Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "BBC Archive" channel.

There was one good thing about the silly British post-war rationing. My mother got fed up with it and emigrated in 1950 to Australia. That meant I grew up in a country that had the sense to end rationing as soon as it was evident that Japan was loosing the War, boosting the economy, and we had plenty of cheap food of all kinds, better quality than sold in Britain.
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Actually, the film illustrated part of why Britain declined after the War. Many of the cars shown have essentially pre-war styling, whereas American cars of the same year were more up to date. Many of the cars are small, with small engines & built down to a price which, since people in export markets were getting increasingly more affluent, spelt the end of British exports.
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"our international reputation will grow ....." Not with the obsolete technology of steam, hopelessly fuel inefficient and maintenance intensive compared to diesel it won't.
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So Lyons was expected to use his experience and make Leyland better. Well, that didn't work did it? Those XJ Jags looked really nice, they drove nice, but they had an extraordinary high fault rate. Rotten Lucas electrics. Lyons claimed the engine was highly efficient. So how come it did about 20 mpg?
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@RobertJarecki The MG TC was a niche market thing. The Jaguar XK120 open top featured in this old film only sold about 1700 cars - that's a total for all markets, 4 years sales. 1,700 cars is negligible. The only reason it sold at all was because it had a high top speed - 120 MPH claimed. The US car production in 1950 was 8,000,000 cars. The most up to date car in the film, the Morris Minor, sold 130,000 cars in 1950. Jaguar didn't sell well in the USA until the Mark 1, released in 1955, with styling very different to typical US cars, but quite new and quite good. RR has always sold very small numbers in the US due to it being a statement - "Look - I'm filthy rich. I'm got pots of cash to waste." In 1950 Cadillac sold about 100,000 cars. It was a much better car - better styling, better finish, better handling, better mechanically. The entire production of Rolls Royce in 1950 was only 2238 cars, so the sales in the USA must have been just about negligible. If RR had post war styling it could have sold much better. But better styling would have needed a lower radiator height, and that old F-head Rolls engine needed a stupendous amount of cooling. Eventually Rolls Royce obtained a Cadillac V8 OHV engine and copied it, production beginning 1959 - and that let them finally use modern styling and sell well.
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The steam part is not so bad, just very inefficient, but burning coal is the worst thing environmentally there is. More importantly from a railroad point of view is that steam locos are very labour intensive - burning coal is very dirty and steam locos needed more hours having their internals cleaned by teams of men than they spend hauling passengers or freight. Until the development of diesel electric locos, most railway companies, especially government owned ones, designed their locos in-house and either built them in-house or contracted the construction out. They could do that because steam technology is simple to engineer. Diesel engine design is highly specialised, and only major manufacturers could handle it. This led railways to hang on to steam because their in-house engineers could handle it. And if those engineers were honest, and told management to buy diesel, they would loose their jobs.
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What exactly does this expensive-looking setup do that a conventional dyno and instrument car won't do?
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Suspect this is deliberate BBC propaganda, not reality. They seem very old teenagers. Going to a jazz club in 1955? British jazz was pretty boring then. They should have gone to a skiffle show. But parents and priests, and perhaps the BBC, viewed skiffle as some sort of evil immoral malignancy didn't they? Meanwhile American parents were worried about rock and roll.
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Seems an unusually ignorant vicar. I have cousins who are ministers in the Anglican Church, and they all know that the success of the Christain Church is due to incorporating pagan ideas and ceremonies - eg Christmas is actually the Roman festival Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, repurposed from celebrating the birth of the sun to celebrating the birth of Christ.
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@peterdaisleyworrall9458 So Clarke Gable got one car? Bully for him. I couldn't find out how many open-top XK120's sold in the USA but the total production was only 1,700 over 4 years. That's 0.005% of the US market. Doesn't change my point that British cars were out of date one iota.
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gee, when I was a kid I lived in a street where all the other kids were 2 or 3 years older than I. Didn't matter. I was part of their social group anyway.
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@hebneh Any two-bit economist will tell you that if you ration something, there's less cash spent so people either don't have jobs or can't be paid properly. So they can't spend either. So the whole economy is suppressed. The government gets less tax revenue, so it can't pay its bills or service its borrowings. The ONLY time mass rationing is justified is DURING and all out war, when you have to divert food, fuel and material to the expanded army, and unemployment and low salaries are not an issue because all the workers that can be spared are in the army. That's why Australia also had rationing during WW2,but as soon as the end was in sight, with our side winning, they stopped the rationing so that the economy could surge forward - which it did.
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Amusing video. I was hoping it had more technical detail. @1:14 ""Concorde workers feel the government has let them down." Actually, Concorde was a stupid vanity project that, if the government had any sense, would never have allowed to begin. @4:14 "the droop nose is Concorde's most endearing characteristic." Actually, it made Concorde look like a fat old chicken trying to fly - wings and body tilted right back to try and get enough lift, while having its neck & head stretched out in front to try and get some directional control. Concorde was in some ways the same as the ridiculous 1940's Bristol Brabazon - sponsored by a Government that thought air travel was for rich VIP's who wanted to travel in luxury and cost was jut a means of showing how important they were. Meanwhile, the American industry had understood that the big profits would come from making air travel so cheap anybody could fly - hence high seat numbers and a focus on fuel efficiency - neither of which the Concorde could have. Hilarious that the expected a second generation of SST in the 1990's, when they could only sell 14 Concordes, even with huge government subsidies.
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@poppyland74 ; Concorde did not fly very well - it barely had enough power to get airborne. That's a fact - illustrated all too clearly when one crashed after takeoff from Charles de Gaule airport due to being forced to takeoff slightly below critical speed due to a minor undercarriage maintenance fault (incorrectly attributed early on to a wheel kicking up a part that had fallen from a DC-10. It didn't help that the crew kept pumping fuel into a tank ruptured by the DC-10 part, feeding a fire, but if it was able to climb the crew would undoubtedly have realised and corrected their error). This crash so obviously showed Concorde's marginal flying and inherent unsafeness that it never flew in service again. One could hardly describe Concorde as fat, given its narrow cabin. I guess few people, other than those associated with free-range chicken farming, have seen a mature hen try to fly. However, if you have seen a chicken try to fly, as I have on my father's chicken farm, the resemblance to a Concorde taking off is very obvious - both use an extreme bank angle with the head/droop-snoot stretched out in front, as both struggle to get enough lift at full power. Don't forget Concorde's ridiculously high fuel consumption, even during high altitude cruise. To an engineer like me, there is nothing beautiful about the Concorde - it is a reverse proof of the old engineering adage that something is only right if it looks right. Concorde looked wrong and it was wrong.
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