Concept Car That Never Made It - Frisky Family Three

Captain Raymond Flower was born into Flower & Sons, a famous family-owned brewing company. The provenance of his extraordinary name isn’t on the record (maybe coined after a boozy, slurred IPA tasting session at the family brewery?) but it’s made doubly intriguing in contrast with the staid names of his brothers, Derek and Neville. Anyway, Captain it is. This is the story of Captain Raymond Flower and his role in creating the Frisky Family Three, a concept car that never made it – even though it kind of did.

Captain’s beer-born wealth gave him the wherewithal to, like his father, dabble in a series of business pursuits – often in partnership with his brothers. Captain himself was a car man: a racing car driver and a managing director of the Cairo Motor Co., a company set up to manufacture small, practical cars in Egypt – until the 1956 Suez Crisis scuppered it.

The core idea remained with Captain, though: small, lightweight, mass-produced cars. It would be an overstatement to say Captain invented the micro, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that the Frisky was a forerunner to today’s smallest cars.

Captain met with an established British engine supplier, Meadows, and together they agreed to produce a new car. In the summer of 1956, the Meadows team worked to create a prototype prophetically named ‘The Bug’. It had a tiny 250cc engine (about a quarter the size of today’s smallest car engines) and it looked like a scoop of ice cream – but, in its favour, it had some modern touches, like fibreglass bodywork and gull-wing doors.

Giovanni Michelotti, one of the most famous and prolific sports car designers of the 20th century, was commissioned to finesse the Bug’s final form. Then, on 11 March 1957, the Meadows Frisky was announced to the public at the Geneva Motor Show. People praised it for its charm, but the company realised a little too late that Italian design and gull-wing doors are expensive things. Meadows returned to the drawing board and came back with a more conventional design, sans gull-wings, named the ‘Frisky Saloon’, which was soon followed by the Friskysport, a convertible.

Then, the company restructured and renamed itself Frisky Cars Ltd. More models were conceived while the Frisky Saloon and Friskysport were starting production: a hardtop version of the Friskysport called the ‘Frisky Coupe’, as well as the Frisky Family Three and the Frisky Sprint – which looked like a shrivelled-up, shrunken version of a proper race car.

The Frisky Family Three was a smart solution to rising domestic costs for British citizens. Since it had only three wheels, it attracted lower excise duty and fees. Plus, to drive it you only needed a motorcycle licence. This ingenuity couldn’t keep the company afloat, though: Frisky Cars Ltd folded, but was resurrected by a Mr CJ Wright from Wolverhampton in the summer of 1958. It was only 15 months or so from applause in Geneva to new owners taking charge of the fledgling company. Yet still more change was to come.

Under Wright, the company continued to work on its models, trying to find the sweet spot in the Frisky line-up, before being purchased yet again by Mr CR Bird of Sandwich, Kent, in 1961. However, the new ownership failed where others had failed before. The car’s compelling design and public admiration did not translate to sales and, in turn, mass production.

Then arrived the micro that would finally take the world by storm: the BMC Mini. It gobbled up the micro-car market despite arriving a year after the first Frisky was announced. Its success must have felt galling to the Frisky’s creators. Their car shared all the things that made the Mini successful: small stature, practicality, thrift, charm and a good dose of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ pride. Conceding defeat, the final owners of Frisky threw in the towel in 1962.

The Frisky and the Frisky Family Three were worthwhile designs, born from an optimistic belief in utilitarian mass production. But they’re resigned to a micro footnote, while the Mini lives as a British icon. The Frisky got made but it never quite made it.

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