The Triumph Southern Cross

Sir,

I enclose a recent issue of the house journal of Pavia Motors Group, the Birmingham based Leyland distributors. The journal carries an article recounting the recently appointed Rover-Triumph dealers’ long Triumph associations, to which I would like to draw your attention.

To quote from page 12, “we designed and built the first production run of the Triumph Southern Cross in 1932. At that time Patrick Motors had been building special bodies on a number of chassis … the Southern Cross was the first model to be designed and produced by Patrick Motors specifically for a manufacturer”.

Being a vintage enthusiast, .and the owner of a Triumph TR3A, Graham Robson’s excellent “Story of Triumph Sports Cars” is always close to hand for reference. With regard to the Southern Cross Robson states (page 22) “Body design was by Ratcliffe, but built by Salmons and Son, whose trade name was Tickford, at Newport Pagnell”.

I believe Graham Robson to be a meticulous historian whilst the author of the PMG article appears well read quoting from a Motor Sport road test even! It is possible that the two sources are refering to different production runs, the PMG article certainly implies that there was more than one, but the question of the design remains.

Knowing of your interest in historical accuracy I wonder if you or your readers can throw any light on this question?

Many thanks to both you and your staff for such an excellent journal. So few motoring journalists these days seem to be able to distinguish between a tonneau and a tonneau cover, but thankfully all yours seem to be very well informed!

Birmingham PHILIP EDWARDS