparently not even Nevil Shute saw the rear-engined revolution coming.

Which is a shame, because if it was from the 1961-'62 era, that would make it one of the iconic Ferrari 156 "Sharknoses". (Source: Ferrari Fan Club of Riga)

This machine Osborne intends to race in the final Australian Grand Prix, to be held at the fictional Tooradin circuit, presumably located near the town of Tooradin in South Gippsland. In geography it sounds like a loop of country roads, but in layout it sounds suspiciously similar to Phillip Island, which had opened a few years prior. We only see one of the qualifying heats, but it plays out as almost the platonic ideal of a motor race: with nothing to live for after the finish, everyone involved pushes to the absolute limit, with the result that even a mere heat ends with multiple fatalities. There's a scene later on where some paperwork needs to be signed in a hurry, so as the only person in the room with a functional car, Osborne acts as courier, roaring around the streets of Melbourne in the Ferrari – the 1950s version of that infamous scene from Driven, I suppose. He does end up winning the Grand Prix, but it occurs off-screen, our heroes hearing about it on the radio – as if to underscore that this, too, does not matter.

At the last, we start hearing cases of radiation sickness in Canberra, and John reminds us that the official announcements are always a few days late: through his CSIRO connections, he's able to reveal there are already cases in Albury. In effect, the radiation is already here: their time is up. One by one they start to feel sick, struck by bouts of vomiting or diarrhoea. The Australian government has already distributed the necessary suicide pills, so all that remains is to decide when to take them. Osborne swallows his sitting at the wheel of his beloved Ferrari; Peter and Mary Holmes give little Jennifer a needle, then curl up in bed together to take theirs. Dwight Towers and a skeleton crew take the Scorpion out to international waters to scuttle her, wary of leaving tech like that lying around for just anyone to find. And Moira...

I've barely talked about Moira, but she's easily the most likeable character in the entire story. People have criticised Shute for writing female stereotypes, but I don't think that's the whole truth. Moira is dragged into the story by the Holmeses, her mission (should she choose to accept it) to keep Dwight company and make sure he's kept too busy to grieve over his lost family in Connecticut. Throw a whore at him, in other words; a loose woman, a party girl. Except she kind of isn't. When we meet her she's a hard-drinking twenty-something (what other kind is there?), but she and Dwight never quite get together. Their quasi-relationship is quite weird, chaste to the point that it starts to feel like Dwight is leading her on, and yet... when the Commander is too hung up on his lost wife to sleep with this younger woman, Moira understands. When he seeks a pogo stick to give to his (long-dead) daughter as a Christmas present, Moira has her old one from childhood refurbished and gifts it to him. She's a subtle contrast to Mary, who – despite being cast as a model 1950s housewife – is actually very selfish in her traumatised, completely forgiveable way. Moira, under the same circumstances, is quite stunningly generous. Fallen woman? Not in your life!

The book's final scene follows Moira as she farewells Dwight from the Williamstown docks, then jumps in her father's Customline and races the Scorpion down through, "Laverton with its big aerodrome, Werribee with its experimental farm … [then] passed the grammar school away on the left and came to shabby, industrial Corio, and so to Geelong, dominated by the cathedral." From there, she roars through Barwon Heads and doesn't stop until she pulls up beside the Point Lonsdale lighthouse. Her reward is one final glimpse of the Scorpion – just a grey shape eight kilometres away – knowing Dwight would be there, standing proud atop the sail. Then she recites the Lord's prayer, takes her pills and washes them down with a last hit of brandy, and because she was our last POV character, that's the last thing we ever know from this story. The last humans in the last city on Earth have been snuffed out.

Yes, it's a grim read. I saw one commenter who said they took it to read in their downtime in Afghanistan, and couldn't finish it because it was more depressing than the war. It's been adapted for film twice, once in 1959 (which was allegedly so bad it hastened the author into an early grave), and once in 2000, which suffers mainly from being low-budget made-for-TV slop. I can imagine another reboot being done by – pick a name out of a hat – Denis Villeneuve, master of the long, beautiful static shot that would really make Melbourne look haunting. I can imagine him shooting that last scene to resemble the Bridge of Death sequence from Episode 1 of Chernobyl, the same ominous slow-motion as the particles descend and swirl, the same whuum-whuum leitmotif signalling that radioactive Death has finally come. It'd be a hell of a way for the human experiment to end.

Truth Hurts
The superpowers never stockpiled cobalt bombs, but don't take too much comfort from that. It wasn't out of any ethical concern, it was simply because they don't make very effective weapons. "Dirty bombs" are just too unreliable for serious militaries, leaving them the preserve of terrorists and anyone else who doesn't have to worry about collateral damage. You'd never get the kind of even radiation coverage Shute imagined, especially not the kind that would produce the frequent "beautiful sunny day/empty streets" paradox that makes On The Beach so haunting. But the phrase "nuclear winter" wasn't due to enter the lexicon until 1983, decades after Shute's own final extinction, so he wasn't to know radiation alone wasn't the problem. On The Beach is an artefact of its time, a specific and applied case of technophobia captured and preserved like a butterfly under glass. But despite what Pieper said, it's not a nihilist text, not even slightly. Shute is far too good at making us feel really sad about everything that's happening for the reader to embrace it as a grand return to Nirvana. He just had the balls to point out that, if the end really was nigh, most people would carry on doing what they were already doing anyway. And that, apparently, is just too confronting for most of us to bear.

Taking a Third Option: 1957 Chrysler Royal AP1

The rise of Chrysler Australia in many ways parallels that of Holden. Both companies began as Adelaide coachbuilders in the 19th Century, and both made the shift to motor vehicles begrudgingly, under the influence of the founders' offspring. But where Holden seemed to live a charmed life, only ever going from strength to strength, Chrysler spent its entire life parked in Struggle Street. 

Protestant Work Ethic
As GM-H began with James Alexander Holden, so Chrysler Australia began with a man: Tobias John Martin Richards. Born in Montacute, South Australia in 1850, he learned his trade as a coachbuilder and blacksmith working for Ludwig Maraun of Pirie Street, Adelaide – only a block over from the Grenfell Street premises of Holden & Frost. By 1885, Richards had the means to strike out on his own, founding T.J. Richards Ltd in what was then West Mitcham, south of Adelaide. Richards became a respected name in the business, responsible for a number of award-winning buggies and coaches – most notably his plush "King of the Road" sulky. The business did well, and in 1900 T.J. Richards expanded to a new half-acre premises on the west side of Hindmarsh Square. In 1907 the workshop was expanded to two storeys, and the old West Mitcham shop was wound up as no longer necessary. By the time Richards retired in 1911, the business was valued at £25,000 (nearly $4.3 million in 2024). 

Where it all began: the original workshop at Mitcham.

