Talbot 105 B1 Airline: from tired classic car to concours standout

By Martin Buckley

| 27 Aug 2024

Classic & Sports Car – Talbot 105 Airline: from tired classic to concours standout

The Talbot marque must have the most complex lineage in the history of motordom. It’s enough to make your head hurt.

Firstly, are we talking French (Suresnes) Talbot or English (London) Talbot?

The fine works of Georges Roesch and Antonio Lago, or the corrupted offspring born of Rootes meddling and penny-pinching after its 1934 acquisition of the firm?

The Sunbeam-Talbots from the late ’30s managed to squander the reputations of two great names at once, which is quite an achievement.

The badge betrays this classic Talbot as a product of London, not Suresnes in France

Founded by the 20th Earl of Shrewsbury, the London Talbot concern of Ladbroke Grove has a proud history that goes back to before WW1.

It initially sold the French Clément car as the Clément-Talbot, but from 1906 built machines of its own design that soon acquired an enviable competition pedigree in trials and record-breaking: at Brooklands in 1913, Percy Lambert became the first man to cover 100 miles in 60 minutes driving his tuned (but not radically modified) 25hp Talbot.

So even before the arrival of the Swiss-born Roesch in 1914, the ‘Invincible Talbot’ pedigree was well established.

Roesch had originally been brought in to create a new car, but his advanced A12 proposal was dropped when in 1919 Talbot was acquired by the French-based – but British-owned – Darracq.

The Talbot 105 B1 Airline’s thickly trimmed front seats butt against each other to form a split-bench arrangement

Incoming boss Louis Coatalen favoured a Suresnes design, but when it proved unsuited to British conditions it was almost immediately redesigned by Roesch.

Born in Geneva in 1891, Roesch had started in the motor industry at the age of 18, and was already showing signs of the genius that would single out his advanced but also practical designs.

Are you still with me? Good, because the confusion really starts to kick in from here, when the French (or were they English?) bosses of the new group decided that Darracqs sold in France would become Talbot-Darracqs.

When Sunbeam of Wolverhampton joined the combine – to form the unfortunately named STD Group – the Darracq name was dropped altogether in the French market.

Youth won over experience in the resurrection of this Talbot 105 Airline, restored over six years from near basket-case to Pebble Beach standout

Roesch, meanwhile, was summoned from Paris and tasked with designing a new London Talbot to arrest a downward sales trajectory.

He responded with a series of smooth and refined yet mettlesome six-cylinder machines that combined elegant simplicity and lightness with high-quality construction.

He was in many ways one of the fathers of the modern motor car, who set to the task from first principles with an intolerant perfectionism that his colleagues did not always appreciate.

His initial approach was to build a car with accurate steering and good brakes to rival the new 20hp Rolls-Royce, but with the idea of using a much smaller 1666cc engine and selling it at a much lower price.

The Talbot 105 B1 Airline was worse than it looked (left); the restored car’s sweeping wheelarch

The 14/45 of 1926 – possibly the first car with factory-fitted directional indicators – was powered by an eerily quiet straight-six engine, with pushrods (supplied by a knitting-needle manufacturer) operating light rockers.

The engine was safe to 4500rpm, which made it notably high-revving for its time.

With its silent dynamotor starter – a combined starter and dynamo – and stiff, cross-braced chassis, the 14/45 was immediately popular – to the tune of 50 cars a week by 1927.

Roesch built generous development potential into the design as an insurance against the sorts of re-tooling costs that the money-losing STD Group, its assets spread too thinly across too many different factories, could ill afford.

This Talbot 105 B1 Airline now looks very different to how it did when it was advertised by auctioneer H&H in 2017

The basic concept would serve for a decade, the earlier versions coming with a bewildering variety of saloon, coupé, tourer and cabriolet body styles, many – but not all – by Weymann.

The subsequent 2276cc 70/75/90 models were named after their claimed power outputs: ditto the 2969cc 105 of 1931-’35, a machine today regarded by some as one of the last great British cars of the vintage period.

The 105 3-litre engine, available to the public from 1932 on a 9ft 6in-wheelbase chassis, was a redesign of the original 75 but was no larger outwardly.

It featured bigger, staggered valves operated by unequal-length rockers and a 48mm Zenith carburettor on a free-flowing inlet manifold.

Crisp dials in the Talbot 105 B1 Airline’s dashboard

Pulling 5000rpm with a 10:1 compression ratio, the 140bhp Talbot 105 team cars gained class wins at the Ulster TT and Brooklands 500, and third and fourth places at Le Mans.

