Bean Cars History

Pic 1:   an extract from the Dudley Herald, noting JLS’s farewell from Bean in England as he departed to take up his new position in Australia. The original newspaper has almost disintegrated with age: this is the best copy that I could make, about 20 years ago.

Pics 2-5: JLS agreement with Bean appointing him as Company Representative in Australia.

Pics 6-9: an article in the Melbourne Sun newspaper in November 1976, which fairly accurately describes the 10/1926 record run by Birtles & Barlow from Darwin to Melbourne. Again, the paper is aged – a fairly poor copy. I hope that you can make sense of the orientations. The car arrived in Melbourne 30 Oct 1926: Birtles and the car sailed for London on 9 Nov 1926: he was at Bean’s office in January 1927, & left there in February in another prototype, poorly designed and badly executed: the Bean ‘Imperial 6’, which literally fell apart under the crew, and was abandoned in July near New Delhi, India, far short of its planned destination in Australia. Birtles was back in London in August 1927, planning yet another London to Sydney expedition, but this time with his ‘Sundowner’, a known & proven vehicle. He left London in November 1927, arriving in Melbourne 25 July 1928. You will notice that the Sundowner in 1926 has steel-spoked Sankey wheels: these were changed to wire wheels before Birtles’ London to Sydney attempt in 1927-8.

Pic 10: a recent pic of the Sundowner in its present condition in the Australian National Museum. Sundowner was a ‘special’, and quite heavily modified from standard specifications at the factory and also here in Australia, to improve power and reliability.