During this time, Richards' dearly-beloved, Matilda, had borne him nine children. Six of their offspring were sons, of whom four eventually went into their father's business in some capacity or another. Eldest son Herbert had a strained relationship with the old man, so he left to strike out on a motor business venture of his own. That left the company to his second and third sons, Henry and Claude respectively, which was renamed T.J. Richards & Sons in their honour. After Henry tragically died in a motorcycle accident in May 1915, Claude became the sole company head.

Like their cross-town rivals at Holden & Frost, T.J. Richards & Sons gravitated across to motor vehicles only slowly, producing their first experimental car body in 1905. Tobias refused to consider that the horse might ever be supplanted and never owned a car himself, so it was largely the enthusiasm of Claude that drove their investigation into this new industry. T.J. Richards & Sons made their last horse-drawn vehicle in 1915.

The Keswick plant. (Source: State Library of SA)

After the Great War, T.J. Richards & Sons feasted on the bonanza of imported chassis in need of bodies, constructing them for brands as diverse as Austin, Citroën, Fiat, Morris, Studebaker, Dodge Brothers and Hudson. In February 1920, the company bought a three-acre site at the northern corner of Bay Road (soon to be Anzac Highway) and Leader Street, for £1,900 ($168,000). Although technically located in Forestville, it became known as the Keswick plant because it lay just south of the Keswick Army Barracks (now the Army Museum of South Australia). By April 1925, the Keswick plant had been extended along Leader Street to cover nearly seven acres. By mid-1926, the company employed 425 people building more than 5,000 bodies a year on simple production lines, resulting in annual turnover of some £200,000 (more than $20 million). By 1928, Richards was the second-largest body-builder in Australia, behind only (of course) Holden's Motor Body Builders Ltd. Between them, Richards and Holden's produced about 80 percent of Australia's car, truck and tram bodies in those days.

Walt
Around the same time, former Buick manager Walter P. Chrysler took over the ailing Maxwell Motor Company in the United States and reformed it into his shiny new Chrysler Corporation. Maxwell had been hit hard by the post-WWI recession and found themselves deeply in debt, with spiralling build quality issues killing all demand for their cars. Having performed corporate resuscitations like this before (most notably with Willys-Overland), Walter Chrysler took on the challenge and moved his headquarters to their Highland Park office in Detroit, Michigan. Chrysler soon absorbed the Dodge Brothers Company and, following the tenets of Sloanism, founded the Plymouth and DeSoto brands in 1928. If you wore overalls and worked for a wage, you bought a Plymouth; if you wore a button-up shirt and worked for a salary, you bought a Dodge or DeSoto. And if you wore a full suit and didn't need to work at all, only then could you contemplate a luxurious Chrysler or Imperial.

Soon Chrysler was looking to expand overseas, and naturally his eye was drawn to Australia. In January 1930, T.J Richards & Sons signed a contract with Chrysler for the manufacture of 5,000 Dodge and DeSoto bodies. The deal was worth a colossal £500,000 (over $52 million in 2024), so to fulfil it Richards bought a new 5.7-acre site on the northern side of Scotland Road, just to the west of Adelaide in Mile End South. Ironically, this plant had lately been the home of South Australia's Ford distributors, Duncan & Fraser Ltd, who'd just been (quite deliberately) driven out of business by Ford Australia. The site, running between Railway Terrace and the Holdfast Bay railway line, cost £17,500 ($1.8 million) and opened in early 1931.

The distinctive "Chrysler Dodge Plymouth DeSoto" sign was a local landmark for decades.

Unfortunately, by the time the plant opened Australia was in the heart of the Great Depression, and as Chrysler were forced to drastically wind back production, so imports of chassis into Australia dried up. For the financial year 1931-'32, T.J. Richards posted losses of more than £31,000 ($3.6 million), and their employee payroll dropped to just 98 workers, all at Keswick. Thankfully, August 1932 saw them land a £100,000 ($12.3 million) contract to manufacture a thousand bodies for the Standard company of Britain, pulling the company back from the brink. By mid-1934, they were firmly on the rebound, back to employing around 1,400 workers – 900 at Keswick, which concentrated on metal stamping and fabrication, and 500 at Mile End South, which was dedicated to assembly. By 1935, Richards was producing 11,000 bodies per year – forty a day – and they were able to pay shareholders their first dividend since 1930. Profits for the decade peaked at £45,106 (just over $5.2 million) for the financial year 1936-'37.

It was at this point the dealers came knocking. In December 1936, the eighteen largest Chrysler distributors in Australia had decided to unionise merge to increase their bargaining power with Highland Park. The resulting company became Chrysler Dodge Distributors (Australia) Ltd, and they quickly began throwing their weight around. With Ford now consolidated in Geelong and Holden's Motor Body Builders Ltd recently absorbed into GM, they needed to move quickly to secure their supply chain. Their gaze naturally turned to the largest supplier of Chrysler bodies in the country, T.J. Richards & Sons, in which they bought a controlling interest. Reassuring any jittery workers that their jobs would remain secure, CDD allowed Richards to renew or pursue fresh contracts with rival brands like Packard, Standard, Studebaker and Willys-Overland, and in mid-1938 they moved their headquarters from Melbourne to Adelaide.

With these windfalls, T.J. Richards & Sons was able to upgrade both Keswick and Mile End South, with all paint shop and upholstering duties transferred to the latter. By May 1938, Richards employed 3,280 workers and had a turnover close to £2 million ($227 million) – a ten-fold increase on 1930. That same year they also beat Holden to the punch when they produced Australia's – and indeed one of the world's – first all-steel car bodies. Developed under the influence of Maurice Richards, grandson of Tobias, the "Safe-T-Steel" body consisted of a single-piece steel roof, one-piece steel body panels and doors, and a steel floor, all welded together into a single unit. From 1937, all Richards-made Chryslers were fabricated in steel.

Then of course war returned, and T.J. Richards & Sons – like Holden and Ford before them – were subsumed into the Department of Munitions, producing land mine casings, ammunition boxes, cable drums and mountings for 2-pounder anti-tank guns. In September 1941, the company renamed itself Richards Industries Ltd, feeling it was more in-keeping with their expanded portfolio, and after 1942 they focused almost exclusively on aircraft panels, such as for the Bristol Beaufort, Avro Lancaster bomber and CAC Wirraway trainer.

Chrysler Australia Ltd
Once peace returned, Richards Industries wasted no time reverting back to motor vehicles, expanding the Mile End South facility again and, in September 1949, buying the wartime aircraft factory for £37,175 ($2.6 million). Although progress was slowed by post-war resource shortages, by mid-1946 Richards was already producing more than 500 bodies per week, and employing more than 2,500 workers (up from a wartime minimum of 2,000).

