AUTOPSIES RESEARCH GROUP

Image above: Rover 100 (1960)

Modernity has brought with it cars which can reasonably be expected to start and stop upon demand and can be owned and operated by the non-mechanically minded. One of the developments which made this possible was the widespread introduction in the 1970s of electronic ignition which now provides the ‘spark’ to internal combustion engines in all modern cars. Prior to this, engines were fired by a ‘distributor’, which was the means of routing high-voltage from the ignition to the sparking-plugs in the right firing order.

At the heart of the distributor is the ‘dead-object’ which has focused my attention this month: the Lucas 45D Distributor Rotor Arm [see image below]. It is a small cylindrical moulding about the size of a wine-cork and made of plastic and brass. During the 1960s, a rotor arm could be obtained new for about 5 shillings (25 pence). They are now available from specialist dealers to owners of old cars for £5 to £10. Although technically obsolescent, this tiny component is essential to keep an old car running.

The manufacturer of the rotor arm was the Lucas Electrical Company, founded by Joseph Lucas in Birmingham in 1872, the same year that the petrol engine was first patented and a decade or more before the introduction of the first motor-car. In spite of its dominant market-share for over a century in electrical components for motor vehicles, the Lucas company had a poor reputation for the reliability of their light bulbs and other electrical car accessories. For this reason, the company was known among British motorists as ‘The Prince of Darkness’ and spawned a host of rueful jokes among customers about the dependability of their products. (Sample: ‘Lucas, the inventor of the intermittent windscreen wiper’).

‘My’ dead-object (the Lucas 45D rotor arm) qualified incontrovertibly as deceased on a recent visit to France in my 1960 Rover 100. It failed on a country road not far from Alençon as dusk was falling one Sunday evening last month. In Lucas tradition, the rotor arm gave no hint of impending failure. It just stopped sending current to the sparking-plugs and the engine died instantly. Trying to trace the fault was vexing and unproductive as night fell and dinner in Bayeux looked increasingly unlikely. It is now that the Deus ex machina intervenes. A French registered Jaguar E-Type Coupé c. 1964 pulled up beside our stricken Rover. The owner transpired to be British and, within minutes, had not only diagnosed the fault but produced from his tool-kit a spare 1960s Lucas 45D rotor arm which was fitted and fired the engine into life immediately. As I write this, it still seems to me to be a very improbable story that a fifty-year old obsolete British electrical component should find its way to a roadside in rural France on a Sunday evening at the precise moment that it was needed.

All of this set me thinking about the role played by Jaguar E-Types in films. They are invariably driven by heroes who save situations or put wrongs to right. Cool operators including Sean Connery in Thunderball (1965) and Michael Caine in The Italian Job (1969) drive E-Types. The car makes an appearance in The Big Sleep (1978), The Odessa File (1974) as well as featuring in contemporary episodes of The Saint and The Avengers TV series. An E-type Jaguar is also one of the stars of Just Jaecken’s Emmanuelle (1974). [Source: Internet Movie Cars Database]

Rover 100 cars play a very different role, often as background vehicles in street-scenes to evoke the 1960s period, as in Quadrophenia (1979) where ‘Sting’, who plays a bell-boy at a Brighton hotel, unloads luggage from a Rover 100 driven by a dapper hotel guest [see IMCDb]. The Rover represents professional, middle-class, well-heeled middle Britain in the 1960s [see Rover P4 videos] and was driven typically by doctors, solicitors and bank managers [1]  It epitomised a set of values and a way of life which may be said to have disappeared in the years following the events of May 1968 in Paris and their international repercussions. Film appearances include The League of Gentlemen (1959) and The Spy who came in from the Cold (1965) as well as providing the authentic period back-drop for recent films (An Education, 2009) and for the TV series Agatha Christie’s Marple.

So there they were by the side of a French country road. The E-Type Jaguar driven by the hero who solved all our problems and vanished into the night, and the Rover 100, with its stately image and erratic British electrics. And deep in the heart of the broken-down Rover was a dead-object: a Lucas 45D rotor arm manufactured in Birmingham England 50 years ago by ‘The Prince of Darkness’.


Simon Rothon

"Object Retrieval was a mass participation art project that took place from 15-21 October 2009 on a converted Routemaster bus in the main UCL (University College London) Quad on Gower Street, London. A single object from the UCL Pathology Collection was exhibited on the bus and explored by thousands of people from their own personal or professional perspective for 7 days, 24 hours a day. The response was extraordinary as you can see for yourself from the enormous amount of information uploaded on the Object Biography page. Contributions ranged from the hyper-scientific to childhood memories via the Gospels, Jack Kerouac, Psychoanalysis and pretty much everything in between. While Object Retrieval has finished, the website will remain open to your further contributions surrounding this simple object, this toy car that once belonged to a 4 year old boy."

