Chapter 15

CONCLUSION

If the various changes in the general design of the Wolseley car from inception are studied with some care, a fair perspective can be gained of the course automobile engineering took both in its earliest infancy and at a later period when there was still no common agreement between Designers in regard to the form chassisdesign of the future would take.

Prior to, and even immediately after, the turn of the century, there was keen discussion about the merits and de-merits of the horizontal and the vertical engine, ignition, transmission, tyres, wheels, steering, and other features which have long since been settled among engineers. There is perhaps reason to criticize the early Wolseley administration for adhering for so many years to the horizontal engine and chain transmission, and particularly at a time when the opposite school had more or less proved their case, but this is not to say that the ground so lost was not swiftly recovered as soon as the canker, which was holding back the name of Wolseley in the early Edwardian days, was discovered and eradicated.

From that time, more than forty years ago, the Wolseley car has never looked back, and it still occupies its place in the front rank of modern automobile engineering. Every change, which has proved to be an advance on something which has gone before, has been adopted without regard to previous theories or what abandonment of other methods has entailed.

Overhead valves and a camshaft driven by a vertical shaft and skew gearing as well as roller cam followers mounted on the ends of valve rockers was " unzeitgemaess " in the extreme (to use a famous Nietzscheism), but this very design was incorporated in the .irst Wolseley engine ever made-in 1895-when inlet valves operated by the suction of the down-going piston were almost universal, and when engine speeds were so low that an automatic inlet valve sufficed, if it did nothing else.

And so we arrive at a stage in the history of British automobilism when the Wolseley Company, which began to experiment with " Horseless Carriages " at a time anterior to the passing of the " Locomotives on Highways " Act of November, 1896, is forced to share to-day with other manufacturers the many uncertainties,problems and even dangers inseparable from participation in the most devastating conflict the world has ever known.

The importance of the role played by the Wolseley Company in that great drama has been set out in this narrative in some detail in the hope that posterity will look back with some degree of pride on a great and successful effort put forth by the Company to achieve victory and to save humanity from total enslavement. The total value of the Wolseley war output amounted to between 29 and 30 millions sterling.

Romance is commonly regarded as the private territory of the novelist, but commercial romance is not unknown, and it often takes strange forms: what stranger is imaginable than for a small engineering firm in distant Australia, which devoted its ener-ies during the seventies of last century to the manufacture of sheepshearing machines, to take its place, three-quart-.rs of a c3ntury later, in the forefront of the British motor industry, the third largest in this country?

The many obstacles which had to be surmounted, and the number of set-backs it experienced since the beginning of the century, have been recorded in some detail in this narrative. As a prominent member of the great Nuffield Organization, the Company can now well afford to face the uncertainties of the future with equanimity, in the knowledge that it has at its helm one of the greatest and most successful Industrialists of all times.