In October 1947 the inevitable finally happened, as CDD finally acquired one-hundred percent of Richards Industries Ltd – securing the company's future, but also ending the family's association with the business their ancestor had founded. Association with other marques was wound up as they focused on Chrysler products. By 1950, Mile End South was approaching its maximum extent of nine acres, and assembly of an almost-complete vehicle from sub-assembled panels took just thirteen minutes. Their net profit for 1949-'50 was £156,330 (more than $10 million) – almost double that of two years earlier – while gross turnover was £4.75 million ($309 million), more than twenty times what they'd seen before the war.

Numbers like that attracted attention, and at long last the Chrysler Corporation itself began to take notice. As early as 1949 there were rumours the U.S. giant was looking to assume full control of CDD, but the consortium rejected an initial £700,000 ($45.5 million) takeover offer in November 1950. Undeterred, in June 1951, Chrysler finally succeeded in buying 85 percent of CDD's ordinary shares and thereby gained a controlling interest in the company, which they promptly renamed to reflect its new status. Chrysler Australia Ltd was in business.

They hit the ground running. October 1951 saw the new bosses embark on a £1 million ($55 million) modernisation and expansion programme, including reorganising Mile End South in accordance with American mass-production techniques. A range of minor parts (such as steering boxes) were made at the Perry Engineering foundry and stamping plants, adjacent to Mile End South. They brought in the dies and tooling to begin stamping panels for the latest 1953 Plymouth, which was then sold as the Plymouth Cranbrook, Dodge Kingsway and DeSoto Diplomat – same cars underneath, just with different grilles and badging. It was a cynical attempt to appeal to more affluent buyers, but we've already established that the Kingsway cost £1,787, so affluent buyers were likely to be the only kind...

Rather gorgeous promotional image of the Diplomat. "1956" plate on 1953 curves unnecessary to know this is a local image, just check the hills behind them. This could only be Australia.

The engine was Chrysler's side-valve "PowerFlow" inline six, a lump that hadn't meaningfully changed since the 1930s (nor would it before it was replaced in the early 1960s). This engine came as a crate unit from Chrysler's U.K. plant in Kew, west London, so although not local content it was at least being sourced within the Commonwealth, helping keep costs manageable. Despite a 230ci displacement, it could offer only 22 kW more than Holden's 132ci Grey, a problem when the car's full chassis meant a kerb weight of 1,512kg.

Few were head over heels for a Cranbrook, and fewer still even bought a Diplomat, but the Chrysler trinity nevertheless found their groove as tough rural cruisers that could handle rough roads without complaint and tolerate dodgy local petrol. In an Australia starved for new cars they actually sold pretty well, with 4,382 of them leaving the plants between 1951 and 1953. By 1954 the reorganisation of the assembly line was complete, a new paint shop and finishing line were in operation, and net profits rose to £858,388 ($38 million). Mid-1955 saw the company invest another £275,000 ($12 million) in a new plant at Mile End South, while another £500,000 went into a spare parts division at Keswick. Chrysler Australia now employed 4,300 workers, many of them newly-arrived immigrants.

Not strictly relevant, but I couldn't resist including this image (dated 17 Oct 1954) of a Chrysler Plymouth hire car that's had a crash with a tram on Pitt Street, Sydney. The relationship between Chrysler Australia and the hire car industry started early. (Source: SMH Archive via Facebook)

But despite this promising start to the decade, the outlook turned bleak after 1955. By the mid-1950s, Chrysler's offerings were being out-styled by the Chevrolet Bel Air, Ford Customline and, yes, the new FE Holden. The Cranbrook's shape – rounded, upright, rather stodgy – was rapidly going out of fashion as wide, flat and low-slung became the name of the game. The twin flat windscreens, although wonderfully cheap to make, gave it away as a design from the 1940s, with engine and suspension technology to match. Having started with a 10 percent market share in 1950, Chrysler gradually slipped to 4.8 percent by 1956. At this time, Holden's market share was climbing towards 50 percent, Ford enjoyed 15 percent, and even BMC Australia – recently formed from the merger of Austin and Morris – were managing about the same. Something had to be done.

What they really needed was one of the new designs being released by their parent company in the U.S. – something like the rather handsome 1955 Chrysler 300, which was making waves in early NASCAR. But this was out of the question: Highland Park was in fact in the process of paying back an enormous $250 million loan from Prudential Insurance (more than $3 billion in today's USD), so they were in no position to fund a whole new range for Australia. It was the familiar Catch-22 of the car industry, needing a new model to generate sales, but needing more sales to justify investment in the new model. Backed into a corner, Chrysler Australia's only option was to repackage what they already had, and just pray that the market fell for it. This was the line of thinking that led Chrysler to develop their first uniquely Australian model.

The Royal Treatment
The challenge confronting Chrysler Australia's tiny team of stylists and engineers was simple: how to cobble together a vehicle that looked new and fresh enough to revamp interest, when they weren't able to change any of the underlying tooling?

Through 1955, a small team of Australian and American designers tackled this very problem, looking for ways of adapting U.S. designer Virgil Exner's new "Forward Look" styling cues – long bonnets, low rooflines and huge fins – to a shape from the 1940s. The roof and doors of the '53 sedan were kept, but onto the front end they grafted the headlight surrounds, bonnet and grille of the upcoming U.S.-market '57 Plymouth. 

Promo image for the '57 Plymouth. That Chrysler Corp made some of the most ornate cars of their day is brought home when you remember this was meant to be the entry-level brand.

The front and rear guards were borrowed from the '56 Plymouth, while the rear quarter panels were redesigned with dramatic full-length fins. The front windscreen remained flat, but it became a single large piece instead of split like that on the old Cranbrook. They did add a properly Fifties wrap-around windscreen (creating development problems for Pilkington Glass, the Australian suppliers who struggled to get the right curved shape...) but then they put it at the wrong end, using it at the rear of the glasshouse instead of the front where it belonged! But considering the budget they had to work with, and the fact that Chrysler Australia didn't yet have a formal styling department, it was all kind of impressive.

By early 1956, seven disguised prototypes were busy racking up the miles on the back roads of South Australia, their identity hidden by the simple expedient of tying down tarps front and rear. Not even Holden had their own proving grounds yet, so open-road testing was still the industry standard. It might've been crude, but the prototypes logged over 100,000 miles with only minimal changes required before production could begin. But not everything went so smoothly.

Amazing how the simple device of removing the hub caps to expose the pressed-steel wheels underneath makes any car look like a junker on its way to the panel-beater.

Halfway through 1956, body engineer Doug Rohrsheim was busy attending meetings with Diecast Ltd to finalise supply of the various pieces of brightwork needed for the upcoming cars. The plan had been to carry through the Plymouth Belvedere, Dodge Kingsway and DeSoto Diplomat in order to supply their three dealer franchises. They were to be differentiated by separate badges, bonnet ornaments, grilles and wheel arches, with the Dodge earning a body-coloured split grille divider in the shorter front clip. The original designations for the three models had been AD1 for the Dodge, AS1 for the DeSoto and AP1 for the Plymouth.

