Inspirational Engineer
It is with regret that the death of Austin and Morris engineer W.J. "Jack" Daniels is announced. Jack was 92 and had been battling cancer for the last two years, but died peacefully in his sleep on November 27th, 2004, at his home near Bournemouth.
Jack was affectionately known as the man who was '90 per cent perspiration behind Alec Issigonis's 10 per cent inspiration' in designing the Morris Minor and the original BMC Mini. Jack was also the first MG apprentice. Speaking about Jack, product development director, Rob Oldaker, said: "Jack was a talented development engineer, who will be remembered for his pragmatic input to many cars, the most famous of which were the new era of front-wheel drive cars, starting with his work with Sir Alex Issigonis and Alex Moulton on the Mini.
"His characteristic pipe caused a few communication difficulties for the young and uninitiated, but he guided many towards successful careers in the industry."
Jack's funeral has yet to be finalised, but is likely to be at St. Marks, Highcliffe, sometime in the next two weeks.
The man who was the 90 per cent perspiration behind Alec Issigonis's 10 per cent inspiration in designing the Morris Minor and the original BMC Mini, was also the first MG apprentice.
The books of the Morris Minor and the Mini, and the many videos of that era, usually refer to Jack as Issigonis's 'Right Hand Man'. There is a lot of truth in that. He often said: "Issigonis's was the inspiration - mine was the perspiration!"
Jack was born in Oxford in 1912, into a farming family. The family's land ran alongside the river between Witney and Ducklington, and got filched to aid the 1914-18 war. Another part of the family owned House's farm and dairy shop in the Parade, Botley, and land where the A34 Oxford Bypass now runs.
He went to Oxford Central School, a technical and commercial place (as opposed to the City of Oxford High School, a grammar) where among his best subjects were woodworking (which may explain his delight with the design and style of the Minor Estate) and technical drawing. He originally sat an exam to get him into the railway commercial side, but (having passed) nothing happened and he went back to school for a while.
Then came a call from the MG Car Company to the school, seeking trainees. The head master sent Jack along and he got the job at MG's (then) new factory in Edmund Rd, Cowley, and was MG's first (unindentured) apprentice. One of his abiding memories was the delivery of chassis from the Cowley Morris factory downhill to Edmund Rd, towing five in a line! Then they had to strip them down, remove redundant brackets, and strip the engines - to tune and rebuild them. The chassis were rig-tested inside the factory after the re-working.
After about two years, Keith Smith was engaged to run the MG drawing office, and Jack was invited to help out. Facilities at Edmund Rd were primitive, and to reproduce their drawings they had to visit an architect's office in Headington. A year later Keith Smith was replaced by George Gibson, and the pair were the first of the MG personnel to be transferred to Abingdon.
One things settled there, H N Charles came in as chief designer and events really began to hum, starting with the 'C' type Midget through to the 'S' type for the Motor Show in 1935, abandoned then following the merger. Charles, who was a very sound engineer, became Jack's real tutor in vehicle engineering.
When the MG racing programme was ended in 1935, Jack (with Hubert Charles and George Cooper) was moved back to Cowley. He was immediately involved with the production of the 'T' series MG, utilising more factory-available Morris components. Together they designed the coil spring IFS combined with an early rack and pinion steering as eventually used on the production 1947 MG Y-type.
With the merger in 1935, a new set of five key designers under Robert Boyle were introduced at Cowley, but just a year later only Alec Issigonis remained from the group. Robert Boyle was replaced by A V Oak and shortly after that Jack was introduced to Issigonis officially, thus starting the famous pairing. They were involved in some of the earliest UK designs for unitary chassis, which appeared first for Morris on the 10 M-series in 1938. Within two years they were almost joined at the hip - Nuffield's Vic Oak ensured Jack provided the practical experience which Issigonis, the visionary, needed. "Most people found Issigonis 'hard to get on with'", Jack said, "but he and I just gelled!"
During the war, he was in a reserved occupation, designing a number of light armoured vehicles. Videos exist of a small all-terrain 'communication vehicle' moving over Shotover Hill in which Jack had a big hand. He was also pushed into designing a mobile winch with 10,000ft of cable, onto which box kites could be attached to carry explosives (an alternative to barrage balloons). His next task was an amphibian, designed to carry 11 tons in a calm sea, 9 tons when rough! The payload had to include a 17-pounder gun. It had a 350hp engine at the back driving either the tracks or two 2ft. props through a transfer gearbox. Jack drove the first prototype from Oxford to Woodstock, where (with the Duke of Marlborough on board) he drove it in and out of Blenheim Lake! These amphibians later did sterling work unloading cargo at Westward Ho, venturing out in rough seas where other such vehicles were unable to function. Then it was on to a really heavyweight torsion bar suspension system for the Tortoise, a tank vehicle intended to attack the Siegfried Line frontally. This was the heaviest tank (at around 90 tons) ever conceived by that time, due to its incredibly heavy armoured plating.
