Un’auto per intenditori: alla scoperta della British Salmson

Many years ago I tracked down the former Service Manager of the British Salmson Aero Engine Company. They had given up car manufacture a couple of years before WW2 but had to support owners by maintaining a Service Department, & this facility was kept in being until around 1956. At this point in time, the various makes & models of all pre-war cars were beginning to depreciate a lot in value, & factory support for the Salmsons was beginning to become uneconomical. So the Service Department was closed, & stocks of spare parts were transferred to St. James Garage, a local motor repair business, who took on a few of the workforce from the old company & helped some of the loyal British Salmson owners to keep their cars on the road for a few more years. At the time of the clearout all the old paperwork & photograph albums relating to car production were unwanted by the departing Martineau brothers (the company directors), & the former Service Manager (Mr. Wilfred Barmen) was told he could take the 2 very large photo albums showing the production history of the cars if he so wished. Mr. Barmen was pleased to pass them on to me for a nominal sum of money, along with his Service Department record cards of all the cars made by the company. There was also a set of car manufacturing drawings, & these were saved by the car assembly foreman, Mr. Saville, & eventually passed from him to another member of the Owners Club. The Martineau brothers never owned or drove the cars they had made, using instead various makes of big six cylinder cars, all of which were serviced in the works.
It should be remembered that the company had initially been tooled up to manufacture small Salmson aero engines, for which a large demand had confidently been predicted, but never really materialised. However, a wide variety of high precision engineering products, in many cases for the local aircraft building companies, was undertaken. They also took on work for various government armament subcontractors & general engineering firms. A case in point being the machining of crankcase castings for the engines of the big vee twin motorcycles manufactured by the Vincent company, at Stevenage, on the other side of London. Another activity-post war, was the manufacture of the British Salmson "Ranger Big Crown" printing press, which was considered to be a noteworthy product in its day. This took place alongside the production of the British Salmson "Cyclaid", a small 2 stroke cycle attachment motor. This became reasonably well known, & was in production for a few years.
Final British Salmson engineering production (primarily the Printing Press) was transferred to a Scottish concern & the London works passed into other hands.

My father & his brother shared a S4C Ranalah 4str tourer before the war.