At the last minute, however, chief engineer Roy Rainsford cancelled the Dodge and DeSoto versions, voiding most of the work Rohrsheim had just done. The Plymouth was to be the only game in town, and despite its lowly appointments, it would be sold as a Chrysler. It was at this point that it was finally given the "Royal" nameplate, resurrecting a name that had gone extinct in the U.S. a few years earlier. Instead of Australian Plymouth, the AP1 designation was retroactively changed to stand for "Australian Production": hence, the Chrysler Royal AP1.

Launch day: less a major industry media event and more a small-town annual show.

"Australia's Car of Distinction" was launched with full fanfare in February 1957, touted as, "setting the styling trends" with its interpretation of Exner's Forward Look styling philosophy. Chrysler boasted of its full-time power steering and "Safety-Sure" powered brakes, both innovations in the Australian market. Four colour combinations were offered – green, grey, blue and tan, each over "Moonlight" accents, combined into an elegant spear that thrust toward the front end. You'd be forgiven for thinking it was all looking rather good.

Instead, it immediately sank without a trace. People seemed to realise that the Royal wasn't quite the real thing, the car you bought when you couldn't afford a Chevrolet or Customline. The face was overwhelmed by that gargantuan radiator grille, which the single headlights and massive bumper overriders struggled to balance out. The wrap-around rear windscreen failed to distract from the high roof and carryover doors, and the tailfins were just silly, towering above the old, rounded boot lid. The hemispherical hub caps were simply from a bygone era. In short, the styling seemed to highlight the car's 1953 origins, not hide them, attempting to replicate American excess without understanding the substance beneath.

What the '57 Plymouth grille became when applied to the narrower Cranbrook body: a tad overpowering.

Things weren't much better on the engine front. Initially there were two of them to choose from: the existing 230ci side-valver, which gave 86 kW and was paired with a 3-on-the-tree manual (with automatic overdrive); or the bigger 250ci with 87 kW, sourced from Chrysler's Windsor plant in Canada (in both cases, assembly was now handled locally). In either spec, these ageing designs just didn't have the mumbo to compete with GM's more modern overhead-valve sixes, let alone Ford's new Y-block V8. 

Side-valve engines had a time and place, but by the late 1950s that wasn't beneath the bonnet of a prestige car.

Even so, the 250 was worth the extra money, as it came paired with Chrysler's excellent "PowerFlite" 2-speed automatic gearbox. In most markets the PowerFlite had already been superseded by the 3-speed TorqueFlite, but that just meant the tooling was available to send to Australia. Upon its U.S. launch, Chrysler had bragged the PowerFlite had 110 fewer parts and weighed 45kg less than an unnamed rival (almost certainly GM's Hydra-Matic), and would eventually prove tough enough to stand up to anything, including a Hemi V8. Early versions had been operated by a small selector lever on the dash, but since 1956 it had came with quirky push-button controls instead – you simply pressed "D" for drive, "N" for neutral, "R" for reverse, or "L" to lock it in the lower gear, such as when towing or climbing a hill (the parking brake was operated by a separate lever, so there was no button labelled "P"). It was such a simple, reliable system that – the ultimate flattery – the Soviets ripped it off and created their own version for their ZIL limousines!

The more I think about it, the less silly this system seems. Why take up cabin space for controls that merely resemble their manual counterparts?

Good as it was, the PowerFlite wasn't enough to sell the Royal all on its own. You splashed out on an American car because you wanted power, good looks and world-class build quality (believe it or not, "close enough for government work" originally meant higher standards). The latter points were right out out (build quality would remain a bugbear of the local industry until the end), but Chrysler remedied the power problem late in 1957, when their new 313ci "Fury" V8 joined the options list. The Canadians had taken Chrysler's new 318ci "A" engine and under-bored it to 313ci (so they could re-use existing tooling), so it came with a claimed 164 kW at 4,000rpm (plus 440 Nm of torque at 2,800rpm, though on Australian fuel both figures dropped significantly). This finally gave the car enough urge to match its fins: the top speed rose to 152km/h, and 0-100 could be achieved in 17.4 seconds (I've seen 13.5 seconds quoted in some places but that seems optimistic; ditto the "152mph" top speed!). Even so, it was still compromised: the V8 was so big installing it required butter and a shoehorn, and it was an oldschool V8 with heavy castings that exacerbated the Royal's front weight bias, placing extra strain on the feeble front brakes and soft suspension. Fuel consumption largely depended on how it was driven, but with a light foot it could get as good as 15 litres per 100km (compared to 13 or so for the manual six).

It also added a premium to the Royal's asking price, with one road test reporting the car they'd been allocated cost £2,179 ($81,000), including tax and the mandatory PowerFlite gearbox. The engine was ordered on fewer than 500 cars in its first year, but that proved to be a function of how late in the year it arrived; by the end of production, it was powering almost half of all Royals.

So the Chrysler Royal wasn't a great car, but here's the thing: there wasn't much actually wrong with it, either. Its Plymouth/Dodge/DeSoto predecessors had earned their place by being tough, simple and easy to repair, and all those things were still true of the Royal (mostly because it was still the same car underneath). Even if the cabin was a bit bare, the vinyl seats were comfy, the push-button auto was unbreakable, and parking was aided by the huge tailfins, which let you see exactly where the rear corners were. Farmers especially related to its rugged full chassis and uncomplicated design, and its only mechanical drawback – sheer size – was no bad thing in their eyes. The six-cylinder engines might not have been exciting, but they never gave you any trouble either, and most buyers weren't looking for a performance car anyway. That said, the V8 was fearsome for its time: former owners remember the many gutless British trucks running between Sydney and Melbourne in those days, which could add hours – literally – to a road trip if you got stuck behind them crawling up the hills. The brisk acceleration of the V8 had real uses back then.

Outside a handful of loyal private buyers, however, the Royal really only found its niche in government, taxi and hire car fleets. Hire companies particularly appreciated its lack of cutting-edge technology – when you were only running a vehicle for a profit, every penny spent on maintenance was another betrayal, and the Royal seemed to thrive on neglect. Thanks to their full chassis, Royals soon found themselves modified into ambulances, and they were also popular with funeral service directors as the basis for hearse conversions. And of course, the V8 made the Royal immediately popular as a highway patrol car for the South Australian police...

The original AP1 ambulance featured a fibreglass cabin extension developed by Commonwealth Engineering, or Comeng. (Source: Carswp)

Verdict?
So, was the Chrysler Royal a secret masterpiece, only let down by dodgy styling? No, not really. It was big, it was cumbersome, and even the V8 models were a tad gutless (though they frequently made the Royal the one-eyed man in the land of the blind – it was 1957, after all). But did it deserve a more enthusiastic reception than the tumbleweeds it actually got? I think the case could be made. Today, rarity alone makes them collectible, as only 4,748 AP1s were ever built, and even fewer were salted away to preserve them. The same kitschy looks that sank the Royal as a new car are now celebrated as quirky and "period".

