Marshall and Company of Clayton in Manchester was probably that city’s first motor car manufacturer, building its first car in 1897. The company started to name its cars “Belsize” in 1901 after the Belsize Works that it occupied in Clayton. The Belsize name, perhaps more common today in London (Belsize Park springs to mind), was first found in Durham and is derived from “Bel Assis” in old French, which means beautifully situated. After several name changes, the company ended up in 1906 as the Belsize Motor Company.
Its products were for many years diverse but also conventional and included motor cars, taxis, commercial vehicles and fire engines, with capacities up to 14.5 litres. Before the First World War Belsize was a significant part of the United Kingdom’s motor industry, employing 1,200 people and making around 50 vehicles a week.
And then we come to the unconventional product in our Snapshot. After World War I Belsize followed a single model policy with a 15 hp car of 2,798cc, but in 1921 it introduced the Belsize-Bradshaw. This was powered by a 9-hp 1,294cc V-twin engine (sometimes given as 1,094cc) made by Dorman and designed by Granville Bradshaw.
Bradshaw was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1887. His early work was with aircraft and aero engines, and he was the co-founder of the All-British Engine Company (later ABC Motors then Walton Motors). At the end of 1918 ABC Motors Ltd transferred its motorcycle manufacturing and selling rights to Sopwith Aviation Co Ltd, with Granville Bradshaw of ABC Motors Ltd concentrating on design. This allowed him to sell his designs to other companies.
The engine of the Belsize-Bradshaw was partly air-cooled and partly oil-cooled. Bradshaw’s wartime work on aero engines had convinced him of the merits of using heat dispersal through the aluminium crankcase to aid air-cooling of cylinders by extending these deep into the crankcase where the lubricating oil could add to the air cooling of the conventionally finned upper part of the cylinders.
The Bradshaw V-twin was made by Dorman to a high standard and the engine was reputed to be smooth in operation but prone to overheating and difficult starting. Production of the Belsize-Bradshaw ceased after around 1,000 had been made. Belsize then went back to conventional power units and survived until growing competition from Morris, together with the 1924 slump, killed them off in 1925.
Image displayed with the kind permission of the Haynes Motor Museum.
Understandable, anyone now being unsure of the swept volume of the Belsize-Bradshaw engine because contemporary motoring correspondents were not sure about it either. Despite this, it feels safe to say that its capacity was never reduced to a potentially very underpowered 1094cc during about a two-year production run of perhaps only a thousand cars – safer to argue the opposite.
During the summer of 1921, motoring correspondents at a number of papers and magazines, including Country Life, were privy to many details of the up-coming 9-h.p. Belsize light car, which must by then have been in its final development and production engineering phase. In these early reports, between July and October, the engine’s bore was given as 85mm (c.3.375-inch) and stroke as 114mm (c.4.5-inch), giving a capacity of 1294cc. (c.79 cubic inch) – a notional “1300”.
The performance of the prototype cars must have proved unacceptable because from late October and following its formal launch at the November 1921 Olympia Motor Show most new car test reports that stated its engine capacity, including such varied but reliable sources as the Autocar and Pall Mall Gazette, gave the bore as 85mm but the stroke now as 121mm (c.4.75-inch), raising its swept volume to precisely 1374cc (c.84 cubic inches). Douglas Carr got it notionally right in his November 1921 Clarion report: “It has a capacity of 1370cc.”
Not everyone got the message, as in early November a syndicated Olympia Motor Show report printed by the Gloucestershire Gazette and another independently in Country Life restated the stroke as 114mm – was that the still-current dimension given out by some sales staff or just a coincidence that two separate show reporters used the previous figure they had been given?
Continental publications were no less muddled, even when supplied by English writer M. W. Bourdon. In an article about British engine oil-cooling experience in the 22nd April 1922 edition of the American Automobile magazine he gave the bore incorrectly as 3.75-inch (95mm) not 3.375-inch (85mm) and its lengthened stroke correctly as 4.75-inch (c.121mm) but calculated a notional capacity of 83-cubic inches or only c.1360cc. Hard to be sure, wherever reported, if the “chicken or the egg” came first with respect to quoted conversions involving millimetres and inches.
