How the world (and world wars) shaped Holden

In 1857, 21-year-old James Alexander Holden, newly arrived in Adelaide from England, set up his saddlery business in a small warehouse at the junction of King William, Rundle and Hindley streets.

He believed that Australian goods could be equal in quality to the best imported ones and argued this passionately at an 1871 meeting of the Adelaide Chamber of Manufacturers:

“We have artisans equal to any kind but they labour under the disadvantage of having the result of their labours condemned before trial as being ‘colonial rubbish’.”

By the time of Holden’s death in 1887, he was into his partnership deal (Holden & Frost). The business had grown to the stage where it could boast ‘carriage showrooms’.

Three major wars fuelled the transition from Holden & Frost (with Henry Adolph Frost as specialist upholsterer) to General Motors-Holden’s, proud manufacturer of ‘Australia’s Own Car’.

The war years
In 1899 the Boer War brought lucrative government contracts for military equipment such as harnesses. By 1901 Holden & Frost was Australia’s largest supplier of military harness.

World War I (1914-18) caused the creation of the Australian motor body-building industry, before World War II (1939-45) created the necessary impetus for the local automotive manufacturing industry.

World War I saw a literal danger to shipping posed by German U-boats and the government introduced the weirdly named Luxury Restrictions, banning importation of beer, furs, car bodies and more.

But there was no limit on the number of automotive chassis coming to the island continent. So Australia had to get into the business of manufacturing bodies to clothe imported chassis and Holden & Frost (which had built its first custom body in 1916 for a Hotchkiss car) was at the forefront.

In 1917-18 the newly formed Holden Motor Bodies Builders Pty Ltd (HMBB) built just a few hundred bodies but a decade later the industry total was 100,552, of which HMBB accounted for 36,171.

Holden-Ford rivalry begins
In 1923 JD Mooney and EC Riley of the General Motors Export Company met with Henry J Holden, managing director of Holden Motor Bodies Builders (and son of James Alexander).

By May of that year HMBB was building 340 bodies per week, for companies including Dodge, Buick, Ford, Chevrolet, Studebaker, Oldsmobile, Hupmobile, Essex, Fiat, Morris and Singer.

General Motors was exporting some 9500 chassis to Australia, about 17 per cent of the total market. Its executives were keen to obtain a guaranteed supply of bodies.

A deal was struck. GM would pay for the erection of a new manufacturing plant in Woodville dedicated to making bodies exclusively for GM chassis. By 1924 HMBB was the sole GM supplier.

Ford had been considering a similar proposal to HMBB and losing out to GM gave impetus to the decision to open their own plant in Geelong in 1925.

In 1926 GM (Australia) Pty Ltd was formed with assembly plants in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.

In one week in 1927 HMBB produced 1557 bodies!

In 1928 the famous lion and stone emblem Holden emblem was designed by Rayner Hof. That same year GM boss Alfred P Sloan Jr expressed ‘my confidence as to the desirability of overseas manufacturing in principle…’

The Great Depression
Then the Great Depression hit – from a record 5897 bodies in March 1928, the total was just 72 in January 1931 – encouraging GM to make a takeover bid for HMBB. General Motors-Holden’s was formed.

Jim Mooney, at the dinner on the eve of the 1933 Paris Salon, invited the boss of GM’s British subsidiary Vauxhall to become GM-H’s new managing director. GM now had Vauxhall (1925), Opel (1929) and Holden.

Hartnett sailed into Sydney in March 1934. Effective though he was in the years leading up to World War II, Hartnett’s claim to be personally responsible for saving GM-H was overblown.

The Englishman was keen for GM-H to build its own car, but the idea was never his alone. GM, under the visionary entrepreneurship of chairman and president Alfred P Sloan Jr, was building up its subsidiaries and encouraging them to develop vehicles suited to their various local markets.

Opel was the prime example. The Chevrolet was too big for most international markets, especially Europe. And in 1948 the average Australian garage was just 15 feet long.

GM-H’s capacity and capability grew and in 1937 it created the uniquely Australian Sloper configuration, forerunner of the hatchback.

Australia’s own car
World War II isolated Australia again. The tyranny of distance was the catalyst for greater self-reliance and the factories of GM-H and Ford Australia were given over to manufacturing the machinery of war.

In summary, this effort encouraged a new confidence that Australia could build an entire car including the engine. GM’s development of mass-produced monocoque cars also made the challenge easier; Holden had been building bodies since 1916!

The Labor government saw the manufacture of a car as a great defence measure in the event of World War III, increasingly seen as inevitable; at the 1948 Holden launch Chifley spoke more about imminent war than the car.

GM, under Sloan, was already planning to build a car in Australia. Even before the war had finished, Sloan was at odds with many industrialists in predicting the post-war boom (‘this tremendous aggregation of purchasing power’). To a large extent GM policy drove that boom!

Hartnett presented his case in September 1944. Sloan wrote: ‘…our Overseas Policy Group…had concluded in June 1943 that Australia was probably the only country in which we would want to consider establishing a new manufacturing base after the war.’

The decision taken, Hartnett was told GM-H would have to fund the program. Prime Minister Chifley arranged for the necessary bank loans which were guaranteed by GM and paid off with commercial rates of interest by Holden.