But in its primary mission – returning Chrysler Australia to profitability – the Royal can only be judged a failure. Despite their best efforts, Chrysler's sales continued to slide, and the company would post huge financial losses for the next few years. The future looked bleak, but Chrysler Australia was only down, not out: after all they'd already been through, they were never going to give up that easily.

Foreign Customs: The 1955 Ford Customline

So what exactly was a Ford Customline? A chance to dip into the plight of Ford Australia in the 1950s, that's what.

The Fifties: When wearing a seatbelt while driving was optional, but a hat was compulsory. (Source: Old Car Brochures)

The Mighty Fallen
The Holden had come as a wicked shock to Ford Australia. They'd known something like it was in the pipeline – they'd put up a proposal of their own for that bid, after all – but they hadn't expected it to become such a runaway success. With Holdens selling like hotcakes, Ford Australia's plan to gradually increase the local content of their 1942 sedans while keeping the lights on with imported British models was no longer really feasible. And Geelong had to make it work anyway.

In post-war Australia, with money scarce and buyers hesitant to spend money on cars that didn't earn their keep, Ford pared their model line down to their core four-door sedans and workhorse commercials. Australian production had recommenced in 1946 with sedan, utility and panel van models, with minor updates in 1947 and '48. Needing to recoup the money invested into tooling for the '42 model, all sheet metal remained as it had prior to the U.S. entering the war, with only slight changes to the grille and other garnish. Many components were sourced locally, but they were still essentially being built from CKD (Complete Knock-Down) kits dispatched from Canada.

Ad in Australian Motor Manual for the 8hp Anglia (Source: Flickr)

These were the flagship models: otherwise, Ford Australia was largely an importer, treading water with a gaggle of British four-cylinder snuff boxes. The A54A Anglia, for example, was a tiny four-door model offered in sedan, open-top tourer, panel van or utility body styles, fitted with Dagenham's so-called "8hp" engine – the 933cc English Sidevalve four. Its bigger brother was the E03A Prefect – once famously the first Ford designed outside Michigan, but now sorely outdated, sporting only the bigger "10hp" or 1,172cc version of the English Sidevalve. Sales for 1948 totalled 5,552 across all U.S. models and 7,810 across all British models, numbers which made Ford the number-one brand in Australia... for precisely as long as it took Holden to get production underway.

The Car That Saved Ford
The '49 has been called The Car that Saved the Ford Motor Company, and there might be some truth to that. Ford had of course been a major part of FDR's "Arsenal of Democracy", but strict government price controls to stave off the kind of profiteering seen in the First World War had rather limited their opportunities for revenue. A misstep at the moment the U.S. was rotating from war back to peace could've doomed the company, but instead they got it just right.

For their first post-war design, Ford's engineers adopted a drop-centre ladder frame, and the outdated transverse leaf springs were replaced by coils at the front and longitudinal leaves at the rear. The same 226ci "Mileage Maker" straight-six and 239ci "Flathead" V8 carried over, but the exterior styling was all-new. Ford's designers removed the last traces of running boards and brought the door skins out flush with the mud guards, creating the so-called "shoebox" aesthetic. The single-spinner chrome grille was modest compared to what was coming, but a bold statement at the time. Where the '48 Ford was visibly a design from the Thirties, the '49 was a statement of intent for the Fifties. Sales in the U.S. topped a million a year.

The model made its way to Australia, where it was assembled in Geelong as a four-door sedan and – unique to Australia – a two-door utility. By the time of its 1950 facelift, production was achieving 50 percent local content (along with 48 percent for the trucks, and 56 percent for British models), and Ford had plans in the works for the Geelong plant to start manufacturing its own engines, transmissions and axle assemblies with an eye to reaching 93 percent local content across the fleet. The '51 facelift signalled progress by updating to a twin-spinner grille, but its time in the sun lasted just eight months before it was shuffled off to an early retirement.

Customs Immigration
Where Holden had a decidedly suburban buyer base, Ford's customers tended to come from opposite ends of town. The British models mostly ended up with frustrated Holden buyers, people who'd been unable to find a place on Holden's endless waiting list – a useful source of revenue, but not one that could be relied upon as the Bend relentlessly expanded production. American V8 models, on the other hand, tended to attract well-off rural landowners, farmers whose wool and wheat yields had long formed the backbone of the Australian economy. These customers needed a vehicle that could lug a tractor tyre, tow a horse float or round up sheep across a paddock, regardless of whether or not a road existed. Their main concerns were ruggedness and reliability, and – the real key to the project – in a good year, they had the money to pay for it. From their point of view, the old Ford V8s had been ideal – we've already explored how the combination of a full ladder-frame chassis and transverse leaves had been exploited brilliantly by Gelignite Jack Murray.

The problem was, for these buyers the '49 Ford was a bit of a letdown – that fancy new independent front suspension was a lot more fragile than the beam axle it had replaced. To reassure these core buyers and get them back on side, Ford Australia would have to pull off something big, something impressive, something that provided style without compromising on substance. Fortunately, the bosses in Detroit had coughed up just the model for the job: the 1952 Ford Customline.

1952 Customline press shot. A tad matronly, but Australian tastes were still developing at this stage. (Source: Shannons Club)

The stage for the "Cusso" had been set by two decisions. First, and perhaps less importantly, was the 1950 retirement of Hubert French, who finally called time on a quarter of a century as managing director of Ford Australia. The MD's office passed instead to Charlie Smith, who was thus handed the poisoned chalice of shepherding Ford Australia through the dark years of Holden dominance. Secondly – unlike their rivals at Chevrolet – the Ford brass in Detroit decided not to try and get an extra year out of the '49 platform, investing in a clean-sheet design instead.

The resulting 1952 Ford was a rather handsome three-box design, much more up-to-the-minute than its predecessor. With a wheelbase boosted from 114 to 115 inches, the standout styling feature was a new single-piece curved windscreen, a sign of recent advances in glass technology that instantly dated the twin flat screens of previous models. The chrome grille and side-strips were lovely and shiny, but not yet so ostentatious that they started turning people off. It had style to burn, but remained a big, cosy American car with all the interior space you could hope for, with an extra few years of development to sort out the breakables. It was just the ticket.

To go along with their new car, Dearborn decided to revamp their naming conventions. The entry-level Ford was rebranded from Deluxe to Mainline – a simple, honest car aimed at those without a huge amount of money. The mid-range version, hitherto the Custom, became the Customline, a more luxurious option adorned with premium trim and a wider array of colours. At the top of the tree, the most expensive version remained the Crestline, but that never made its way to Australia. The curious thing was, because Australia sat a level below the U.S. in terms of wealth, what had been a blue-collar car for sheet metal workers Stateside became a prestige car for the upper crust in Australia. So although the vehicle that arrived in October 1952 was mechanically a poverty-pack Mainline, its price meant it had to be marketed as a plush, up-market Customline.