This is the description by the curator and artist of the Object Retrieval Project on the website devoted to the project.

The Autopsies Group took up the invitation to research and think about the little car exhibited in this project.  That car, depicted above and below in photographs taken by Jann Matlock during our work sessions at the Routemaster bus, on 21 October 2009, was a tiny toy car, modelled after the Ford Galaxie Sunliner, that entered the UCL Pathology Collection in 1963 in relation to a case of lead poisoning involving a 4 year-old boy.  The case notes are reproduced here.

In these case notes, that justify the "appropriation" of the object today in the Object Retrieval Project, and its display in the Pathology Collection that originally housed it, the little boy was diagnosed in three ways: as a "case of mental retardation" (possibly relating to his lead poisoning as Rebecca Harrison notes in her contribution), as having "pica"--or the propensity to eat things that were not destined to be eaten--not so much a disease as a symptom, but at the very least an attribute that was part of a strange discourse of blaming victims as both Karolina Kendall-Bush and Harrison dicuss below; and being different, in this case, of "non-European extraction."  Despite our best efforts, we do not know what happened to the child or even whether follow-up studies were done on any of the children studied by Dr. Moncrieff in 1963 about whom he published an article reproduced on the Object Retrieval site.  We do know that this little boy was not one of the specific cases detailed in that study.  We can also assume, from the evidence of his lead poisoning levels, and the diagnosis of severe learning disabilities, that he may not have had the future that other children born in 1959 would today enjoy.  If he is alive today, he would be 50.  In the year that he entered the Greater Ormond Street Hospital, Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream Speech" (on 28 August 1963).  Also that fall, on 23 october 1963, Bob Dylan recorded an important political ballad, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll."  That song, which told the story of one of the most tragic injustices of the civil rights era in the U.S., detailed how the scion of wealthy tobacco farmers killed a black woman with his cane because she was slow in bringing him a drink--and then was given the minimal penalty of only six months in jail for manslaughter:

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'.
And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder.
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.

Dylan tells the whole story, in his way, almost as if he's providing a newspaper account of the murder that occurred in February 1963. The version below is from a public domain appearance on the Steve Allen show in 1964.

Zantzinger's story is relevant to the Object Retrieval Project for two reasons: first because his victim, like the little boy in the Object Retrieval Project, was of another background than European and justice was dispensed on the basis of that racial, ethnic difference. Second, because Zantzinger left jail to become a major slumlord in Maryland and in the Washington D.C. area. See this account in The Guardian, (and in some slightly more anecdotal accounts here). 

Arrested in 1991 on charges of fraud and deceptive business practices, Zantzinger was like the slumlords who in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and even today, refused to do anything about the lead paint in the apartments they rent.  He was also like the lead paint companies that have fought tooth and nail all attempts to force them to indemnify their victims for pretending--well into the 1970s--that lead paint was safe and for claiming, even today, that their paint was no more to blame than other things in the environment.  See these examples from Life Magazine: [1] [2] [3] (1967!) Pencils, pottery, and yes, little toy cars, have taken the fall for an industry that has chosen not to participate in the clean-up of the home environments they promised to make sparkling and safe.

William Zantzinger died in January 2009. For a contemporary activist's account of the era, read this.

Tragically enough, in 2009 as well, on July 2, the Rhode Island Supreme Court reversed a legal decision that would have forced the three big lead paint firms to pay to help clean up the housing that their paint has made toxic.  After more than 30 years of hiding the health risks of their lead paint, Sherwin-Williams, NL Industries, and Milennial Holdings were set to begin paying billions to repair the damage to housing where lead paint risks still persist.  Cases are pending in California and Ohio, where courts could still make the lead firms share in the cost of making homes safe.  Until then, justice for the millions of children who suffer from lead paint poisoning, will remain as elusive as for Hattie Carroll.

This is why the Autopsies Research Group played Bob Dylan's song at the end of our research visit to the Routemaster bus in the UCL quad on 21 October 2009.  While we would rather remember 1963 for Martin Luther King's dreams, we also want to remember the injustices committed by slumlords like Zantzinger and by the lead paint companies both of whom profited from little boys such as the one who once loved a little toy Ford Galaxie Sunliner.

Wherever he is, we hope he is not alone.
--Jann Matlock