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

While carrying out research into Paris transport networks I recently came across an image that seemed strangely familiar. Illustrating one of the many proposed transport projects for the Paris region during the 1960s was a photo of a suspended metro train. The project has now been completely forgotten and despite lengthy development and testing the technology was never adopted in France. And yet the suspended metro is known the world over for it is immortalised in François Truffaut's film Fahrenheit 451. In the film, adapted from Ray Bradbury's novel, the suspended metro appears in the daily commute between the city centre and the residential suburbs. On board, Clarisse notices her neighbour Montag, and the two establish a friendship on the daily commute to their respective jobs in the fire station and school.

Truffaut made the suspended metro sequences on a location shoot near Orléans in France. In 1959, engineering film SAFEGE built a 1370 metre track at Châteauneuf sur Loire to conduct tests for a new form of rapid and silent public transport. The project generated much interest from abroad but before the company could sell the technology it would first have to build a working system in France. When Truffaut's team arrived for filming at the test track in March 1966 development for the SAFEGE metro was at its height, and the system seemed likely to be rolled out imminently for commercial operations. At least two proposals were developed for the Parisian suburbs, but the first was rejected due to technical difficulties, and the second abandoned in October 1966 for financial reasons.

A few years later the test track was dismantled and the carriage was sold for scrap. By chance, however, the unit immortalised on film by Fahrenheit 451 escaped the smelter and after providing a home for the iron merchant's son it was used as a chicken hut. Discovered in a field in 1991, the carriage was bought by members of a local association (ARSATI) interested in the history of the Aérotrain - another experimental transport system developed near Orléans in the 1960s and 70s. After restoring the carriage in 1994, ARSATI planned to display the SAFEGE metro in a museum dedicated to innovative transport, but sadly the unique metro was vandalised and the project abandoned.

Truffaut wrote he was determined to use the suspended metro in his film, and remarked that even though it seemed out of date compared to the neighbouring high speed Aérotrain experiments it was still a glimpse into a future that otherwise pretty much resembled contemporary England. Over forty years after the release of Fahrenheit 451, the suspended metro of the film still seems strikingly modern - or at least timeless compared to the brick houses of Montag's street, resembling the London outer-suburban commuter belt of the 1960s, and the sea of rooftop television aerials in the title sequence. The film remains the last resting place of a transport system out of its time.


Jacob Paskins


References to the SAFEGE suspended metro from Le Métro Suspendu website (in French).