Before Holdens, Holden's: The 19th Century Roots of GM-H

Even in the 1950s cars in Australia were still transport for the rich – everyone else used their 'awse or walked! – Harry Firth, Australian Muscle Car: Ford and I

One of my favourite podcasts is Well There's Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters, which also has slides¹. My favourite era to hear about is Gilded Age America, roughly spanning from the end of the Civil War to the start of the Great Depression, an era of laissez-faire capitalism, grifters in straw hats, DC electrical grids and urban freight rail. It fascinates me because it's an era that we in Australia pretty much missed out on: For Australians, the 19th Century lasted until 1945. In the course of researching this blog – in which I just wanted to provide the context in which the early Holden company was trying to do business – I think I found out why.

The Man, The Myth, The Legend?
James Alexander Holden was born in 1835 in Walsall, in what was then Staffordshire, just to north of Birmingham. His father, a leathergoods purveyor and sometime Member of Parliament, died when James was only 16, leaving him with £130 of inheritance² and a stepmother he hated, prompting him to explore his options overseas. He tried his luck in Canada and New York before returning to the U.K. where, in 1854, aged just 19, he decided to follow his cousin Edwin Smith to what was then called the Province of South Australia – a colony that was barely older than James himself, having only been established in 1834. He arrived safely in the city of Adelaide (built on land stolen from the Kaurna nation) after a pleasant 102-day voyage.

James comes across as an ambitious, press-ever-onward type, full of big ideas but with a low threshold for boredom – I get the feeling if he were around today he'd probably be a crypto bro. Upon arriving in South Australia he bounced through a succession of white-collar jobs (basically out of boredom), but this kind of job-hopping was actually a very good idea at the time. Half the working-age population of Adelaide had just decamped to the gold fields of Ballarat, so in this sort of environment, someone willing to work and blessed with plenty of self-esteem could build up a nest-egg fairly quickly. And indeed, by 1856 a 21-year-old James had embarked on his first business venture as J.A. Holden & Co., selling saddles, whips and harnesses of both local and British make.

The business did well, and by the following year James had married his landlord's daughter, one Mary Phillips, and together they bought a house and started a family. Initially J.A. Holden & Co operated out of a small warehouse at the corner of King William Street and Rundle Mall, but in September 1859 they moved to a larger premises at 34 King William Street, a collection of 1840s buildings divided into small shops, known as Beehive Corner after the iconic tailor's shop.

Beehive Corner in 1866. The whole complex was demolished and replaced with the current gothic revival building in 1895. (Source: State Library of South Australia)

By 1864, J.A. Holden had 21 employees and more space was needed, so he rented another shopfront at 106 Gawler Place, a narrow single-lane thoroughfare through the centre of Adelaide. The price was £350 per annum³, paid quarterly, which he could afford thanks to winning a contract to supply carts and other equipment for the 165 horses and 210 bullocks of the Overland Telegraph Line. This ambitious project meant stringing 3,200km of copper wire (and building a chain of repeater stations) clear across the Red Centre, from Adelaide to Darwin, but once it was finished it was only a matter of months until Darwin linked up with Java via submarine cable, reducing communication delay with Europe from months to hours. Australia was no longer isolated, and with the proceeds of such a major project, J.A. Holden & Co were able to purchase the site outright in 1873, for the covenanted price of £3,850⁴.

Gawler Place during Holden's tenure. (Source: State Library of South Australia).

By 1871 they'd outgrown their home base yet again, and expanded around the corner to 59 Rundle Street. Gawler Place remained the wholesale business, while Rundle Street became Holden & Birks, a subsidiary retail business operated in partnership with one Alfred James Birks, formerly of the Bank of South Australia. Sadly, this arrangement lasted only until 1874 when Birks unexpectedly died, aged just 33.

Holden & Birks in Rundle Street. (Source: Wikipedia)

For what it's worth, James' personal residences had followed a similar pattern. As newlyweds, James and Mary had started with a four-room cottage adjacent to Clayton Congregational Church in Beulah Park. To that they'd added a larger home in Magill, but then only a year later they sold both properties to buy a fifteen-acre estate at Kensington Park, where in 1871 the original cottage was replaced by a proper seven-room residence (which was expanded even further in 1875).

Finally, in May 1879, the company upgraded to its ultimate home, a bespoke two-storey office and retail building located at 100 Grenfell Street.

Source: Wikipedia

But the good times were already coming to an end. For one thing, the economy had started to cool – the best of the Victorian gold rush was over, meaning immigration had slowed, and drought was squeezing the crops on which everyone depended. Banks were failing, and even the surviving ones were forced to start calling in loans, including on some of Holden's customers – and, no doubt, on Holden himself. If you thought his meteoric rise and splurging on property sounded like a man living on too much credit, very good, I too have read financial stories since 2008. As the business situation deteriorated he sought solace in the bottle⁵, and started looking for bail outs.

