Part One
Following the end of WWII, Bradford's Jowett car company were seemingly on a path to great success. In an attempt to shake off the company's staid image brought on by years of worthy but rather dull light cars and commercials, new managing director Charles Calcott Reilly had hired stylist/engineer Gerald Palmer in 1942 to design a modern new saloon car, to be called the Javelin. Palmer not only drew the car's stylish, wind-cheating shape but also designed its radical water-cooled flat-four engine and independent front suspension set up. The car was a moderate success despite it's high price and reliability issues caused by the new engine. Jowett were approached by ERA who wanted to build a small sporting car based on Javelin mechanicals. Palmer was on his way out, so ERA hired famous Austrian engineer Robert Eberan von Eberhorst to design the new car's chassis.
In 1949, the motoring press announced that there would be a joint ERA-Jowett 'high performance car' available soon, but when the unclothed tubular chassis appeared at that years Earl's Court show later that year, no mention was made of the ERA connection. This chassis was bodied by the newly formed Harold Radford ltd, but Jowett wanted an open car and an in-house design was chosen for the production models.
The new car, christened the Jupiter, began series production in late 1950. The styling was fairly elegant from some angles, but the rather bluff front-end and fussy detailing detracted somewhat. The car itself was a confusing halfway-house between true sports car and tourer, the 1486cc Javelin engine producing a tame 60bhp, albeit with rather nimble handling from both Palmer's torsion bar suspension and Eberhorst's chassis.
After production had begun in earnest, Jowett were faced with a problem; They had decided to build the entire car themselves (a wise move in fact, as Briggs Motor Bodies, builders of the Javelin, were soon to be swallowed up by Ford), and they were not geared up to produce both the tubular chassis and the part-steel, part-aluminium body at the speed needed to meet demand. Most of the cars they built were sent to America, and the wait for completed European-market cars was long, so the company dispatched a number of rolling chassis to foreign coachbuilders to be bodied individually in the 'European style'. These cars were the first of 75 Jupiter chassis, out of a total production run of 899, to carry non-standard bodywork. These cars were built by firms in the UK, Europe and Australia.
Five years after the first Jupiter chassis was built, the end of the road finally came for Jowett. Even after the teething troubles of both Javelin and Jupiter had been ironed out, the company was never quite able to meet demand, and by now other British marques were producing technologically inferior but more reliable, and cheaper, 'proper' sportscars, and firms like Aston-Martin and Bristol were refining the 'grand tourer' to near perfection. Up until the end, Jowett still offered rolling chassis to specialist coachbuilders, the last one being dispatched in 1953, with the final standard Jupiter rolling off the production line in November 1954.
In this feature I will try to bring together as many of these special-bodied Jupiters as I can. The subject is particularly fascinating as, almost accidentally, this one low-volume semi-sporting car from Bradford can be seen as a perfect cross section of British and European coachbuilding style in the 1950s, taking in everything from the tiniest independent firms to famous Italian carrozzeria.
