Uniquely, Jaguar’s founder, Sir William Lyons, also supervised the marque’s style - employing a most unusual modus operandi

*The creator and his creation (all photos © Jaguar Heritage)*

«If I was twenty-five years younger, this is what I'd be doing». These words were spoken by Sir William Lyons, founder and Chairman of Jaguar, having visited the studios of Bertone and Pininfarina in 1967. It's a telling admission: did Jaguar's managing director miss his true calling?

Businessmen are inherent risk-takers. Some are of the virtuoso variety, but even by the more pragmatic nostrums of the breed, Sir William Lyons (he was knighted in 1956) was a cautious man. Having co-created Jaguar Cars from humble Swallow Sidecar beginnings during the late 1920s and carefully stewarded the business through the intervening years, he was not minded to take unnecessary risks.

There was, however, one area of endeavour where Sir William cast aside his pragmatic mantle and let loose a wholly divergent side to his personality - the arena of car design. Lyons wasn't a stylist - not in the accepted sense at least. Having little by way of drafting or rendering skills, what sketches he did produce were not of the calibre to adorn anyone's walls. Yet in another sense, Sir William undoubtedly was a stylist – an artist even – and, furthermore, a visionary.

Most great art is created through a process of collaboration - even works nominally attributed to solo artists. Jaguar's founder has long been cited in the printed word and by fair repute as undisputed author of Jaguar style, so only a heretic would now question the depth of his involvement. That both Jaguar and Sir William were so indelibly interwoven that every touch-point, everything the eye could rest upon was subject to his personal approval is as much without question as it was largely without precedent.

First Steps

Sir William's route into automotive design was a consequence of several factors. Jaguar (or SS Cars, as it was known before 1945), was a somewhat precarious venture during the Great Depression. Money was tight - none being available for a professional stylist. But more tellingly, Lyons simply wasn't prepared to compromise his vision, electing to supervise such important matters personally.

Sir William would over time become a wealthy man, and while he enjoyed the trappings of success, he was never ostentatious, either in appearance, demeanour or in manner. In fact, and in marked contrast to the cars he produced, he was a rather shy, somewhat diffident character; a man whose few chosen words were usually very well considered. But what characterises Jaguar style more than any other single factor, was the palpable and overwhelming reflection of Sir William's own aesthetic – one which embodied a carefully refined personal taste.

*SS Jaguar 100, the first true Lyons design*

Lyons favoured dramatic, purposeful, largely clean-limbed forms, employing subtle sculpting and finely-judged detailing to add richness. Although his magpie eye absorbed contemporary trends, the car designs he oversaw eschewed fashion, adopting a more timeless elegance of line. Indeed, it wouldn't be wildly inaccurate to characterise Jaguar styling as exhibiting a flamboyance that was at its most striking in its rectitude.

But was there a distinct rationale for Jaguar style - a Lyons Method, so to speak?

Modus Operandi

Throughout his career, Sir William adopted a broadly consistent methodology when it came to styling. Having established a close rapport with a succession of skilled craftsmen, who could bring his vision to life, he would establish the basic silhouette using a full-sized wire 'armature', over which a succession of skin panels would be laid. By a painstaking (and often lengthy) process of altering surfaces, wing lines and extremities, an overall appearance which was, in his terminology, «pleasing to the eye» would emerge.

*The Chairman in front of Jaguar’s ‘other’ design studio*

He believed that prototype designs should be evaluated in an outdoor setting, insisting on these life-sized prototypes being finished in high-gloss black - which he felt was most testing of the car's shape - showing up reflections and visual nuances which might otherwise be lost. Those prototypes would regularly be transported to Lyons’ home, Wappenbury Hall, to be studied at length and from all angles. Additionally, Lyons would instruct fabricators to fashion alternative nose and tail treatments, which would then be quickly substituted to form part of these deliberations. Throughout this evaluation phase, Sir William would finesse and elaborate, suggesting a lift here or a tuck there, this iterative process taking as long as was deemed necessary to tease out what he could clearly envisage in his mind's eye.

Much of this work occurred in the evenings, when Lyons would tour the Browns Lane plant, stopping in on each department to check on progress - his last habitually being the experimental studio, often entailing the Jaguar Chairman placing his tailored jacket aside and getting his hands dirty – sometimes well into the night.