Interestingly, Bourdon also described the contemporary Marseal of Coventry’s prototype 2.375-inch (60mm) by 3.5-inch (90mm), 1018cc (67-cu.in), in-line four-cylinder, oil-cooled 10-h.p. car engine, which unlike the Bradshaw engine had an oil cooling radiator. Marseal cars on sale before and after that were water-cooled but, much like Belsize, for all their innovation Marseal was in the hands of the receivers by 1924. Longer surviving Lea (&) Francis displayed, at their reappearance at the 1922 London Motor Show, an oil-cooled car for £190 fitted with a Bradshaw designed 700cc, 7.1-h.p., side-valve flat twin. It was listed for only a year.
Prototype Belsize-Bradshaw car engine capacity was apparently increased and presumably the power output, but not by much. Significantly reengineering the two cast-iron cylinder and valve assemblies bolted into the aluminium crankcase casting may have been too difficult and expensive late in the programme, with a 7mm bigger crankshaft throw the easier option to improve power output. Perhaps it was as a result of this late change that the first customers’ cars were not delivered until December 1921 and why some Belsize agency garages only advertised in February 1922 that they had any to sell.
A Special Two-seater Sports model, with alloy pistons and a raised compression ratio was announced at the Scottish Motor Show in January 1923. If the bore, stroke and capacity had changed, that was not revealed widely by the press but some later reports said it could reach 55mph. The model was advertised in June 1923 at £235 and evidently some were sold: a “BELSIZE BRADSHAW, two-seater, special sports engine; any trial or expert examination” was on offer second-hand in Cranbrook in September 1923. Several more second-hand 1924/25-year Specials followed and were for sale around the country at least as late as 1931.
Although Granville Bradshaw had worked successfully on aeroengines, he revealed to Bourdon and others
in 1921-22 that the benefit of thorough oil cooling had come to him in wartime experiments not from these but from the relatively mundane flat twin-cylinder air-cooled stationary engines he designed to drive military wireless and searchlight dynamos. When production versions of his test engines were fitted with neater fan shrouds, they would no longer develop the same power or run reliably for the specified fifteen hours on ten consecutive days because, he surmised, only the heads were now being cooled adequately but not the oil in the crankcase. Heat distorted cylinders were considered the cause of reduced compression and increased friction and wear.
Hence, as well as internal direct oil cooling, the Belsize-Bradshaw had a front-mounted flywheel with a fan-bladed centre and an enveloping engine shroud to air-cool the crank case and alloy heads adequately even when the car was stationary. An essential element of this Bradshaw oil-cooled design was that the valves could not be in the air-cooled heads. Each pair of side-valves had to be located close to the camshaft in the 90-degree vee between the cylinders to ensure adequate oil cooling of the exhaust valve seats. This was a retrograde layout compared to the oil-cooled, overhead valve, flat twin, Bradshaw-designed engines already fitted to Zenith motorcycles.
One danger which Bradshaw dismissed when challenged was that when adjusting the valve tappets through the top access panel of the crank case, it was possible to drop a spanner all the way down into the sump. He said it would be quite safe to leave it there until the sump was removed for a routine engine clean. Amateur fettlers were nevertheless given sound advice by a motoring correspondent: “Tie a long length of string to your tappet spanners.”
To control oil loss, special inlet valve stem sealing was employed to reduce suction at low throttle openings and the standard engine’s cast-iron pistons had two compression rings and one scraper ring with a chamfered upper edge to minimise it pushing oil up the bore – British Piston Ring Company “Scraypoil” oil-return rings might have helped but did not appear until 1924. Total oil capacity was two gallons, circulated by a piston pump at a gallon per minute at 1000rpm and Bradshaw claimed that the oil typically reached 150F. (71C.), never exceeding 190F. (89C.). Engine overheating was not a problem reported in early car tests, where it was considered a good hill climber in top gear, being “an excellent slogging unit.” While the car could achieve 30-40 miles per gallon of fuel, owners reported using a gallon of good quality oil per seven to eight hundred miles due to sealing leaks and cylinder losses – a pint every hundred miles or so was not considered comparatively excessive.
