The Life of Donald Healey

from the Graham Robson Archives

Donald Healey was an amazingly industrious character. Famous for so many things in a long career, he always seemed to be quite ageless, for when the Austin-Healey marque was prominent, Donald was already in his sixties, but gifted with the energy of a 30-year-old.

Until his reluctant retirement to his native Cornwall, he was always active, never looking back if there seemed to be future projects he might influence, yet he’d been a British motoring icon for so many years that we thought he would always be with us.

Having already won the world-famous Monte Carlo Rally in his thirties, he had every right to relax, but to Donald Healey this was just the start of another life. Success, he concluded, merely made him better known—and better able to get further, faster, in his profession.

Then in the late 1940s, immediately after the Second World War, he set up his own company. Surely that was enough? No. Not for the little Cornishman.

After 18 roller-coaster years with BMC, later British Leyland, most would feel it was time to retire. Not Donald Healey. At 72 years of age, he went out and helped to take over Jensen, to establish yet another new sports car—the Jensen-Healey. To see a man with premature hair loss win the Monte Carlo Rally gave the wrong impression of his age. And to see a totally bald, but incredibly spry team boss set up 200mph-plus top speeds on the Utah Salt Flats when 58 years old, was an inspiration to people of all ages.

In all that time, everything that Donald Healey tackled received his full attention, whether it was designing new cars, recreating the gardens of a gracious mansion in Cornwall (it’s now a visitor attraction), experimenting with closed-circuit TV years before the Japanese made them commercially possible, or trying to harness nature with high-tech windmills! He’d been like that since 1915, when he learned to fly, and he was still the same in the late 1970s when casting around for a successor to the Jensen-Healey project.

Donald Healey became famous in the automobile business without any family backing. Born at Perranporth in 1898, when there was still not a single motor car in that part of the country, he grew up in a sleepy little town where his family ran a grocer’s shop. His interest in machines came from what he saw all around him, and after serving in Britain’s Royal Flying Corps during the First World War he set up the Red House Garage in the village.

For the next few years he then made his own way in motor sport, moving up from reliability trials to rallies. Having won Britain’s first major long-distance rally, the Bournemouth, and urged impossibly small (832cc) Triumph Super Sevens through the snows to the Monte Carlo Rally, he then got his first ‘works’ drive, with Invicta, for whom he won the Monte in 1931. Two years later, he turned to Britain’s motor industry in Coventry, working briefly for Riley, then moving to Triumph.

After an early life in Cornwall, therefore, he had finally made it to the Big Time. From 1934 to 1939 he was Triumph’s technical director, and for the next forty years he became one of the British motor industry’s most engaging characters.

Now let’s put this into North American terms. Think of Depression-hit USA, think of a small-town country boy living in Kansas, Wyoming, or Montana, transplant him to Detroit, and see him beginning to make headlines within the year. That’s how sudden Healey’s impact on the British industry really was.

After I came to live and work in Coventry during the 1950s, I got to know Donald (and his sons Geoff and Brian) quite well. They all brought their own skills to the business. In all his years in the limelight, though, I have no evidence that Donald ever drew a line on paper—yet he inspired many famous cars: it was Geoff, in particular, who interpreted and engineered most of his schemes.

He was, in fairness, an innovator, but he was not a designer. He knew what he wanted—invariably it was to be fast, elegant, and always sporting—but someone else was always there to interpret his wishes.

At Triumph (which was still independent of Standard in those days) his supercharged eight-cylinder masterpiece, the Dolomite Straight Eight, was inspired by the Alfa Romeo Monza but designed by Swetnam’s team (Swetnam had once worked for Sir Henry Royce of Rolls-Royce), and styled by Frank Warner.

In 1945, the design of the first post-war Healeys was in the hands of ‘Sammy’ Sampietro (chassis), Ben Bowden (body), and the Riley Motor Co. (engine, gearbox and back axle), while his eldest son Geoff had much to do with the layout of the original Austin-Healey 100, the Sprite, the Jensen-Healey and all their developments. From the early 1950s, in fact, it was Geoff who controlled the complete design office, with Donald getting more involved in commercial matters and—yes, let’s be honest—in wheeling and dealing.

