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Farewell to the road's Mini marvel
2000 On October 4 as the last of the original Minis prepared to come off the production line, Motoring Correspondent Frederic Manby wrote this affectionate valediction.
"They stop making the Mini today. The definitive small car has scarcely changed since it astounded the world on its debut on August 26, 1959. It is still the ultimate town car.
In London, in the Swinging Sixties – and how they did swing – celebrities like Peter Sellers, all the Beatles, the Earl of Snowdon and Twiggy, were Mini people. So were F1 legends like Jackie Stewart, Graham Hill, John Surtees, and screen stars Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Big names, but small really was quite beautiful for them. Mary Quant, the nation's coolest frock designer, was inspired to give us the mini skirt, and later did a Designer edition Mini, one of dozens of "specials" over four decades.
Minis had sliding windows and a starter button on the floor, and exterior door hinges and body seams, and you opened the door from inside by yanking a piece of cable – and there wasn't a radio.
Its 34 horsepower 848cc engine gave a top speed of 72 miles an hour, managed 0-60mph in a yawning 27 seconds but cornered like a hare, and returned 40 miles a gallon.
The standard model cost 497 and was called either a Morris Mini-Minor, and built at Cowley, or an Austin Seven, built at Longbridge. They did think of calling it the Newmarket.
Today's Mini is quite a flyer in comparison. It has a 62 horsepower, 1275cc engine, does 90mph and 0-60 in 12.2 seconds, and averages 43 miles a gallon. It has a radio and proper windows and door handles and concealed hinges, but the external seams are still there.
It is also considerably safer, with a much stronger body, and an airbag in the steering wheel, and causes far less pollution. Oh, it is also a very un-mini 9,330.
Between first and last there have been pick-ups and station wagons with wooden spars, convertibles and the open Moke. I learned to drive in a grey Mini van, reg 6707 TD, and my first car was a grey Morris Mini Cooper with a white roof, reg CUA 666C. That lovable car took root.
This is a bit anoraky, but I still dream about it. The dream is always the same general plot. In this dream, I discover I still have the car mothballed, and the delight is immense as I drive it again. Of course, when I wake up this dream is like a rotten romance, and leaves me feeling wretched and empty. I last saw my car in real life at a farm near Ipswich in May, 1970, where I sold it to a dealer, taking the money to London to buy something rather different.
If you had a Mini in the Sixties, you had The Car. You could fit noisy exhaust pipes (I didn't), wider wheels, and replace the slithery cross-ply tyres with radial ply – which gave more grip. Dozens of tuning firms would provide more power by polishing and balancing the cylinder head's cavities, fitting bigger carburettors and sportier camshafts, and double valve springs so that you could rev its socks off.
There were hitches with the Mini. The radiator was in a wheel arch, which meant the electrics behind the front grille were exposed to rain and snow. The external seams were vulnerable to rusting. It had rubber cone suspension (by Alex Moulton, who created the famous Moulton small-wheel, suspension bicycle), and today, a Mini seems far from comfortable.
The Mini was designed by Alec Issigonis, who also did Britain's first million-seller, the Morris Minor. He will have been aware of the 1957 Fiat 600, rear-engined, also small-wheeled, and packed with urban brio, and not unlike the Mini to look at.
His engineering breakthrough with the Mini was to place the engine crossways between the front wings, with the gearbox in the sump, and driving the front wheels. This meant that the 10-foot-long car had a remarkable amount of cabin space.
The boot was less impressive, but Riley and Wolseley versions had extended rumps – and bigger engines.
In 1961, they gave us the Mini Cooper, developed with the help of John Cooper, who had won the F1 constructors' title in 1959 and 1960. The Mini was now on a roll.
Cooper S "works" Minis won the Monte Carlo Rally – the big motorsport event of the era – in 1964/65/67. In 1966, they took the first three places but were disqualified for the petty infringement of using non-standard light bulbs. A nation was outraged.
It is fair to say that the Mini's potential was never exploited by the various owners of Longbridge – which has made all Minis since 1969 – the year Alec Issigonis was knighted. There were proposals to make it as a hatchback, but it never went into production.
Anyway, there will be some sad faces at Longbridge today. Official total Mini production – some of them made overseas – is 5,387,862. The last, a Solar Red Mini Cooper Sports, will go on display in the Heritage Motor Centre, near Warwick. Today, the factory starts producing an entirely different car, the Rover 75. Its production moves from Cowley, where BMW will start building a new hatchback Mini next year.
Carriages turn to inferno as rush hour trains collide
1999 After an appalling high-speed collision near Paddington Station in London on October 5, we reported that more bodies were still expected to be found.
"A grim search for more bodies will continue today in the wreckage of the horrific London rail crash which killed at least 26 and injured 149 when an express ploughed into a commuter train at the height of yesterday's morning rush hour.
