Date: 2025-10-05 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00025945
COMPANIES
LEYLAND
Ruairidh MacVeigh: The Rise and Fall of Leyland Trucks and Buses
LEYLAND
Ruairidh MacVeigh: The Rise and Fall of Leyland Trucks and Buses
Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eAD2xz9PrQ
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I was born in Preston, Lancashire not very far from Leyland. The first factory I ever went into was their main factory in Leyland (the town) around 1955 when I was a teenager and my cousin was enrolled in their training program. He was a fanatic about buses and eventually went on to become the General Manager of one of the regional bus companies in the UK. One of the things I remember from visiting the Leyland factory was that the manufacturing tolerances for Leyland buses and trucks were significanly more precise than that uses in most of the British car companies at the time.
The head of Leyland made a huge mistake by taking over more and more of the British vehicle industry. At one point in my own journey I spent a summer vacation from university in Canada where I worked for the Austin Car Company of Canada, a unit of the British Motor Car Company. Even though I was only 20 years old, I found the senior staff who had been seconded from the UK to be incompetent and 'full of themselves'. The top manager in this little unit in Toronto ... essentially little more than a small garage ... returned to England as a 'senior executive and 'Board Member' ... it is no wonder that much of British industry in the 50s and 60s went into such a state of failure!
In contrast to the British vehicle industry, a few companies stand out, none more than Rolls Royce (RR). Though RR went bankrupt in the 1960s it did so because it tripped up technically pushing the envelope of materials and engineering as it developed the RB211 jet engine. Thanks to the UK Government, the company survived and over time ... many decades ... has become one of the best companies in the world with world class products and reputation.
It is encouraging that Leyland lives on in India. I am disappointed that the UK esentially quit on engineering and technology in favor of banking and finance after WWII and especially under successive Conservative governments eventually getting to where we are today with what to me is almost totally disastrous 'financialization'.
@greatwolf5372 8 days ago (edited)President Biden seems to have concluded that a country needs much more than strong financial profits to be a strong country. I could not agree with him more!
Ashok Motors in India licensed to produce Leyland buses in 1955(and renamed itself Ashok Leyland) and is now the 3rd largest manufacturer of buses and 10th largest manufacturer of trucks in the world. It now exports its products across the globe including to Britain. It also now fully owns Optare, another bus manufacturer in the UK, which was also a 'descendant' of Leyland Buses. Ruairidh MacVeigh
16 replies @henryjohn2218 8 days ago (edited)
Ashok saran died in plane crash. The leyland company was headed by Sir ashok's wife. She trusted the Indian engineers and British engineers in developing the company. Today ashok leyland exports buses and truck all over the globe.
Peter Burgess
Ruairidh MacVeigh
113K subscribers
Nov 11, 2023
Greetings! :D
While most people think of the Morris Marina and Austin Allegro when discussing British Leyland, an often forgotten part of this gigantic firm was its trucks and buses division, which long predated the part-nationalised conglomerate, and had its history rooted over half-a-century earlier to a time when the Leyland Motors company was one of the most successful bus and lorry builders in the world.
However, while Leyland Trucks & Buses proved to be one of the more popular aspects of the wider British Leyland group, external politics with regard to the bus market in general, together with the revenues from bus and truck sales being dispersed across the wider industry, meant its survival was not guaranteed, and by the end of the 1980s, this once legendary brand in the motoring world had almost disappeared completely.
Chapters:
- 0:00 - Preamble
- 0:32 - Humble Origins
- 4:50 - Inter-War Success
- 10:25 - New Products for a New Age
- 13:42 - Widespread Expansion
- 17:36 - British Leyland
- 21:52 - Deregulation
- 26:23 - From Road to Rail
- 30:02 - The Big Sell Off
- 32:44 - Volvo Steps-in, and Steps Out
- 36:05 - Conclusion
The views and opinions expressed in this video are my personal appraisal and are not the views and opinions of any of these individuals or bodies who have kindly supplied me with footage and images.
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Thanks again, everyone, and enjoy! :D
References: - AROnline (and their respective sources) - Wikipedia (and its respective references) Transcript