Shenanigans In The Car
pp. 90-91 · Read in the full issue
Building Business
Big Wheels and Little Wheels is by L. J. Hartnett “as told to John Veitch”, but as it is told throughout in the first-person, it is L. J. (Larry) Hartnett who will get the credits and the debits.
Apart from a distressing habit of referring to national figures by their first names—Bert, Chif, Bob, etc. —it is an interesting look behind the scenes of the Big Car Business.
MR. HARTNETT was the biggest wheel in General Motors- Holden in Australia for 15 years and, during the war, Director of Ordnance Production. But to the average Australian today, if the name means anything, it is the Hartnett car—the one that didn’t quite come off.
He was, throughout his GM-H career, a somewhat paradoxical char acter in that he was an Englishman, working for otie of the American industrial giants, in Australia, where he became more Australian than a genuine, fair dinkum Aussie.
He graduated from Vickers to the RAF in World War I. In the mid -1920’s he went to Singapore for Guthrie and Co. and this, un expectedly, led to a General Motors job in India and, subsequently, in Scandinavia.
"Limey Hearses"
In the 1920’s one of the GM bosses had acquired the English Vauxhall, almost over the dead bodies of the rest of the hierarchy who could see nothing of value in the “Limey hearses”, and in 1929 Hartnett was invited to help re suscitate this rapidly failing section of the GM empire.
This uphill task was made easier when the British Government of the early 1930’s introduced a 32 per cent.
Customs duty on all imported motor vehicles. This priced Chevrolet trucks out of the market overnight and paved the way for a profitable Vauxhall offshoot the Bedford truck.
It was probably Hartnett’s part of the Vauxhall revival that put him in line for his next job—in charge of the foundering fortunes of the General Motors-Holden merger that had taken place a couple of years previously in Australia.
These were the days when motor car chassis were imported and bodies put on them in Australia. The firm that provided most of the bodies— for General Motors cars as well as
for other makes—was Holden Motor Body Building Co. in Adelaide, the principals of which had started life as saddlers.
During the depression General Motors merged with Holdens and until the arrival of Hartnett in 1934 the new company was leading a cat and-dog existence under the joint managing-directorship of a man from each of the merged companies.
Hartnett’s brief, when he arrived, was to make the new company work or to close it up.
The rest is Australian history.
During Hartnett’s reign he put in the big GM-H factory in what was then the desert of Fishermen’s Bend, Melbourne; got the company out of the red until it began to make millions in profit for happy share holders back in the United States; and laid the foundations for Aus tralia’s own car —the Holden.
He sold the idea of an Australian car to a reluctant GM hierarchy in New York which finally agreed that GM-H should make a complete car but refused to advance any money to finance it.
Two and a half million pounds
for this was provided by the Commonwealth Bank on the say-so of the Prime Minister of the day, Chifley; and a further £500,000 by the Bank of Adelaide. But all of the fantastic profits from Holden sales (£15.5 million in 1962 and £19.2 million in 1963) have gone back to shareholders in America, for GM-H, having acquired the last re maining Australian-owned preference shares in the company, is now 100 per cent. American-owned.
Early in 1947, more than a year
before the first Holden rolled off the production line at Fishermen’s Bend, Hartnett was recalled to New York for re-indoctrination.
“You’ve been in a top war job down there with a socialist govern ment for six years,” he was told.
He had thus become “too Australian” in his thinking. They wanted him back in New York for a while to “get back into the GM team.”
Hartnett, however, was sold on Australia and in living there, so after over 20 years with GM he quit the company, returned to Melbourne and launched a new project of his own.
The Chifley Labour Government had encouraged the production of the Holden car and virtually financed it; they now encouraged Hartnett to produce a smaller rival to it.
But in the four years between 1947 and 1951 during which Hartnett tried to get into production, a great many things had changed in Aus tralia. Chifley, who had given practical help to Hartnett in both the Holden and his own project, died; and in 1949 the Labour Government was defeated by R. G. Menzies.
Hartnett without dwelling too much on the subject, makes it quite plain that he found it far more difficult to make “Bob” co-operate than had been the case with “Chif.”
For its look behind the scenes of big industrial business—particularly big, ruthless American business— what Mr. Hartnett has to say to John Veitch is very interesting, indeed— even if, at times, he seems so much on the defensive one naturally wonders what the other side of the case might be.
He was, of course, not always right and admits it. Probably one of the mistakes of his life—if it could go into that category—was in 1947 when he turned down the VW works which could have been picked up by Australia as war reparations against Germany.
The Wolfsburg plant, originally owned by the Nazi Party, was then being operated by the British Army of Occupation and Hartnett spent three weeks there going over the plant with a fine-tooth comb. He couldn’t see Australians going for the beetle-shaped, rear engined, air cooled car in any great numbers; and he observed that styling changes would be difficult and expensive.
American and English car manu facturers had come to the same con clusions before him. Neither he nor they—raised in the tradition of annual car-style changes were to know that VW would keep the same shape for the next generation.—JT.
(Big Wheels And Little Wheels
Lansdowne. 45/-.)