The death toll is certain to mount because firefighters still have an entire burned-out carriage to search among charred and mangled wreckage left by the collision near Paddington Station.
Sections of the two trains were catapulted into the air and burst into flames, leaving terrified passengers trapped inside by flames screaming for help.
Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Andy Trotter said one carriage, very badly damaged by fire, still had to be fully searched for bodies.
"The number of fatalities could rise considerably when that search is completed tomorrow. We don't have any idea on numbers at the moment. But you can imagine. It is a crowded commuter train."
Driver error or signal failure are believed to the most likely causes of the accident, and there was growing anger last night because it was almost identical to the Southall rail disaster, which claimed seven lives in September 1997 on the same stretch of line. Rail experts said the two years since then had been wasted in pursuing court cases instead of improving safety procedures.
Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott announced a public inquiry into the tragedy, which is Britain's worst rail crash since the collision between three trains at Clapham in December 1988, when 35 people were killed.
Yesterday's crash happened at 8.11am when the Thames Trains 8.06am Paddington to Bedwyn, Wilts, local service crossed the track on which the high-speed 6.03am Cheltenham to Paddington First Great Western service was approaching Paddington. The accident involved Signal 109, at the centre of a previous near miss in February 1998 and known to have been the cause of complaints to Railtrack.
The collision turned carriages into an inferno. Survivors spoke of seeing people with their clothes on fire, of being plunged into pitch darkness and thrown across the carriage and of panic-stricken commuters running from the train screaming for help.
The eventual death toll was 31 and dozens were injured because one of the trains had passed a red signal. Public inquiries were headed by Scottish judge Lord Cullen. He made dozens of safety recommendations and concluded Railtrack, the company then in charge of rail infrastructure and its investment, had failed to respond to earlier warnings about signalling problems.
He also criticised the Health and Safety Executive's Rail Inspectorate and recommended an independent Rail Industry Safety Body.
Hollywood legend Bette Davis dies, aged 81
1989 On October 6, Bette Davis, who had changed the way Hollywood looked at actresses, died in France. Our report said:
"The actress, Bette Davis, who died in Paris at the weekend at the age of 81, kept working almost to the end. She had cancer and knew her time was short, but still sparkled with energy and humour, even at her last public appearance, days before her death, when she accepted, at the San Sebastian Film Festival, an award for her lifetime's achievements.
Typically, one of her last reported remarks, when accepting the award, was the wry comment that "if they'd waited a little longer I wouldn't have been able to be here to receive it." She made more than 80 films during a career spanning half a century and was never afraid of tackling the big studio moguls of the 1930s and 1940s if things were not to her liking. Her body will be flown to Los Angeles this week for a private funeral, her lawyer said yesterday.
Mr Harold Schiff said he and Miss Davis's son, Michael Merrill, planned to arrange a "very private funeral and a memorial service in a week or two." Both would be held in California."
Bette Davis was born Ruth Davis April 5, 1908 in Lowell, Massachusetts. After making her Broadway debut she moved to Hollywood in 1930 to screen test for Universal. But it was a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers which made her name and she was the studio's first to lift a Best Actress Oscar.
Despite her success, Warner Brothers continued to offer her unsatisfactory roles. In 1936, she challenged the studio by coming to England to make pictures. Jack Warner sued her, and she was forced to honour her contract.
In 1939, Bette won her second Oscar for Jezebel. She also received Oscar nominations the next five years in a row.
She had a reputation for being difficult to work with but set a new precedent for women. By 1942, she was the highest paid woman in America. Bette made a roaring comeback in All About Eve (1950), and then another in 1962 with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
At the age of 75, Bette had a mastectomy due to breast cancer and shortly after suffered a stroke.
Che the legend shot dead
1967 Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna came from Rosario in Argentina. He qualified as a doctor in 1953 but left Argentina soon afterwards to travel South America. 'Che' Guevara eventually became a right-hand man to Cuban prime minister, Fidel Castro, a member of his "26th of July Movement" which seized power in Cuba in 1959. The intellectual force behind Castro's government, he rose quickly, becoming head of the National Bank and Minister of Industries.
Amid rumours of fallings-out with Castro and determined to further the revolution in other parts of Latin America, Che resigned in April 1965 and disappeared.
On October 9, 1967 it was reported he had been killed during a battle between army troops and guerillas in the Bolivian jungle. A statement from the Eighth Bolivian Army Division said the 39-year-old guerrilla leader was shot dead near the jungle village of Higueras, in the south-east of the country.
A post mortem examination on Che Guevara's body, carried out two days after his death, suggested he had been captured and executed a day later. His body was buried in an unmarked grave near Valle Grande and his remains were not found until June 1997, when they were returned to Cuba. Che Guevara remains a romantic figure and a hero of Third World socialist revolutionary movements.
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