Gary Edwards writes:
VC7336 is one of six known survivors with coachwork by Swallow on a Standard Big Nine chassis.
According to the Parts Book, published in November 1930, the chassis was in the sixth batch produced and fell within the third dispatch to Swallow in 1930.
The actual date of production with the Swallow coachwork is unknown and given the treatment of the roof anti-drumming panel and the joins to the aluminium body sheets i.e. these abutted and were covered with an aluminium finisher strip - technology change meant the cars produced around November/December 1930 had all-welded joints, so my guess is VC7336 was produced around September/October of 1930.
However, the car was not registered until 24th March 1931 and its first owner was the Standard Motor Company Ltd., which suggests that the car was old stock and they probably got it on the cheap!
The car was "Standard-ised" as the headlamps were Lucas L140 units with the Standard emblem inset and differed from that supplied by the Swallow Works.
The bumper arrangement is curious, around September 1930, the cars supplied by Swallow were fitted as standard equipment front & rear bumpers. These were supplied by Wilmot Breeden and the bumper blades were a ribbed cast-iron profile. The front bumper that came with my car and the rear bumper irons (part thereof) were different and of Standard car manufacture, BUT differed from the factory cars produced at the same time. The later Swallow-bodied Big Nines for the 1931 Model Year onwards all had the same bumpers as the factory cars.
The odd thing about the front bumper is that this projects significantly forward - it was definitely fitted to the car as all the mounting holes align, but there is a good 10" gap between the bumper and the bodywork, it looks odd. There are not any witness holes to show that this was fitted to another car first and re-purposed, it all looks to have only been fitted to VC7336. I will come back to this below.
The car was last known to have been taxed in 1938 to a private individual and the car moved to London. There are not any other records relating to tax that I have found found.
The car's recorded mileage was just under 10,000 miles, and the odometer only reads up to 9,999.9, so the figure could be 19,000, 29,000 and so on, however, despite the external appearance of both the dynamo & the starter motor, their respective internals are like new. The steering wheel is not worn and the engine was re-bored to +0.020". This all suggests low mileage and the 1938 date the car was last taxed would seem to be about right given the internal condition of the mechanics.
Back to the front bumper, the front nearside wing and the bumper had received a biff, the wing is slightly distorted as were the bumper & bumper irons - which given their projection, is perhaps not surprising! Perhaps when this happened, the threat of War meant the car was not repaired but stored - clearly, people felt that a 9-year-old car had some sort of value.
I do wonder if the front bumper was an experiment for pedestrian road safety - back then, manufacturers were looking at ways of making pedestrians safer and they may have conducted trials to see if sticking the bumper further forwards than normal would help. A complete unknown but it would explain why the bumper bars were positioned so far forward!
I got the car in 2019, the car was in bits and badly presented, the seller had given details of the car to the Swallow Register about 6 months before the Auction in October of that year. The asking price was, I thought optimistic. Anyway, I saw it listed by H & H Classics with no reserve, and I decided to register for bidding.
I did that and then worked out what I wanted to pay and placed a bid of £6,000.00, a few days later, I decided to revise my bid down to £4,000.00 - just in case I was the only bidder. The day before the auction I further reduced my bid to £2,000.00 and on the day, I set myself to watch the bidding live. However, I was called out to do a job and was away during the bidding. When I got back, the car was sold, there had been two bids, mine & one other and the car sold for £2,200.00 plus buyer premium and VAT. Ok, what will be will be, I was not unduly bothered and had I been there. I could have entered into a bidding contest and ended up paying a lot more, so happy with that.
The next day, I don't know why, but I looked at the listing and was surprised to see that the car had gone from being "sold" to "unsold". I emailed the Auctioneer and he came back to me to say that they could not get in contact with the other bidder and I replied that I was still interested. The next day, the Auctioneer came back and said if I wanted the car it was mine for £2,400.00 plus buyer premium and VAT, total amount of £2,760.00, would I like to think about it over the weekend, "NO", I will buy it now and the car was delivered a week later.
When it came (from Manchester) it was exactly as photographed - all the wings were loose, the seats were loose and everything was just piled inside the car, no locks on the doors, door trims all off, etc., it looked very sorry for itself.
I pulled everything out, started to clean it up and then bit things back where they should go, some significant parts were missing, like the steering column tube, no exhaust, rusted brake cables, no carpets. However, the timber frame, from what I could see, was in very good condition. The more I looked, the better it was, the seat leather was very stiff and dry, but complete, the trim was very dirty, and the headlining was dirty and rotted but all there. I was very pleased with what I found.
You may recall back in the 1980's Practical Classics magazine restored a Standard Swallow (now in a museum in Denmark) and it was this car that sparked my interest in Swallows, little did I ever think I would own one, but the car the magazine restored, which came from the predecessors of the Jaguar Collection, was in a far worse state than my car was now, 40 years earlier!
The talk in the Jaguar world was that this car was just too far gone, during the 1990's, Jaguar dismissed the car and so it seemed did everyone else. The car has had a number of owners since the 1970's, it was in a dismantled state prior to then and had moved about but none of the custodians did any work to the car, bits just went missing in the process!
I decided NOT to restore the car, but to preserve what I had, to get it running and back in use. The paintwork is too far gone, so it will get a re-paint, but the interior, apart from the lack of carpets, is original and the leather has responded very well to cleaning and feeding and is now supple. The leathercloth is mostly good and the woodwork has its original mahogany paint effect - it would be easy to strip this and re-do it, but the tatty original shows exactly how it was. It was missing exterior door handles, scuttle vents, interior light switch and other minor bits, but I have managed to source these. One of the headlamps was damaged beyond repair, but I found another. The sidelights were missing, but I had bought a pair of these a month or so before I bought the car and had them restored.
I am still missing an original radiator cap and a spring mechanism for the passenger door window glass and I don't have a full set of the hub cap centres, but I am still looking.
The car came to me without any registration documents and the registration was not recorded on the DVLA's computer. Luckily, the Coventry Transport Museum had index cards that showed the chassis number, the engine number, the date of first registration, details of owners AND that tax had been paid. This, together with the Club's assistance with the documentation meant that the car could be re-registered retaining its original registration mark - it is non-transferable, but I am good with that as it has to always stay with the car!
The car is now running and driving, there is still more to do before I can just drive the car in any weather, such as replacing window rubbers and sealing the new roof covering (all fitted but not weathered in) so it can get wet without causing problems. I have done 19 miles so far...
I will be bringing the car up to the NEC on a trailer and I am planning to drive it back home (yikes), I am planning to take this to the International Rally in June also!
The photos contrast how it was when it arrived here in 2019 and how it is more or less now. The car was also featured in The Automobile magazine last spring.
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