This was just the beginning of Geelong's smoke-and-mirrors magic show. Although it arrived as a CKD kit from Canada – the chassis was imported, with the body stamped in Australia – the harsh fact was Ford Australia had to hit a minimum of 80 percent local content to get the government tariffs off its back and make the entire project profitable. The other 20 percent had to be sourced from Canada so it could be paid for within the Commonwealth, but that was a bit of a blessing in disguise. Canada was big enough to support two versions of the same car, and was also, inevitably, much more integrated into the U.S. manufacturing scene. That meant the Mercury brand survived in Canada far longer than it had in Australia, where it benefitted from a curious phenomenon: the many small, isolated farming towns dotting the Great Plains, which usually had only a single car dealership each. If that dealership happened to be Mercury (meant to sit a tier above Ford, remember), then they had to compete at the entry-level as well, or else forfeit those sales to Pontiac. To keep their Mercury dealers in the game, the Customline had been rebadged as the Meteor, a model unique to Canada, and this gave Ford Australia three sources of parts for the local Customline: Ford U.S., Ford of Canada, and Mercury Canada.

A fourth source was the local British components industry, which underpinned the many British cars being assembled in Australia (including Ford's Anglia and Prefect, but also Austin, Morris, Hillman, stuff like that). This provided an extra stream of switches, electrical components, brake boosters, and a thousand other bits and bobs which would never be fitted to an American car in a pink fit, but went into Australian cars as a matter of course. The resulting Geelong-built Customlines hit the road with some odd hybrid configurations which would later prove a minefield for restorers.

Flathead V8s undergoing quality control checks, Geelong c. 1940 (Source: Facebook)

When it came to the engine, however, the Customline was straight down the line. Geelong had been assembling 239ci Flathead V8s since the 1940s, but the company had invested heavily in a modern overhead production line to allow full manufacture for 1952. "Automatic machines do the whole job of assembling the engines," they said proudly, "even to filling them with oil ." With 1,520kg to move, 75 kW was adequate and nothing more, but top speeds of 129km/h and 0-100 times of 19.2 seconds were feasible. A 400m drag strip might take you 21.1 seconds, but if you tried it the theoretical 16.2 litres per 100km fuel economy would disappear in a hurry. If the Customline's performance left it neck-and-neck with the upcoming Holden FJ, that's only because the Holden was half a tonne lighter, and you soon learned where that extra weight had gone when you took it off the bitumen – believe it or not, in these early days it was the Holden that was more likely to break down.

Inside, the interior trim and dash was basically straight out of the U.S. Mainline, with its semi-circular instrument panel that emphasised the unobstructed view though the one-piece windscreen. The steering was very slow, requiring four-and-a-half turns lock-to-lock, but that was normal for the time (and did a wonderful job of insulating the driver from road shock). Pendant pedals replaced the floor-mounted type, and pleated leather seating was standard in a range of colours (including two new two-tone options), with matching Vynex for the door trim. It was a world away from the harsh woollen interiors we were used to, which were notorious for attracting moths and showing stains.

From the brochure: interior of the '52 Customline (Source: Shannons Club)

If the many blank-off plates on the dash gave away how much stuff we were missing, the buyers didn’t mind: it was less to go wrong. In fact, everything about this car seemed tailor-made for the isolated rural driver: all those British components made for excellent parts interchangeability, making the Customline easy to maintain even in the most backwater of communities. Its full chassis made it durable, and it came with a proven engine that burbled along happily even on miserable local fuel. And if the sedan wasn't workhorse enough for you, Ford had recycled the Mainline badge for the utility version, developed just for Australia using the chassis of the U.S. two-door convertible. Parked beside a Mainline, a Holden ute looked like a plucky shire pony next to a Clydesdale, the only downside being how much the Ford driver would have to spend on fodder... er, fuel.

Brochure image of the '52 Mainline ute (Source: Flickr)

Indeed, about the only thing that held it back was the price, which was around the £1,425 mark (equivalent to more than $63,000 in 2024 money). If that compared unfavourably with the basic FJ Standard, at just over £1,000 ($45,000), remember you were getting a lot more car, and that a piddling Austin A70 would set you back £1,370 ($61,000). The Cusso's most direct rival was probably the confusingly-named Chrysler Plymouth, and those cost more like £1,600 ($71,000).

Nevertheless, for those who could afford it, the Cusso was a big hit. No self-respecting auctioneer, country doctor or race horse owner would be caught dead without one, and no less a legend than Slim Dusty was renowned for buying the latest Customline to haul his entourage and caravan from gig to gig beyond the black stump.

Holden Action
The Cusso came along just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of Ford in Australia, by which time the company was Geelong's biggest employer, with over 5,000 workers (54 percent of whom were immigrants). With the car only in production since October, 1953 models were really just '52s with the latest U.S.-model grille. Although a surprisingly minor change, it made the so-called Anniversary model look much lower and sleeker and it had quite an impact, arriving as it did just before the Holden FJ.

Fifty years of Fords in Australia: not to be confused with fifty years of Ford Australia, the company itself only hailing back to 1925. (Source: Shannons Club)

It was in 1954, however, that Ford's real sleight of hand began, as they served up the first of many low-cost facelifts. Although the '54 looked the same as the U.S. model, the local version was in fact nothing more than a '52 model with a '54 grille. Ford's money had instead gone into new stamping presses as part of a massive expansion programme, so they elected to give the U.S. model's new backlit dash a miss, preferring to get an extra year out of their existing right-hand drive dashboard instead. There was no point replacing the '52 dash when it had only been on sale for two years, even though its fake woodgrain dash was beginning to age as tastes changed (though in any case, Holden's dash hadn't changed in six years either).

Similar reasoning led them to get an extra year out of the existing Flathead V8 too, rather than prematurely upgrade to Dearborn's new "Y-block" V8. The Ford Y-block (so-called because the block extended below the crank centreline, giving it a Y-shaped cross-section) was an overhead valve V8 of a much more modern design than the ageing Flathead, providing American customers with 97 kW right out of the gate. In its initial guise it was only a 239 like the Flathead, however, and poor Australian fuel would force the engineering team to lower the compression ratio and negate all the extra power anyway. The Flathead had only been in full local production for two years, so it made no sense to scrap all the tooling and castings to replace it with a unit that wouldn't even be an upgrade. No, better to continue building the Flathead and spend the year sounding out local component suppliers ready for the Y-block's introduction the following year.

Brochure wisely emphasised the big imposing grille, and left the unchanged parts of the car for the back cover. (Source: Old Car Brochures)

All of this made the '54 Customline, quite deliberately, a bit of a placeholder, a moment of breathing space as Ford Australia prepared for their next major offensive. None of it hurt sales however, as 1954 ironically became the peak of Customline sales, with 9,577 of them leaving the showrooms that year (along with 4,509 Mainline utes).