The 105s won the Alpine Rally in 1932 and 1934: the famous BGH 21/22/23 trio, with Vanden Plas Coupe des Alpes open bodywork, did not drop a single point that year – not bad for cars that, apart from higher compression ratios and larger fuel tanks, were pretty much standard.

In 25 races, the team 105s – run by dealer Fox & Nicholl of Tolworth, but funded by the works – only retired four times.

No wonder seasoned connoisseurs such as Earl Howe mentioned these race-proven British cars in the same breath as Alfa Romeo and Bugatti.

The Talbot 105 B1 Airline was painted white in the 1960s before being taken off the road in the mid-’70s

As a publicity stunt, a Talbot salesman drove the 1932 Scottish Motor Show 105 back to the capital faster than the London-bound express train, averaging 52mph for 400 miles.

When Rootes took over, Roesch was working on an advanced backbone-chassis car, with fully independent suspension, that would sadly never see the road.

The Roesch Talbots continued for a while under the Rootes regime, assembled from the remaining stocks of parts.

The 110 had a bigger, 3½-litre engine, bored out to 80mm, and was marketed for its last 1936-’37 season as the Talbot 3½ Litre, but by then its sporty feel was compromised by a wide-ratio Humber gearbox and other ‘cooking’ items from the Rootes parts bin, such as conventional 12V electrics.

The Talbot 105 B1 Airline oozes authoritative refinement, both in its stature and in the way it motors along the road, with an appealing element of sportiness

Roesch had even presided over the design of a baby Talbot 10, based on the Hillman Minx, before departing for David Brown’s tractor division in 1938.

The B1 105, however, with its lowered and further-strengthened chassis, made its debut at Olympia in 1934 and was the final evolution of what purists would consider a true Roesch Talbot.

The ‘double-drop’ chassis featured a tubular cruciform brace with perforated channel sections on the inner faces of the main side members.

Semi-elliptic springs were used all round, the finned aluminium brake drums increased in size and the Wilson preselector-type epicyclic gearbox, produced in-house at the Barlby Road factory, now incorporated a centrifugal ‘traffic clutch’ designed by Roesch that automatically disengaged the engine from the transmission at idling speeds, in order to relieve stress on the drivetrain.

The Talbot 105 B1 Airline’s 3-litre ‘six’ makes 119bhp

Also new for the 1935 season was a seven-seater limousine for £850 and the £45 option of the 3½-litre, 24 RAC horsepower engine.

The Airline saloons cost £625 – nearly twice the price of a standard 65 saloon – but came with a set of elegant fitted luggage in the boot, built-in jacks, a metal sliding roof, and a central lubrication system that fed engine sump oil to various suspension parts and even the steering box.

James Young and Vanden Plas in particular did some lovely bodies on the 105 Talbots.

Inspired by the 1930s fad for aerodynamic styling, the Airline saloon body was penned by Roesch himself, initially as a vehicle to use on his summer holidays on the Continent: 55 copies, built by Darracq, were laid down out of a total 97 B1 105s built.

The chassis plate confirms this Talbot 105 B1 Airline’s origins

Chassis 4065, engine number 69, took to the road in December 1936 as DLP 937 and was delivered to a wealthy inventor who had made his fortune designing machinery for pasteurising milk.

Mr Enoch lived in a fine Art Deco home in Totteridge, north London, that must have complemented perfectly the fashionable Airline shape of his new Talbot.

He sold the 105 in 1938 to a distinguished Welsh academic and economist, William John Evans, but some time soon after the war DLP 937 was being enjoyed by an Italian chip-shop owner in Wales before returning to England in 1957.

It was still being used on the road by the first of its three owners in the Midlands in the early 1960s, by then repainted wedding-car white, but by the time the Wolverhampton-based coachbuilder Jack Castle rescued the Talbot in 1976, it was in a state of some distress.

‘The Talbot 105 B1 Airline, with its strengthened chassis, was the final evolution of what purists would consider a Roesch Talbot’

Castle replaced some sections of the ash body frame, but when he parted with the car 34 years later it was partially dismantled and not much closer to hitting the road again.

The 105 Airline stayed in Wolverhampton with its next prospective saviour, but once again the sheer amount of work required proved to be overwhelming, and in 2017 the Talbot found its way to an H&H Classics auction at Duxford.

With its body panels held on by 14 (not period-correct) cable-ties, this sad-looking offering even caught the attention of The Sun newspaper: the reporter was shocked that such a wreck was estimated to make £30,000 when it crossed the block.

The winning bidder at just under that figure was then 21-year-old Charlie Elliott, from South Woodham Ferrers, Essex.

A strip-down revealed the Talbot’s rotten wood

“The bidding quickly went up to the top of my budget, and against advice I put my hand up one last time,” says Charlie.

