Together with Arrol-Johnston, Argyll was one of the two most important of the 50-plus Scottish car makers. The first Argyll was built in 1899; it was a light car designed by Alexander Govan (1869-1907), inspired by Renault, with a 258cc single-cylinder MMC-De Dion engine and tubular steel frame. Larger cars were then made, with production reaching 15 cars a week in January 1904.
The optimism generated by an output of 1200 cars in 1905 led to over-expansion. Argyll bought a 25-acre site at Alexandria in the Vale of Leven, where they erected a vast factory. The cost of around £220,000 can be compared with Napier’s new works at Acton that cost only £32,000. Just as critical as this weight upon the company’s finances was Alexander Govan’s early death in May 1907, which robbed the firm of much of its driving force. The investment in the factory could only be justified by mass production, but Argylls were still essentially hand-built. In August 1908 the company was in liquidation, though the factory continued production. The new range from 1910 helped production to rise to 452 in that year, but it was still well below that of 1905.
From 1911 Argyll experimented with sleeve valves; these were not to the double-sleeve design of Charles Knight but the single-sleeve design patented by Peter Burt and J.H.K. McCollum. Argyll made two sizes of sleeve-valve engine, a 2612cc 15/30 and a 4082cc 25/50. The latter is the powerplant of the car in this Snapshot.
Applications on motor vehicles of the single-sleeve-valve engine remained very few, but this type of valve design became much more widely and successfully employed in aircraft engines, such as the radials built by Bristol in the 1940s. As well as moving up and down as the pistons rose and fell, the sleeves oscillated, following an elliptical path to uncover inlet and exhaust ports, an action described by the writer Anthony Bird as ‘an exotic rumba-like motion’. This gave a much more silent-running engine than those with poppet-valves, and the frictional increases of the design were significantly lower than those of the Knight double-sleeve-valve engines.
Sleeve-valve cars were made until 1914, together with a poppet-valve car, the 1953cc 12/18. Argyll hoped to sell licences for their engine to other car makers, but only Piccard-Pictet actually made any engines. Although there were considerable differences in design between the Knight and Burt-McCollum systems, Knight sued Argyll for patent infringement. Argyll won the case but suffered heavy legal expenses. Coupled with the drain on their resources from the Alexandria works, this led to another liquidation, in June 1914. The factory was sold to the Admiralty, becoming the Royal Naval Torpedo Factory, and continuing as such until it was sold to Plessey Ltd in the 1970s.
In November 1915 the former works at Bridgeton were bought by John Brimlow, manager of the repair works, and after the war he restarted production on a modest scale. Production probably ended in 1928, with no more than 300 cars made after the war.
Image displayed with the kind permission of the Haynes Motor Museum.
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