Ol '55
But the '54 was merely a taste of things to come. The 1955 and '56 models are easily the most revered of the local Customlines, arriving in showrooms with new panels, a new dash and new ball joint front suspension, plus a new engine. The reason was simple: it was the only Australian Customline to arrive "in synch" with its American counterpart. 

"Cordially"? (Source: Shannons Club)

The American consumer got new panels only on the '55, but that was because the new dash and engine had been introduced in 1954. Over there, the model tiers now climbed from the entry-level Mainline, to the mid-spec Customline, up to a new prestige model called the Fairlane (replacing the old Crestline badge). The clever (some would say cynical) part was that very little of the expensive hardware under the skin actually changed as the buyer moved up the range: Ford simply added more chrome, a wider array of paint schemes and the latest vinyl trim to upgrade to a Customline or Fairlane (the tail fins on a Mainline, for example, were exactly the same as those on a Fairlane, except they housed only ribbed blank-off plates instead of the new-fangled reversing lights and indicators). In short, the '55 was another victory for Ford's elite accounting department, with a grille that was more stylish but also cheaper to build, and panels that were made less intricate so they required fewer passes through the steel presses. On the other hand, this low-overhead approach allowed the car to be sold at a reduced price, and the move to simple "bolt-on" upgrades suited Ford Australia down to the ground. It set them up for cheap annual facelifts for the remainder of the model's life.

So the sleek, malt-shop looks of the '55 Customline made it a handsome beast, but it all could've been thrown away if the interior had been a disappointment. It was no accident, therefore, that Ford Australia chose this moment to debut their new dashboard. Painted rather than woodgrained, it featured a new and different half-circle speedo that was back-lit to show off the latest technology. It all made the driver's seat of a '55 Customline a very pleasant place to be. 

Not the nicest colour to show it off, maybe, but imagine it in cream or eggshell blue... (Source: Shannons Club)

But the real buzz was all about the new engine. The wisdom of sticking with the Flathead for an extra year was borne out, as Ford Australia had deliberately waited for the Y-block to get an upgrade to 272ci before making the switch. Ford Australia would quote the same 120 kW output for all Customlines from 1955 on, but this was a bit of a white lie as performance would vary considerably over this period. The truth was, local oil companies would soon be forced to lift their octane ratings to comply with an engine upgrade GM-H had in the pipeline. This upgrade would not come into effect until the Holden FE arrived in 1956, which wouldn't be soon enough for 1955 Fords. As a stop-gap, Ford inserted de-compression plates between the heads and block of the Customline to reduce the compression ratio to 6.8:1. This cut power output to around 108 kW, and perhaps a fair bit less – after Wheels was given a test car with its de-compression plates removed for a test in December 1955, they reckoned the truth was closer to 105 kW.

The brochure explaining why it was called the Y-block. (Source: Curbside Classic)

Fit and finish were also notoriously rough, the 6-volt electrics were old-hat, and the vacuum-powered wipers would stop if the driver put their foot down (such as climbing a hill or pulling out to overtake). But at a time when the FJ Holden was also running 6-volt electrics, vacuum wipers, a split windscreen and single centre tail light, the '55 Cusso could be forgiven for its faults. The truth was, nothing on local roads in 1955 looked this good, packed this much grunt and could carry this much stuff without complaint. Government departments quickly noticed its full chassis made for an excellent ambulance or mobile medical clinic, while its V8 power was immediately appreciated by highway patrol officers. Top speed was 154km/h and the 400m could be covered in just over 19 seconds, figures which were quick for 1955. Fuel economy was a claimed 14 litres per 100km average, which was again acceptable for such a big car. Handling was wonderfully neutral, with oversteer or understeer available on demand – Ford was clearly comfortable sending extra forces through that new ball-joint suspension. It remained the simple, reliable brute its customers wanted, and the new mechanicals gave the '55 enough clout to cover a necessary price jump to £1,694 ($73,000 in 2024).

A Long Way From the Top
Good as it was, the '55 heralded the beginning of a sales decline for the Customline. From a peak of 14,000 deliveries the year before, sales slowed to just 11,817 for 1955 (including 3,985 utes, which were now being divided between the Mainline and the F-series pickup). Even with the price hike, that meant an overall drop in Ford's turnover, a bad sign after all that investment in new tooling. The only solution was to keep improving the car and hope they could win those buyers back.

The '56 Cusso: horizontal fog lights made the whole shape seem lower and wider. (Source: Shannons Club)

As a result the 1956 model saw a new "Styletone" colour option, which matched the roof to the lower body with a different colour in between (the normal two-tone option only split the colour above and below the side-strips). This was paired with an interior now available in either leather or Vynex and, late in the year, the standard 3-on-the-tree manual was supplemented by an optional 3-speed "Ford-O-Matic" auto. Often incorrectly remembered as a 2-speed, this was a tough automatic shared across a number of light commercials and Checker taxis in the U.S., and by the time it came to Australia it had been re-engineered to drop back to first gear under hard acceleration (always appreciated by the revheads). Safety was even given brief consideration, with better door locks, optional seat belts and new dished steering wheel.

Under the bonnet, the Y-block ran the same Holley or Stromberg 94 carburettor as the '55, but now the de-compression plates had been removed and the timing and valve lift had been tweaked to match the higher 7.6:1 compression ratio. Combined with a switch to a 12-volt electrical system, which made for a fatter spark, the engine became much sweeter and more responsive, as well as serving up about 123 kW. That was enough to drop the 400m time to 17.5 seconds and push the top speed awfully close to 160km/h, and for the first time in Australia, whispers of "the ton" – a top speed of 100mph – began to creep into the pub-bragging lexicon. But it came at a price, and that price was now £1,705 (nearly $70,000): its main competitors by now were the Chevrolet Six, which undercut it at £1,683 ($68,000), or the Dodge Kingsway Six, which cost a whopping £1,787 ($73,000). Neither came with a V8, but even so sales continued to slide, down to just 6,792 sedans and 3,496 utes for 1956.

Such circumstances weren't the best time to take a big risk, but for 1957 Charlie Smith and the team had no choice. In the U.S., the 1957 Ford Custom 300 and Fairlane 500 models had swelled to a massive 118-inch wheelbase with longer overhangs, lower ride heights and smaller wheels – all features that would kill the car as an off-roader. The new platform also promised huge new tooling costs and reduced local content, meaning adopting it would've amounted to a suicide pact for Ford Australia. They had little choice but to carry on with the '55-'56 shell, updating it annually with tweaks scrounged from the wider Ford empire.

