As liquidators are appointed for Bristol, our man looks back at this much-loved British car manufacturer
News that Bristol Cars, the car company spun off the similarly-named aeroplane company 75 years ago, is to be wound up, makes me think – happily and sadly – of its sometime owner and backbone Tony Crook, who this year would have celebrated his centenary had he lived beyond the grand old age of 94.
The Bristol liquidation adds a final straw to a modern saga of false starts, uncertainty and failure that dogged the former manufacturer of ‘gentlemen’s grand tourers’ since Crook’s heyday of the 1950s to 1990s.
He operated the company day-to-day until he was forcibly retired – by heavy-handed new owners who changed the locks on his beloved Kensington showroom – in 2007.
Documents recently sent to Companies House show that the High Court decided last December that the firm should be liquidated; its assets sold to offset debts of about £7million.
It was most recently owned by Kamkorp, a technology group operated from a Surrey estate by millionaire Kamal Siddiqui, who also owns the Frazer Nash name.