H.J. Holden.

In 1879, for example, he took his 21-year-old son Henry James Holden (second of his and Mary's ten children, but the first to survive to adulthood) and made him a partner, accordingly changing the company name to J.A. Holden & Son. October 1880 then saw James subdivide and sell off some of the estate at Kensington Park, raising £2,368 12s⁶. By 1884, however, they were under enough financial stress to need another partner, which they found in one Heinrich Friedrich Adolphe Frost, though he came to prefer Adolph. Originally from Hamburg but more recently of Port Wakefield and Yorketown, where he'd been a respected businessman in his own right (and even served as mayor), it was a risk for Frost to buy into such a troubled concern, but one he considered worth taking. The synergy of merging his carriage-building and trimming business with one of the best leathergoods producers in the colony was simply too good to ignore.

Even so, James' situation remained desperate and he proved not to be above making shady decisions. As a senior member of the community he'd been made both a Magistrate and a Justice of the Peace, with the latter office sometimes requiring him to rule on bankruptcy cases. One such case was that of John Wake Fox, one of whose creditors happened to be... J.A. Holden & Son! Despite the obvious conflict of interest, James was given the case, which had the obvious outcome: The Insolvency court was less than impressed when they found James had seen his own £42 debt paid out in full, leaving just 5 shillings in the pound for Fox's other creditors!

He was fortunate in fact that none of the other creditors had the money to pursue the case, but either way James was now a very sick man and incapable of further damage. In September 1885, a virtually-bankrupt James sold his share of the retail business to his son Henry and partner Frost, and went into voluntary liquidation in March 1886. A meeting of his creditors had revealed debts totalling £31,195, albeit with assets totalling £39,454⁷ – he was in the black, but only if he amortised all debts now, before accruing any more interest. He was forced to sell off everything, including the estate at Kensington Park, a slew of other properties, a stock of fifty buggies and various other pieces of machinery and bits 'n' bobs. The dream was over, and he subsequently died in Semaphore Hospital in June 1887, aged just 52, of tuberculosis and complications arising from alcohol abuse.

So what are we to make of James Alexander Holden? It seems a more ignominious end than he probably deserved, but inevitable given the way he'd lived his life. He'd pursued with reckless abandon what would become, a century later, the Peter Brock philosophy: "Bite off more than you can chew, then chew like buggery." But he proved ahead of his time in a basic yet very important way: He believed in the value of Australian manufacturing. He was a founding member of the Adelaide Chamber of Manufacturers, a body aimed at doing for local production what the Chamber of Commerce had done for merchants, and at its grand opening he'd said:

We have artisans equal to any kind but they labour under the disadvantage of having the result of their labours condemned before trial as being 'colonial rubbish'.

Holden & Frost
But the true measure of a man is what survives after his death. J.A. Holden & Son might have been wound up, but the retail business – the one that had started as Holden & Birks – lived on in the hands of Henry James Holden and Adolph Frost, trading as the partnership of Holden & Frost Ltd.

Tough economic headwinds remained throughout the 1880s, but the company scraped by from their sole remaining address at 100 Grenfell Street. What turned their situation around was the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, which was kind of the Ukraine War of its day. It was motivated by naked British greed (South Africa was rich in gold and diamonds), and it made Britain very unpopular internationally, especially once the effects on Boer civilians became widely known. Nevertheless, for Holden & Frost it was a godsend, as the South Australian government awarded them a contract to fit out the new units of mounted infantry being raised for the war effort. An opening contingent of 10,000 soldiers had been promised to the mother country, and the units being raised had names like the 1st South Australian Mounted Rifles, so the demand for saddles, bridles, Sam Browne belts and alike was acute. Holden & Frost landed an immediate contract for 10 percent of the total.

Men of the 2nd South Australian Mounted Rifles c. 1900. Third from the left is Trooper Harry Morant, aka. "The Breaker" (Source: Australian War Memorial)

It was a golden opportunity, and Holden & Frost jumped on it, setting up a separate workshop with additional staff to complete the job in the shortest time possible. Their 1,000 sets of equipment were ready and delivered long before those of Sydney or Melbourne-based contractors, which of course led to an order for a further 1,000. By 1901, Holden & Frost was the largest supplier of harness to a new entity, the Commonwealth Military Forces, precursor to the Australian Defence Force. Over the course of the war, the colonies had federated to become the new Commonwealth of Australia: A province no longer, South Australia was now officially a state of the world's newest country. That meant demand for Holden & Frost's products remained relatively high, as the new Federal Government had decided the only way to defend such a huge, sparsely-populated continent was with the kind of mounted infantry that had proved so effective in South Africa. The company thus survived the Federation Drought in better shape than it otherwise might have done.

