Austin’s Woodie Chronicles – chapter 2

By Colin Peck

In the first chapter in this series of features on why and how Austin built Woodies I set the scene by giving a brief introduction on the development of the pre-War shooting brake and how this evolved into the post-War wooden-bodied utility vehicle.

 Austin had entered the utility market early in the game and placed two orders for 250 vehicles each from Papworth Industries in Cambridgeshire to be built on the Austin 16 chassis. While a few 16hp Woodies were built by other coachbuilders (to be dealt with in another chapter) the fact that no official commercial chassis-cab versions of the 16 were sold by Austin meant that the official BW1 Countryman cars had no serious competition. However, that was not to be the case with the BW3 A70 Countryman that followed.

 Austin was so pleased with the quality of the Countryman vehicles being bodied as Woodies by Papworth Industries that orders for more than 900 BW3s were placed. These were all based on the BS2 Hampshire saloon chassis and body, so they retained the 16 inch wheels, high ratio differential and that all-important steel floor (although that would not become an advantage until many years after the cars were built).  Quite why the BS2 Hampshire saloon did not become the BW2 Countryman has never been made clear and if anybody can explain this anomaly I’d love to hear from them.

Papworth Industries built 200 Woodies designated as 'brakes' for London-based Austin dealer CarMart. They were all based on the A70 pickup chassis cab. (Click picture for larger image) 

 While the construction of wooden bodies reduced the use of steel, which was in very short supply in the early post-War years, the BW3 Countrymans retained the saloon’s steel front doors. Surviving Papworth workers, including the chief pattern maker, whom I’ve tracked down, have never explained the reason for this, although I suspect it must have been something to do with problems of how to effectively marry wood to the sweeping curves of the front wings. Chrysler managed it very effectively with its Town & Country Woodie convertibles of the late 1940s by using steam presses to bend and shape wooden panels and my own sketches of a BW3 with wooden front doors shown what an attractive option it could have been. Fortunately Papworth resolved the issue with the BW4 Countryman that followed, but that’s another story.

This A70 pickup was bodied by Jennings of Sandbach, a firm latterly known for building the cabs for ERF trucks (Click picture for larger image).

While no records are available that show the proportion of BW3s that were exported, the fact that the British Government announced in February 1948 that steel would only be available to car manufacturers that were exporting 75% of production, would somehow confirm the suspicion that most did go overseas, particularly to North America.  In fact my own BW3 was exported new to Canada in 1950 and had only clocked up 49,000 miles when a major engine failure put it off the road in 1969.  

Fortunately it was placed into long-term dry storage in Ontario and was never driven again until I shipped it back to the UK in 1998 to be restored.  Perhaps even more fortunate was the fact that the body was not devoured by woodworm or termites (maybe something to do with the colder Canadian climate) unlike the rust-free Woodies stored in the warmer climes of America. Of the handful of surviving BW3s, most are located in New Zealand, North America and Spain and of the two cars currently known to be in the UK, mine included, neither was originally found here. 

The dire shortage of new vehicles in the immediate post-War years created a booming market for the UK’s commercial coachbuilding firms. Army surplus vehicles were re-bodied as vans, trucks, buses and coaches as fast as they could get their hands on available surplus chassis and the construction of wooden-bodied shooting brakes was the perfect solution for turning available commercial chassis into ‘car-sized’ vehicles for eager private buyers.

So, while buyers put their names on waiting lists for new Austin cars, Longbridge-built A70 commercial chassis-cabs were relatively plentiful and this did not go unnoticed by a number of small independent coachbuilders and also London-based Austin dealer, Car Mart Ltd.  

When the A70 Hampshire saloon was replaced by the A70 Hereford saloon at the end of 1950, the Hampshire-based commercial chassis carried on in production at Longbridge for approx six more months.  So, two hundred of the older-style A70 chassis cabs were purchased by Car Mart and delivered to Papworth Industries where they were built into Woodies and these were unofficially classified as ‘brakes’, to differentiate them from the official BW3 and BW4 models.

These Papworth-built ‘brakes’ retained the commercial 17 inch wheels, the pickup’s rear wings and although the body style was similar to the BW3, side-hinged rear doors replaced tailgates and the second rear right side door was a dummy, which did not open.  At the same time a great many coachbuilding firms, such as Jennings of Sandbach, Frank Grounds of Aston, Whitacres of Stroke-on-Trent and Martin Walter of Folkestone, were also snapping up A70 chassis cabs and building their own shooting brakes.

Most of these coachbuilders also used the trusty A70 chassis cab as the basis for everything from vans and trucks to milk floats and ice cream vans, but that's a story for another time.  The main unseen difference between the official BW3 and the small production run shooting brakes, based on the commercial chassis cabs, is that the BW3 used the standard wheelbase car chassis onto which was mounted a cut down version of the steel Hampshire saloon body (complete with steel floorpan).

 Another variation on the A70-pickup-to-shooting-brake theme, but this one was built by an unknown bodybuilder

All of the pickup-based Woodies had a bare chassis onto which a wooden-floored body was constructed and this has drastically shortened their lifespan.  Preservatives were primitive in the 1950s and so wood-framed bodies started to rot almost as soon as they left the factory so it was fairly common for such bodies to be rebuilt more than once during their lifetime, often using newer materials such as steel and aluminium. However, once the wooden base rotted out the body was only fit for firewood which accounts for the fact that at the end of 2005 only one single independently-built Hampshire commercial-based Woodie was known to survive in the whole world – and that vehicle, currently located in Scotland, was in dire shape!

Click here for part 1 of 'The Woodie Chronicles'