Once more the brochure shows off the car's selling points, which in this edition were all about the looks. Who said style over substance has to be a bad thing? (Source: Old Car Brochures)

Once again, it was Canada that came to the rescue. The '55 Meteor had featured a more elaborate grille with a V and four-pointed star in the centre, which was donated to create an unmistakeable "V" front for the '57 Cusso. Geelong combined this with the '56 Fairlane's huge chrome side-swish, chromed the headlight surrounds as well, and then changed the lettering on the Fairlane's boot badge to read "Customline" instead. Only the carryover 1955 dash spoiled the effect, looking very plain-Jane compared the flashy exterior. The Y-block’s compression ratio had been wound back to 7.1:1, but a new Holley 320cfm carb was fitted which, along with a new distributor and head tweaks, delivered 122 kW. The engine would remain in this spec until production ended.

One factor Ford did not neglect in their promo material was the combination of power steering, powered brakes and the Ford-O-Matic gearbox. The times being what they were, these were marketed heavily to the fairer sex, who would surely faint like a Dickens heroine if subjected to the strain of shifting their own gears. Regardless of who it was for, the V8 and the auto were both features Holden wouldn't be able to match for many years to come, which was a useful extra feather in Ford's cap.

The 1958 edition was the most extraverted Customline yet. This time Ford pinched the entire grille off the 1955 Meteor, complete with the four-pointed star that earned the '58 its enduring nickname, the "Star Model". The elaborate side-flash came from the two-door '56 Meteor Rideau, because it could pass for an evolution of the previous model's '56 Fairlane trim. The star theme carried around to the new boot badge (also lifted from the '56 Meteor), and the extruded stars laid into the vinyl door trims. All that was missing was the spectacular 1956 Meteor grille, but that perhaps would've been a bridge too far for the conservative Australian market.

Ford-O-Matic Star Model: As you can see, there were some striking colour combinations to be had if your pockets were deep enough. (Source: Unique Cars)

The '58 was badged as either a manual Customline or a Ford-O-Matic auto, with no trace of Customline badging on the latter. Each came with very different trim and stitch patterns. The Ford-O-Matic featured an extra space between the chrome flashes, meaning if you ticked the Styletone option it could be had with three paint colours, to standout effect even in 1958 (by contrast, the manual Customline could be ordered in a single tone or two-colour Styletone only). In addition, the 1958 dash is often incorrectly listed as a '56 American or Canadian item, but in fact was a unique item produced by Ford Australia. The speedo and gauges were local items made by Smiths Instruments, packaged differently and featuring an optional centre-dash clock. A special slide-control panel on the dash operated the fan-boosted heater option (also supplied by Smiths), while power steering and powered brakes continued to pad out a lengthy options list. The price of the Customline had risen again, going to £1,899 ($74,000) for the manual and £2,063 (over $80,000) for the Ford-O-Matic.

And if all that wasn't enough, there are rumours that Cussos after 1955 could be ordered with a bigger 292ci V8 fully-imported from the U.S., if you didn't mind the cost and were in a position to ignore local content requirements (say, if you were a government department in need of some VIP transport capable of making a sharp getaway). There doesn't seem to be proof, but there are enough paperwork irregularities in Ford's records from this period that it seems plausible.

And Yet...
Although one of the best cars money could buy in its day, Ford sold just 4,903 of them, even including Mainlines and a handfull of spillover '59 models. How was such a thing possible? Well, at first I assumed much of it would come down to Holden's production capacity steadily catching up with demand. September 1956 saw the opening of Holden's new Dandenong plant after all, which massively expanded Holden's production capability. Sure that would make a dent? To find out I fed Unique Cars and Parts' production numbers into an OpenOffice spreadsheet to generate the low-effort graph below, expecting to see a sudden dip in from 1956 to '57 as Dandenong opened. And indeed, there was a significant dip... but for the British models. While frustrated Holden buyers did indeed abandon Ford once there were enough Holdens to go around, sales of Customlines barely even flinched. 

If you're good at maths and wondering why U.S. plus U.K. Models doesn't equal Total sales, it's because the total includes trucks and Fordson tractors as well.

So what could explain that long, slow decline? Well, the simple fact that Cusso buyers were rural landowners. Joe Kenwright's article over on Shannons Club signs off with recollections of an interview with Sir Brian Inglis, a president of Ford Australia who in the Customline days was a manager on the Geelong line. He told of how Customline sales each year were heavily dependent on the annual wool and wheat harvest, and the British capacity to buy them. Those well-off customers were actually only well-off only some of the time, so there was no way to project future sales numbers to justify new tooling. Ford was forced to break automated manufacturing tasks up into smaller manual tasks instead. As sales varied, they could hire or fire more staff as needed: this meant, believe it or not, most panels in those days had to be cut out with band saws! Inglis recalled with some horror the potential for injuries caused by shattering blades, but at the time there was no other way to do it. Similarly, those big, sexy chrome bumpers that in the U.S. arrived as a single unit? In Australia they were assembled from three smaller pieces, with joins hidden by the overriders. 

The point is, by the late 1950s that variable workforce was shrinking fast as drought began to bite. Although the worst of it wouldn't affect the eastern states until the mid-1960s, the decade from 1957 to 1968 was a dry one, and even in the early days the lack of rain was enough to veto luxury purchases like new cars – especially when component interchangeability meant parts salvaged from one Customline could be used to keep the next running. Ford was only saved by a sales resnaissance for their British models: that widening band of orange as the graph hits 1958 and '59 was mostly driven by the new Mk.II Zephyr, the first Zephyr able to justify its extra cost well enough to start peeling buyers away from Holden. The path forward was clear – Ford needed to join Holden in the mid-size car market, where the highs were less high but the lows were less likely to put the whole company in jeopardy. No wonder the Zephyr was the model chosen to base the company's future upon.

Still of the Geelong plant in 1957: a Mk.II Consul leads what looks like an F-350 down the line, with a Mainline ute standing by to the left.

The last Customline left the Geelong plant in September 1959, by which time it was firmly out of date. Its erstwhile replacement was the 1959 "Tank" Fairlane, a car so wrong for Australia it's almost comical (especially when it cost £2,173, or north of $83,000!). But in many ways the Cusso was never replaced. Throughout this period GM-H offered the Chevrolet Six as an up-market alternative to the Holden, and although equally stylish, their basic six-cylinder engines and relatively drab presentation failed to inspire the same awe as the Customline. Only in another century, when Range Rover became a prestige brand, would we again see horse floats under tow by a vehicle that was equal parts workhorse and éclat.

Charlie Smith had realised long before that most Ford products weren't strong enough to be sold in Australia. He worked to convince his Canadian managers that local manufacturing was the solution, but it wasn't until 1954 that he succeeded. That meant it wasn't until 1956 that Ford Australia bought 162 hectares of Wurundjeri land on the northern outskirts of Melbourne, in a suburb named for the pleasant open countryside which had long supported pastoralists – Broadmeadows. They handed the Victorian government £90 million (more than $3.6 billion today) for rail, water and sewage connections, and the construction work began. Ford Australia was on a mission to unseat Holden, or die trying.