See more
Overview
Sunbeam Motor Car Company Limited was a British motor car manufacturer with its works at Moorfields in Blakenhall, a suburb of Wolverhampton in Staffordshire, now West Midlands. Its Sunbeam name had been registered by John Marston in 1888 for his bicycle manufacturing business. Sunbeam motor car manufacture began in 1901. The motor business was sold to a newly incor…
Ownership
John Marston, the London-educated son of a sometime mayor of Ludlow and landowner, had been apprenticed to Edward Perry, tinplate-works master and twice mayor of Wolverhampton. In 1859 aged 23 Marston bought two other tinplate manufacturers in Bilston, four miles away, and set himself up on his own account. On Perry's death Marston bought his Jeddo Works in Paul Street Wol…
Products
When at its height in the 1920s, Sunbeam Motor Car Company's Moorfield works employed 3,500 staff on their 50-acre site. The buildings covered 15 acres.
Under VSCC rules all cars made in Wolverhampton post WW1 qualify as vintage and as post-vintage thoroughbreds after 1 January 1931. All cars built before t…
Commemoration
The name lives on in the open space known as Sunbeam Gardens near a housing estate built in the early 1990s on most of the Ladbroke Grove site of the Clément-Talbot car factory. One of the original buildings remains, the Talbot administration block now known as Ladbroke Hall, with the earl's crest high above its main entrance. In the housing area there is a Sunbeam Crescent.
Sunbeam as a badge for other manufacturers
Rootes was an early proponent of badge engineering, building a single mass-produced chassis and equipping it with different body panels and interiors to fit different markets. They ended production of existing models at all the new companies, replacing them with designs from Hillman and Humber that were more amenable to mass production.
In popular culture
• P. G. Wodehouse in Carry on, Jeeves (1922) wrote "...A Sunbeam, isn't it? We've got a Wolseley at home."
• Agatha Christie's character, Horace Blatt, drives a Sunbeam, the only automobile make mentioned in Evil under the Sun (1941).
• Elizabeth Taylor's character drives a red Series I Sunbeam Alpine in BUtterfield 8 (1960).
See also
• List of car manufacturers of the United Kingdom
• Sunbeam S7 and S8
• Sunbeamland
External links
• Example of Sunbeam Sikh bus
• Sunbeam Talbot Alpine Register (STAR)
• Sunbeam Talbot Darracq Register Ltd private archives (accessible to members)
• The Sunbeam Talbot Darracq Register Ltd