Holden 48-215 a smash-hit
It took three years before the supply of Holdens matched demand, which meant the febrile Austin A40 remained Australia’s top-seller until 1951.

The Holden utility arrived in 1950 and the FJ facelift three years later added a Special variant and a panel van. But it was the FE that really began the process of developing a huge range of variants from the one design with the Station Sedan (1957).

It seemed Holden could no wrong and although by 1960 and the FB, the car was no longer obviously superior to its rivals, Australia’s love affair continued.

By the mid-1960s the new threat of cheaper, better finished and more luxuriously specified Japanese cars was emerging. Constantly increasing tariffs on vehicles not manufactured here helped the Holden and Falcon to continue on top of the sales charts.

Meanwhile, Holden’s energetic pursuit of a US-style options game contributed to a decline in build quality, first evident with the 1968 HK model.

Unsurprisingly, the quality and efficiency of the Holden, Falcon and Valiant reached their nadir when tariff protection was at its highest.

Commodore boom and bust
From about the launch of the VN Commodore in 1988, Holden quality began to improve, reaching a high point with the 2006 VE and then the VF, which were Australia’s top-selling cars bar none.

But Australian buyers were already turning away from conventional sedans for small cars and, increasingly, SUVs; medium and large sedans had been losing popularity for years.

Ford Australia under president Geoff Polites did better than its rival (under Peter Hanenberger) around the turn of the century. The Territory was a clever machine that, had Ford Oz been able to convince head office to import it, could have been a world-beater.

Hanenberger’s excessive efforts to broaden the product range with Commodore-based models such as the four-wheel drive Adventra wagon and dual-cab Crewman ute failed to stop buyers turning away from Holden in droves.

Good as the Territory was, it was already too late for the Falcon to threaten the Commodore’s market supremacy again. That job was left to the Toyota Corolla, Mazda3 and – incredibly – the Toyota HiLux.

Years before the official announcements of cessation of local manufacture, the glory sales days of the Commodore and Falcon were memories from a previous century, a previous Australian culture.

Holden timeline:
1856 — Holden originally a family business which opened its doors as J A (James Alexander) Holden, specialising in saddlery

1885 — Holden & Frost formed. The company did leatherwork and ironmongery. Henry Adolph Frost was an upholsterer

1899 — Major supplier of harnesses and saddlery in the Boer War

1908 — Repairs to car upholstery, manufacture of hoods and side-curtains, two years later Holdfast Trimmings. GM Company organised in US

1913 — Motorcycle sidecar bodies

1914 — World War I

1917 — Holden Motor Body Builders a consequence of Luxury Restrictions

1923 — JD Mooney and EC Riley of GM Export Company meet HMBB to arrange for supply of car bodies to be made in Woodville. By next year sole GM supplier

1924 — GM Milford Proving Ground established, first overseas assembly of GM car in Denmark

1926 — GM (Australia) Pty Ltd with assembly plants in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth

1928 — Rayner Hof designs Holden’s lion and stone emblem

1931 — GM-H formed

1935 — Opel Olympia with monocoque body. Its engineer, Russell Begg, will be the chief engineer of the Holden

1935 — Sloper (forerunner to hatchback). Holden builds its first all-steel body (Plymouth chassis)

1936 — Fishermans (then Fishermen’s) Bend new headquarters for GM-H

1940 — Wartime Production for Australian automotive plants and also in Germany (putting GM’s Opel investment at perilous risk)

1946 — GM team in Detroit work on 195Y25 with seconded Australian engineers

1948 — Names including ANZAC and GMH rejected in favour of Holden

1956 — 250,000th Holden. Holdens exported to NZ, Thailand, Malaya and North Borneo. FE Holden

1957 — Station Sedan. Lang Lang Proving Ground opens. Woodville builds millionth body

1958 — 500,000 Holdens, 47.4% total, ute 49.6% light commercial market

1960 — Left-hand drive exports, Hawaii first

1962 — 1,000,000th Holden

1962 — Elizabeth plant opens, replacing Woodville as Adelaide focal point

1964 — Technical Centre opens at Fishermans Bend

1965 — 1.5 millionth Holden (exponential growth: 14 years for first million, three years for next 500,000)

1967 — Exports total 100,000 (with many more markets than in 1956)

1969 — Australian V8s. 2,000,000th Holden

1970 — Australian Tri-Matic transmission

1978 — Introduction of Holden Commodore

1979 — Huge $300 million expansion includes new engine plant. Camira engines widely exported

1980 — Peter Brock’s HDT operation builds first car, the VC HDT (based on premium SL/E variant)

1985 — Button Plan with progressive tariff reductions. Leads to merger proposal with Toyota (which fortunately didn’t occur)

1986 — MD Chapman reports to GM Executive Committee that company no longer viable as manufacturer. Bailout brings demise of GM-H. Two new companies: GMHA and Holden Engine Company formed

1997 — ‘World class’ VT Commodore launched

2006 — Billion-dollar VE Commodore launched

2013 — VF launched as final major Commodore upgrade

2014 — Holden announces end of local manufacture

2017 (October 20) — Final Commodore to go down Elizabeth production line