Hot off the press: meeting British Motor Heritage

Today, we’re on a tour with two parts. BMH’s headquarters are in Witney, Oxfordshire, but Payne has suggested we start at Warwick to see the tools and to watch Taylor Pressform make some parts in real time, from original tools. Our other mission is to view the extraordinary array of historic plans, drawings, blueprints and documents BMH has inherited during its 45-year journey and which it is just beginning to digitise and organise. Then we’ll go to the main manufacturing plant at Witney to see more stuff being made. It’s my idea of a great day out.

The document cache is mind-blowing – and daunting in size. These papers, some a century old, have spent much of their recent years in four 40ft containers. Payne leads us past the steel mountains to what looks like an ex-MoD building at the back of the site, opens a heavily padlocked door and lets us inside.

The place is packed almost to the roof with files, cabinets and drawers, bulging with documents that surely tell a new tale of the British car industry’s heyday. Payne estimates there are one million pieces waiting to be revealed, and he has begun a slow and steady campaign back at Witney to organise them all. They’re homing in on sheet number 18,000, and many are buried treasure.

Payne guides us proudly to an extraordinary find, a plan of Rover’s Solihull factory site that is so early it reveals details of workshops used for automotive jet engine research before the end of the 1940s.

As well as viewing these remarkable documents, we’re here for another purpose: to witness the reorganisation and expansion of BMH’s business, led by a continuing strong demand for parts from agents around the world and from revitalised hands-on car repairers. Covid lockdown has created demand in two ways: by encouraging people to complete restoration projects they’ve been working on for years, and by feeding nostalgia for the ‘good old days’.

Payne has an extensive career history in old car parts, having been chief operating officer at Rimmer Brothers and also citing previous stints at Bearmach and Unipart as well as a previous term as sales and marketing director at BMH. He was instrumental in setting up the original Jaguar Land Rover Classic Parts division, too.

Since taking the helm at BMH 10 months ago, Payne has upgraded the websites and IT systems, started making new products, set up the document digitisation project and reorganised many procedures, including communications with his 60-odd Heritage Approved parts specialists. He has also revised BMH’s Tex-branded “wipers and mirrors” business and acquired trim maker Concours Carpets, whose assets include 800 carpet patterns for classic British cars.

“Our big problem at present is a chronic steel shortage,” says Payne. “Material costs are very high, in some cases three times what we were paying pre-Covid. Another issue is the need to rethink our logistics: in many cases we’ll have a demand for 50 parts a year, made with tools built to make 500 parts a week. A minimum at Taylor’s is often 100, so we need to be clever about storing both tools and parts.”

Over at Witney, an hour away if you’re lucky with the traffic, things are thriving. Today, they’re doing Mini bits parts and E-Type bonnets. Fronted by offices and a nice boardroom, BMH is really a metal-shaper’s paradise, full of the sounds and smells of creative industry, with plenty of screens to spare eyes from welding sparks and flash. Lots of what they do is hand-finished; some of the country’s most skilled artisans work here – and to judge by the happy demeanour of the people we meet, they are proud to do so.

Complete bodies tend to be made in batches, 20 to 30 cars at a time, usually twice a year. Demand is reliable, says Payne. Suppliers book spaces in the next batch of bodies, which means the pieces are all sold at manufacturing time. That makes this a nice business – as long as you can get the steel.

“The biggest market demand right now is for repair panels,” says Payne. “We’re getting lots of orders from people who want to finish projects they began 20 years ago. Since Covid, we haven’t stopped – it’s not as if you can take your work home in our business – and the worldwide market has been consistently strong.”

BMH is well into its fifth decade, having been founded as a division of BL in either 1975 or 1979, depending on who you ask. For a while it was viewed as a profit-earning arm of the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust, now the British Motor Museum at Gaydon, but that link was severed long ago. BMW also owned BMH for a while but stepped away in 2001.

One name that comes up is that of David Bishop, who led BMH into the 2010s but whose greatest contribution was his penchant for combing defunct UK manufacturing plants for discarded tooling that he knew would come in handy again. Many of his treasures reside in that compound in Warwick with the MGB parked outside.

What of BMH’s future? Payne says he has no specific production targets because demand is relatively reliable and predictable. BMH has an annual turnover of £5 million and since 1991 has made countless thousands of repair panels plus precisely 6274 complete bodies, a total that includes 2009 for the three-year MGR V8 production programme. So far they have made 1717 ‘other’ MGBs, 1177 Midgets and 865 Minis. Payne expects volume and demand to continue at current levels, along with around 120 E-Type bonnets a year.

“We’re concentrating on greater efficiency,” he says. “We want to put what we do onto a secure basis with our top 50 products available off the shelf, with our specialists in closer touch and with our bills of materials in a nice, secure database. At present, so much knowledge lives in the heads of dedicated employees who’ve been here up to 36 years. That’s great for now, but they can’t go on forever.”

Classic cars' future

What’s ahead for classic cars? Is their future bright? BMH boss Graham Payne is extremely positive about it, negating popular predictions that interest in MGB-era classics will wane as the world’s baby boomers drop off the perch. There’s simply no sign of a decline, he says.

“Our statistics tell us that the biggest age group for restorers is 45 to 54 years old,” adds Payne. “They’re not all old men in sheds. Our traditional business, Midgets and MGBs, is strong, but we’ve also been boosted by demand for Mini parts, and there’s absolutely no sign of that declining. The reverse, if anything. Rimmer Brothers, where I used to work, are also talking about year-on-year increases in demand.”