Comrades

Initially, Cyril Holland was his chosen stylistic interpreter; the Blackpool native said to have had a symbiotic ability to interpret Lyons' sketches and often vague notations into wood and metal, to highly pleasing effect. However, in the post-war era, he departed, leaving Lyons to find another artisan with whom he could work.

By its 1960s heyday, Jaguar had become, to some extent, a series of miniature fiefdoms, overseen by colourful characters, many of whom barely tolerated one another. Fred Gardiner and his crew of 'tinnies' at the Browns Lane sawmill had inherited Holland's mantle; Gardiner, owing to his importance to Sir William establishing something of a law onto himself.

An abrasive character, with a vocabulary which would have mortified a sailor, the expletive-laden Gardiner would become a most incongruous pairing with the formal, reserved, scrupulously polite Lyons - a man who addressed everyone at Browns Lane (regardless of seniority) by surname. Yet Sir William was uncharacteristically indulgent, even addressing Fred in first-name terms.

The pairing would become responsible for the finest designs to have emerged from Browns Lane - most explicitly, the 1968 XJ6 saloon, widely hailed as Sir William's masterpiece. Much of this work was carried out amid innumerable outdoor viewings both at Browns Lane and the immaculately tended gardens outside Lyons' stately home amid the rolling Warwickshire countryside. Sir William subsequently stated that the definitive stylistic execution took over three years to perfect.

This would come into sharp relief when Jaguar's Chairman displayed the (seemingly) finished design of XJ6 to his sales directors in 1967 - the less than effusive critique eliciting a furious response from its proudly defensive author.

When it came to style, Sir William deferred to nobody, frequently imposing onerous restrictions upon the engineers often forced to work within his visual strictures. However, there were exceptions. Aerodynamicist, Malcolm Sayer was recruited to shape Jaguar's competition cars. Owing to his undoubted abilities and the unique logarithmic methodology with which he created skin shapes, Lyons was content not only to allow him a relatively free hand on certain model lines, but to canvass his view upon his own stylistic works in progress. It's believed that only Sayer's untimely death in 1970 prevented him from ultimately succeeding Sir William in a design capacity.

Another pivotal character in the creation of some of Browns Lane's most acclaimed body shapes was Bob Blake. It was the laconic American panel-former who first mocked up the side elevation for the fixed-head E-Type which so captivated Sir William in 1960. Working closely together, the finished shape became the definitive E-Type derivation. Blake (described by former Chief Engineer, Jim Randle as «the best tinny I ever worked with»), would later become styling foreman, shepherding a succession of roadgoing Jaguar shapes long after Sir William's retirement.

Orchestra Without Conductor

Around 1969, Sir William initiated a small styling studio, lead by Doug Thorpe and a number of neophyte stylists. This entailed new working practices, the adoption of clay modelling and, by consequence, the abandonment of Lyons' carefully honed methodology. As Jaguar's founder edged towards retirement, he chose not to interfere, a matter which left the inexperienced stylists floundering. Asked how he approached car design, Lyons found himself similarly lost: «all I try to do is make nice cars», being his somewhat unhelpful reply.

Sir William Lyons, design consultant (photo © Jaguar Heritage) — *Sir William Lyons, design consultant*

Nevertheless, his influence would continue to reflect upon designs for XJ-S (to which he contributed), XJ40 (becoming closely involved with its detail design as the definitive shape edged towards production), and the stillborn XJ41/ 42 (F-Type), which was the last complete design to overtly bear his mark. During his final years, his visits to the Browns Lane studio would be punctuated by the sight of Sir William wielding his walking stick – his gimlet eye for line undiminished by time's passage.

Jaguar's Spiritus Rector departed life in 1985, and, in his wake, «what would Sir William do?» became a question that would be asked with increasing frequency by subsequent generations of Jaguar stylists and designers. Because only Lyons truly understood the precise measure of alchemy and craft that brought a Jaguar into being, and while others tried manfully to emulate his method, nobody quite succeeded. To this day.

*Sir William, orchestrating forms at Wappenbury Hall, in 1984*

If Jaguar's stylistic legacy can rest with more than one person, it's largely because Sir William had several assistants. But nonetheless, it was Lyons who orchestrated, directed and inspired Jaguar's creative forces, and crucially, once he departed, so too did the vision and drive which embodied them.

Today, in a peaceful churchyard in the tiny hamlet of Wappenbury, a short distance from his former home, lies Jaguar's founder and creative muse in eternal rest. Here too lies the Lyons Method - like its originator - gone to earth.