Apart from oil and air cooling, the car’s other “innovations”, which some detractors called abnormalities, included a rear track eight inches narrower than the front and the generator link-belt driven by a pulley at the rear end of the gearbox, meaning there was no charging unless the car was in motion. Unless the car ran regularly at 23-24-m.p.h. there was a risk of the battery being drained if the lights were used in town in winter. This “innovation” made testing the generator drive and output inconvenient, requiring the jacking up of at least one rear wheel.
Bradshaw said that the narrower rear track was to save the rear tyres from 90% of potential punctures due, he claimed, to the front ones throwing nails under more normal in-line wheels – a theory no doubt based on his observing guilty shoe-nailed old nags pulling the many horse-drawn carts still in use.
Despite its narrowed rear track, the Belsize-Bradshaw back axle was fitted with a bevel gear and differential. At the time, Bradshaw, who believed a differential was essential even in a light small car, was having a widely publicised technical spat with Talbot’s Louis Coatalen, who insisted they were not necessary and so did not fit one in his contemporary 8-h.p. model. Well-known motoring writer W. G. Aston noted, in an article strongly agreeing with Coatalen, that the Talbot-Darracqs which won the Coupe de Voitures over a twisty circuit didn’t seem to need one. “It only shows how easily prejudice may lead one astray,” he concluded. Others might conclude that Aston picked the wrong axle to grind.
A Bradshaw patented clutch system was part of the in-unit gearbox assembly and was mounted on its hollow main shaft behind the gearbox. Behind it was a disc turning at propeller shaft speed and when the clutch was fully depressed it acted as clutch stop and brake bringing the gears to drive-shaft speed when changing. This rudimentary pre-synchromesh system made it one of the easiest and smoothest small car changes and led to it being marketed as a car designed especially for lady drivers. The steering box, mounted on the crankcase and the gearbox were also lubricated by the engine’s pressurised oil system. Gearbox engine-oil lubrication: what a novel idea for a future small innovative front-wheel-drive car…
The original Belsize-Bradshaw was extremely quiet compared to other V-twin-engined cars, so much so that at 30-40-m.p.h, the latter its maximum on the flat, the carburettor intake reportedly made more noise than the exhaust, except when reversing. However, despite claimed good power-to-weight and an occasional sporting trial prize win, the car was slow compared to similarly priced and sized rival models. Prices started at £275 for a 2-seater in 1921 and dropped in 1922-24, with a 2-seater at £210, 4-seater at £235 and a Coupe at £260. A Rotax 12-volt electric starter remained a £15 extra, although all cars had a Bendix starter ring on the front flywheel and a speedometer was another £5.
With perhaps too many “innovations”, the Belsize-Bradshaw evidently didn’t even achieve short-term popularity and second-hand sellers were lucky to sell a standard model for even thirty quid by 1928 but one owner who had owned his 1923 model from 1926 until 1935 had by then covered over 100,000 miles without failure and it still had its original pistons. One of few recorded satisfied owners, he must have bought it cheaply as he claimed his had devalued at only £5 per year – a 1930’s British working man’s good fortune story, rare enough to pique the interest of the Daily Mirror.
Intimation that the 9-h.p. Belsize-Bradshaw was about to get a water-cooled 4-cylinder came in June 1923, Bradshaw having already designed and in production at Belsize a new water-cooled two-litre engine that still featured a full aluminium shroud with air drawn through by a flywheel fan. Although Belsize was not present at the November 1923 Motor Show, presumably because it was already in financially difficulty, the oil-cooled Belsize-Bradshaw was still listed as a current model on sale for 1924 and enticed enough purchasers who, looking at second-hand adverts, mostly didn’t keep them long.