FRIENDS OF DOROTHY

Ernie Nagamatsu offers an enlightening US perspective on the birth, death and surprising California afterlife of the Swallow Doretti - while exercising his own example

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What was the Swallow Doretti? The key players were sports car fan Dorothy Deen - so surnamed after a shortlived marriage to L Howard Deen - and her father, Arthur Andersen.

Arthur was an engineer who re-engineered the 'Whizzer' engines used on bicycles on which Dorothy took long treks in LA. He also manufactured small model aircraft engines that Dorothy advertised in modelling magazines, as well as Popular Mechanics.

Arthur also had a steel business, the Andersen-Carlson Company, which made thin-walled tubing for electrical conduits. He sold out to the Rome Cable Company located in Torrance, California, but stayed on as a manager.

Arthur's company did business with the Abingdon, UK conglomerate TI (Tube Investments) that had been founded in 1919 and in 1946 included the Swallow Sidecar and Swallow Coach-Building Company, which founder William Lyons had sold to TI when he started SS/Jaguar shortly before the departure of co-founder William Walmsley.

With Swallow floundering in the early 1950s, the TI management decided to reinject it with glamour by building a sports car, and put Eric Sanders in charge. In 1952 Sanders travelled to California to meet with Arthur Andersen of the Rome Cable Company, who had streamlined the manufacture of the tubing that would be used in his cars. As much as it was a business meeting, this was also a meeting of minds between two ardent sports cars fans and, at the end of the year, Arthur was invited to the Swallow Coachbuilding Company to discuss the sales and marketing of a new sports car for America. He met with Sir John Black and ex-Bristol aircraft engineer Frank Rainbow, plotting the takeover of the hungry West Coast market with a new design that had to be ready for launch at the 1954 London Motor Show.