After the war, Issigonis and Jack got down to finishing the design of the new Morris small car (initially called the Mosquito after the famous war plane). About this time the famous story about the Mosquito body (later to be the Minor) occurred. Issigonis decided the prototype body was too narrow. He had Jack and some others literally saw down the middle of the prototype chassis, and with each half on a trolley, he moved them apart until he liked the design, whereupon Jack and co. welded it together with some spare steel plate! Which is why all Morris Minors have a 4-inch-wide strip down the bonnet - it somehow got into production that way!
Jack and Issigonis also played around with their first design for a fascinating car - a transverse engined front-wheel-drive design in a Minor body. It took 4 years to complete and proved amazingly effective as a road vehicle, having far superior road-holding characteristics to the then (other than Citroen) conventional front lateral engine RWD designs. Nothing could persuade Morris management that this was the future for small cars, although Jack became a believer in FWD.
At this point ('52) Issigonis left Morris for Alvis, but when Len Lord persuaded him back in '55, Issigonis immediately requested Jack to re-join him, which was agreed. Two Alvis people, Chris Kingham and John Shepherd followed shortly and a new design team was created. Jack had to wind up his then design efforts on the Ferguson 4WD car and the Salerni torque converter to start on XC9001, a vehicle within the plan rectangle of the Minor, but which also had an early version of the Moulton Hydrolastic suspension.
After the Suez Crisis in 1956 fuel economy became a top selling point and smaller cars became de rigueur. Len Lord, head of BMC that combined Austin and Morris, set the team briefly on to XC9002, a downsizing to 1100cc and then very shortly after that onto a new project, XC9003 - this is where the true Mini story began.
Everything Issigonis and Jack had done up till then came together at 'the Austin'. Jack and family moved to nearby Kings Norton.
Issigonis started sketching baby Minor-styled cars on envelopes and serviettes, and Jack and his team turned them into practical structures. Alex Moulton and John Morris of SU carburettors were also involved, and John Wagstaff and a man called McKenzie became part of his team.
"Len Lord and George Harriman suddenly gave the urgent go-ahead - they wanted this small car urgently - and things progressed very fast!" said Jack.
"The first prototype (nicked named the 'Orange Box' because that's what they used initially for seats) was completed in late '57! Issigonis demanded the first test drive, and got 100 yards before the suspension collapsed. The very high loadings on the spring unit simply pushed apart the upper and lower fixings, which is why the subframes were added as a design fix!"
Jack and Co. were pushing small car design in ways it had never gone before. For examples, many of the welded body seams were on the outside of the car! The universal joint for the FWD was based on a Rezappa submarine conning tower control gear, which gave constant velocity and was self-supporting. This was the real secret of the Mini and it was this successful detail that made the drive system such a success - and the Mini such as capable and nimble little car. The tiny tyres were an industrial novelty. Tyre testing was carried out at Halfpenny Green near Wolverhampton in conjunction with Dunlop, at the time the only people prepared to make tyres that small size.
The Austin / Morris Mini became a cult as we all know. It was the 'In' car in the '60's, and lasted almost unchanged until the late '90's. The great (Lord Snowdon, Peter Sellers, various leggy models including Twiggy and film / TV stars) were all pictured in them; up-market variants appeared everywhere. With the Mini in production, Jack became involved with other FWD cars such as the (ADO16) 1100/1300 series, the Maxi, and later the Allegro.
Issigonis went off to his own tiny 'R&D' unit to produce an array of concept cars; but this time Jack did not go with him. He continued to develop Minis and had a hand in developing the race and rally-successful Mini-Coopers with the late John Cooper. He also used to regularly drive prototype No 5 to around 250,000 miles. He also put together a twin-engined mini, which was notorious for enormous speed at the time, although then a difficult concept in gearbox terms. A small engine at each end of a larger car is a concept yet to come in production.
Jack retired in 1977 after 50 years of continuous service. Many at this point would have called it a day, but Jack never lost his car enthusiasm. He still turned up at historic Austin, Morris and Mini related events such as car rallies, Mini-Cooper days, and even the Las Vegas Car of the Century Awards (as we said earlier - The Mini was Car of Europe and 2nd in the World, and the Minor was in the listings too). And he still had frequent visitors from the trade and trade press.
He was truly one of the last icons of the motor industry's pre-computer era. Bibliography
MG from A-Z - Jonathan Wood (1998, MRP Publications)Motor Guide to makes and Models 1945-56 (David J Culshaw (1956, Temple Press)Mini Magazine - June 1998 (Interview by Graham Robson).MiniWorld - Dec 1996 (Interview by Richard Williamson)Various books about the Morris Minor and the Mini, and several other partial texts and videos from various sources.
Plus of course Jack's own very important input and my own recollections!Text compiled by Dave Daniels (Son, Austin Apprentice and former Press Dept 1957-1964).