But of course, we were now into the 1900s, and the times were once again changing. In 1888, a mechanical engineer from Mannheim named Karl Benz had registered the paperwork for what he called the Benz Patent Motorwagen – the motor car – and so changed the world forever. One who had an interest in these new contraptions was Edward Wheewall Holden, son of Henry and grandson of James, who'd graduated from Adelaide University with a degree in Science and Engineering and joined the company in 1905. In 1909 Adolph Frost died and the Holdens bought his share, taking full control of the company, and giving Edward the headroom to pursue his interests.

In this era, when the motor car was basically a toy for One Percenters, there were all sorts of draconian laws in place to suppress the "maniacal" urges of this fringe hobby. Horse owners were forever complaining that these noisy, smelly contraptions frightened their steeds, and speed limits were set so low it wasn't unusual for a "speeding" motor car to be overtaken and booked by a policeman on a bicycle. Nevertheless, Edward slowly convinced his father these machines just might have a future, and when Henry sailed overseas in 1908 to see for himself how the motor industry was developing, Edward set up a tiny workshop at the rear of the Grenfell Street premises to begin working on motor cars. 

At this stage, the process when buying a car was to import a chassis and engine from the U.K., U.S. or Europe, and then have a custom body coachbuilt upon it. The customer would spend considerable time discussing various choices of wood, fabric and other pieces of trim with the coachbuilder to ensure they got exactly the vehicle they wanted. It was a long and expensive process, taking up to three months to complete a single car, but one at which Holden & Frost excelled. By 1914, they'd built their first original body on the chassis of an imported Lancia⁸.

Staff outside Holden & Frost saddlery in Grenfell Street, 1914. (Source: The Townsville Bulletin).

The outbreak of the Great War in 1914 saw another windfall, as demand for military tack once again went through the roof, but the war also stimulated interest in motor cars. Danger to shipping forced the Nationalist government under Billy Hughes to introduce the Luxuries Restrictions bill of 1917, which restricted the import of non-critical items like perfumes, furs, eggs, beer and ale... and bodies for motor vehicles. The intention was to save space aboard ships for wartime supplies, which a motor car most definitely wasn't, but there was concern what would happen to this fledgling industry if their bread and butter was cut off completely. As a compromise, no limit was placed on the number of automotive chassis that could be imported into Australia, leaving Holden & Frost in prime position to manufacture the bodies to clothe them.

At this time the most popular model of car in Australia was easily the Ford Model T, with other brands like Dodge Brothers (which would be bought up by Chrysler in 1928) following well behind. In Adelaide the principal Dodge Brothers dealer was the Cheney Motor Company: A phone call from company head S.A. "Bert" Cheney to Edward Holden resulted in a meeting, also attended by Henry, where Cheney proposed that the Holdens establish a dedicated plant to manufacture bodies exclusively for Dodge Brothers chassis. The volumes Cheney was talking about were breathtaking, but the numbers finally turned Henry around, and the morning after the government brought in the Luxuries bill, Henry Holden went to the Bank of Adelaide and secured a £50,000⁹ loan to finance the new factory.

The Holdens had made a massive commitment to an industry they had hitherto only dabbled in, but it proved a wise move. In a meeting with the NSW distributors, Dalgety & Company, the Holdens and Cheney were able to ask just £57 10s¹⁰ for a body – far less than a comparable Ford – so when they mentioned production numbers like 5,000 a year, they seemed quite achievable. When the company was divided again in the aftermath of the Great War, the leathergoods side carried on as Holden & Frost, located in Grenfell Street. The coachbuilding side, which had now eclipsed it, became Holden's Motor Body Builders Ltd, operating out of a sizeable new factory at 400 King William Street, Adelaide.

King William Street, c. 1920 (Source: State Library of South Australia)

By the end of 1917, two open-top tourers had been produced, and the following year 99 bodies were built. The trappings of heavy industry began to appear, such as modern metal-stamping machines, and kilns for drying the wood used in construction, so for 1920 output rose to 317 bodies. The factory in King William Street had to be doubled in size to cope with the increasing demand, resulting in 876 bodies produced in 1922. It was now clear a single factory wasn't going to be enough, so Edward's younger brother William Holden was dispatched on a scouting mission to find a suitable location to build another. Given so much of their output went to the eastern states by ship, a site close to Port Adelaide was desirable, especially one with good rail links. William's gaze fell upon a sleepy hollow almost halfway between Adelaide and the Port, bounded on two sides by railway lines and adjoining the Woodville railway station. This was of course the storied Woodville Plant, and once it opened in 1923, production skyrocketed to 12,771 units, seven thousand of which were produced in the first half of the year alone.