Although the myth developed that Donald Healey became extremely rich through all these activities, his son Geoff always made it very clear that this was not so. Too trusting, and in some ways “too nice,” he sometimes did not get the most out of opportunities. Then, of course, there were diversions into other activities like the sports boats.

Having joined the Triumph Board of Directors, and bought up shares to back that appointment, he then lost most of his money when that company struck financial trouble in 1937. Having recovered some of that, he then lost more in 1939 when Triumph called in the Receiver.

We also know that there was much more fame than money in the Healey project of 1945-1953, for meeting the payroll on Fridays was often a real problem. And we know that his chance meeting with George Mason of Nash Kelvinator not only inspired the Nash-Healey model, but that Nash also underpinned Healey’s £50,000 ($140,000) bank overdraft and helped him to recover from a very rocky position.

It was only after BMC started building thousands of Austin-Healeys every year (and the Healey family started to earn royalties on every car made) that long-term prosperity was assured. Even then, much money was plowed back into running the design and development offices at Warwick. The final company, Healey Automobile Consultants Ltd, always being busy and creative to the last.

No matter where he settled, nor what he tackled, Donald could push, cajole, persuade, and inspire a team to produce something new. Though there rarely seemed to be enough financial backing, he was always stubborn and ever-optimistic—and the results were impressive. Encouraged by Triumph to develop an Alfa-Romeo beater in 1934, he did just that—by copying a Monza! Determined to design a post-war British sports car, he started work while Hitler’s bombs were still falling, and was first to the market with his original Healey—way ahead of Jaguar and MG—in 1946.

The pace then quickened. His link with Nash was an inspired Anglo-US motoring co-operative deal, and his link with BMC (to found Austin-Healey) was very timely. Others had tried to join forces with BMC in a sports car project—Jensen and Frazer Nash among them—but it was a combination of Donald’s effervescent character, and his eye for a line in the prototype Healey 100’s styling which caused BMC’s Leonard Lord to take him on board.

As far as BMC was concerned, Donald Healey could then do no wrong, which explains why they let him keep control of the cars bearing his name but being built by BMC, the way he was allowed to run the racing and record breaking programs independently from them, and why his designers got the job of developing the little Sprite without interference.

Even so, he could be very stubborn. Protective of his name to the last, he would not approve of proposed new MG-designed cars carrying his name, and when BMC became a part of British Leyland he certainly did not approve of what Sir Donald Stokes’s cronies had in mind.

In 1970 the parting between Healey and British Leyland was bitter, but one of several departures committed by the Stokes management regime, which was incredibly short of the vision that any team at this level should have developed.

Problems, though, sometimes lead to opportunities, so Donald then got together with Vauxhall Motors (a British GM-subsidiary brand) and Kjell Qvale (the wealthy motor trader from San Francisco) to take over Jensen, and eventually to launch the Jensen-Healey. Most of the money came from California, but most of the ideas came from Healey.

If the Energy Crisis had not erupted in 1973, and Britain’s inflation had then not roared upward, this might have been another long-term success story. Unhappily, sales slumped, losses mounted, and Qvale eventually closed down the enterprise.

Because the cars had done so much export business, and earned so many US Dollars, Healey then turned to the British government for aid. To his amazement, this was refused (DeLorean got much more at the same time and it all disappeared), and the company had to close down. Healey never forgave the left-leaning British administration for this—especially as they had already poured a lot of money into a ludicrous loss-making “workers’ co-operative” trying to make obsolete Triumph motorcycles.

At 78 years of age, Donald Healey finally decided to slow down, but only reluctantly. In retirement, so called, one of his consolations was that there was now time for him to accept world-wide invitations to visit the clubs which preserved his cars, and it was only a gradual loss of mobility which eventually caused him to stay in his native Cornwall.

The end came in 1988, nearly seventy years after starting his first business enterprise, but only months after his flow of bright new automotive ideas began to dry up. By any standard, he was a unique personality, and this had been an astonishing life.