The Austin Motor Company was in trouble. The “War to End All Wars” had been profitable for the English company, but the post-war slump was a problem. In the early 1920s, a receiver had been appointed to take control of the company, so Sir Herbert Austin took a big chance on a small car, but neither he nor his board of directors was entirely comfortable with it. They gave grudging approval of the new car, although they expressed their opinion that it would be difficult to sell the “bath on wheels” that Austin had designed.
Mrs. Zebouni, Dr. Zebouni and Clive Ball with their Austin Sevens in 1965. Ball’s 1929 Austin Seven, Samantha, is on the left and is the car he drove around the world.
Austin built his first car, a racer, in 1900 and won a silver medal in the 1000 Miles Trial while he was working at another British carmaker, Wolseley. He wanted to build his own production cars, so he formed his company in 1905 and produced the first Austin automobile in 1906. He took the company public in 1914 to provide capital for expansion, and the company grew nicely in Longbridge during the World War I years by producing munitions. Austin was knighted as “Lord Austin of Longbridge” for his wartime efforts, but the plant went idle at the end of the war in 1918. The solution for using the plant’s capacity was to concentrate on one model and mass produce it. The Austin Twenty was that model, but it was a big car and not entirely suited to the post-war marketplace. A scaled-down version, the Austin Twelve, was added in 1921, but demand for cars costing more than £500 fell, and investors consequently abandoned the company.