Motor bodies under construction at Woodville. (Source: Facebook page "Help save South Australia's history from demolition.")

 

General Motors Comes Calling
Success got Holden's noticed, and in 1923 the American giant General Motors came knocking. Founded by William C. Durant in 1908, GM had been conceived not as a car manufacturer but as a holding company which would acquire other companies. Durant’s first takeover just happened to be the Olds Motor Works, founded by Ransom Olds and makers of the Oldsmobile (1908), which set the trend – Durant soon acquired David Buick’s Buick Motor Company (also 1908); the Cadillac Motor Company (1909); the Chevrolet Motor Car Company founded by Swiss brothers Louis and Gaston (1911); and soon, Alexander Wilson’s Vauxhall Motors in Britain (1925); Adam Opel’s Opel AG in Weimar Germany (1929); various other small operators like Champion Ignition; and, ironically, very nearly the Ford Motor Company itself. Henry Ford’s demands were just a little too steep for Durant, something he must have regretted later...

So by 1923 GM was on track to become the world’s largest car maker, and was looking to expand its business worldwide, including in Australia. By serendipity, Edward Holden had gone overseas to open negotiations with the GM brass in New York just as one J.D. Mooney made the opposite journey, landing on our shores with the same mission. Mooney was president of General Motors Export Corporation, and with Woodville now up and running, Holden's was all too willing to strike a deal: GM was offering a long-term contract with the kind of volumes that would make even Dodge Brothers blanch. Very quickly, Holden's had signed on the dotted line to become the sole assembler of GM products in Australia, on a cost-plus basis.

1926 Chevrolet Superior V with Holden's body, photographed on the Dobbyn railway bridge, Cloncurry, Qld. (Source: QldPics)

Mooney's plan for the Australian market centred around the Chevrolet, a modestly-priced car felt to have great potential here. Unfortunately, earlier Chevrolet models had been poorly-built and gained a local reputation for unreliability. All the same, GM pushed forward with this plan and secured dealers in each state, including the same Bert Cheney who'd been so instrumental in Holden's move into full-scale production in the first place. Cheney sold his Adelaide dealership (which became Waymouth Motors) and moved to Melbourne instead, setting up showrooms along Little Colllins Street.

As Woodville came online, Holden's output totals reached numbers that would have seemed fantastical only a decade earlier: 22,150 bodies left their factories in 1924, almost double their total for 1923, and they broke their own record again the following year, with 32,292. 1925 was also the year they finally divested themselves of Holden & Frost, now a rather boutique business which had long since become vestigial: The whole thing was sold to the retail merchants Harris Scarfe Ltd.

In 1926, Henry James Holden died, aged 67. In stark contrast to his infamous father, his funeral was attended by hundreds of mourners, including high-society business associates and politicians. This time there was little doubt the business would carry on, however, as Edward inherited his father's role as company head and William became Managing Director.

That same year, General Motors Export Corporation decided to establish a direct presence in Australia and constituted General Motors Australia Ltd, with a head office at City Road, South Melbourne. New assembly plants were opened in Melbourne (City Road), Sydney (Marrickville), Brisbane (Fortitude Valley), Adelaide (Birkenhead) and Perth (Cottesloe Beach, now Mosman Park), where Holden's bodies were mated to General Motors chassis.

GM City Road c. 1936 (Source: State Library of South Australia).

By 1928 the industry's total production had reached 100,552, of which Holden's accounted for 36,171. It was at this point that the famous "Lion and Stone" emblem was designed by Australian sculptor George Rayner Hoff, best known for his unsparing and evocative war memorials. Calling back to a prehistoric legend that witnessing a lion rolling a stone had inspired humanity's invention of the wheel, the badge was subsequently fitted to all Holden bodies and, although undergoing minor changes over the years, remained to the very end.

The partnership between General Motors and Holden's was off to a promising start, but going any further they would have to pass together through the crucible of the worst economic crash of all time. Though nobody at the time knew it, the Great Depression was just around the corner.

¹ I really appreciate how hard Rocz works to avoid implying it's the disasters that have slides.

² Just over £15,000 in GBP in 2023.

³ Just shy of $48,000.

⁴ $528,000.

⁵ His arrival in Australia had coincided almost exactly with the all-time peak of alcohol consumption in this country, around 20 litres per capita, with most of that comprised of spirits, i.e. rum.

⁶ Nearly $462,000.

⁷ Debts of nearly $4.9 million, with assets worth $6.2 million.

⁸ Or a Hotchkiss in 1916. There is a lot of conflicting information about when and what the "first Holden" really was.

⁹ Nearly $5.5 million.

¹⁰ Just over $6,300.