“When we picked it up, I was shocked when I saw the delivery driver throwing in random bits of wood and metal that were apparently part of the car. How was I going to work out where they all went?

“No wonder my mum cried when she saw it on the trailer.”

The fact that her son had committed himself to a £30,000 bank loan only added to her anxiety.

The classic car’s ash frame was recreated by Charlie after a crash course in woodwork

“The most frustrating part was financing it,” Charlie continues. “I don’t come from money, so I relied on a lot of love and support from my family, helping achieve and believe in the dream.

“It was definitely a very emotionally charged restoration. The lack of parts, and the complex design of a lot of the components, was challenging; also, specialists’ timescales, because everyone who is good is busy.

“I was just lucky they all helped. A massive amount of time went into the details, which a lot of people skip: I really think they made the car.

“Details that people just made out of pictures.”

The Talbot 105 B1 Airline mid-restoration

One of the few positives was that the engine had already been rebuilt: Charlie and friend Jake Newman – an up-and-coming historic motorsport engineer – had it running in just a couple of days, but wisely decided that it needed to come apart again in the course of the restoration.

Although the Talbot was thought to be mainly complete, the Ace wheel discs were missing, among many other small items.

Charlie, a sales executive for BMW and MINI, was brought up around racing and vintage cars.

Between the ages of 11 and 16 he raced go-karts alongside some current members of the Formula One grid, and he started reading C&SC when he was just seven years old.

The Talbot 105 B1 Airline was registered in 1936 and lived first in London then later Wales; old photos provided useful reference

He bought the Talbot 105 as a tribute to his late maternal grandfather, David Mathison, who had died five years previously.

As a passionate Talbot fan, Mathison’s dream car had been a 105, and he’d owned a 14/45.

“He had pictures of Talbots all over the garage,” explains Charlie. “He always told me that the 105 was the best car you could ever own.”

Although in no way underestimating the task ahead, Charlie was heartened by the originality of the Airline and, alongside Jake, determined from the start to restore rather than replace wherever possible.

All hands on deck the day before the Talbot was shipped to Pebble Beach

The restoration turned into an epic, six-year challenge that consumed every penny Charlie had saved, everything he earned and all his spare time, with sessions in his late grandfather’s garage often going on until the small hours, accompanied by Jake and his great uncle John Gaught, a resourceful ex-BT engineer.

“If he couldn’t do something, he always knew somebody who could,” says Charlie. Jake’s dad, Graham, and Charlie’s dad, Paul, also pitched in.

Specialists were consulted when required, naturally: the door hinges, for example, were milled from solid brass by a machine shop.

But when it came to the wooden body frame, Charlie got a carpenter to show him how to make a single strut and then they did the rest themselves.

‘The views out are good for a closed pre-war saloon, with two large squares of glass for a rear window’

“Neil Tadman did the interior almost as a tribute to his father, who used to trim Bentleys and other vintage cars,” says Charlie. “Neil now only really does Porsche 356s.”

Other honourable mentions go to Foppe d’Hane of DVP Restorations, who supplied parts and advice, and Paul Cooper of Cooper Engineering, who did much of the fabrication.

To fund the rebuild, Charlie and Jake even began restoring and dealing old cars, ploughing the profits back into the project.

“It was my insanity that pushed the job through,” Charlie admits. “That and the deadline imposed by an invitation to Pebble Beach in 2023.”

The Talbot 105 B1 Airline’s interior was retrimmed to a superb standard by Porsche 356 specialist Neil Tadman

“The engine was done by Lee Langstone, and without his help it would have never made it there,” Charlie continues.

“It was still in pieces just days before it was due to be shipped. When it landed in the USA, we had only done a two-mile test drive in the car!”

At Pebble Beach, most entrants had teams of professional valeters cleaning their cars.

“We did it ourselves,” says Charlie, “with the added problem of having to pull the horn apart to get it to work because we hadn’t had time to check the electrics.”

A special moment as Charlie and the Talbot mount the Pebble Beach rostrum to take third in class (left); Charlie and Jake celebrate

“But we had the best week,” he adds, “and the Americans are so nice: the only snooty ones were the English.

“We later went past one of them, broken down, when we did the Tour d’Elegance, but our car didn’t miss a beat.”

The Team Elliott Talbot 105 came third in the European Classic Sport class.

As it purred on to the famous rostrum, Charlie must have felt a world away from his beloved grandad’s garage and the cable-tied wreck with which the youngster had apparently stitched himself up six years earlier.

Such grit, commitment and resourcefulness are rare at twice Charlie’s age.

“It was my insanity that pushed the job through. That and the deadline imposed by a Pebble Beach invitation”

In the metal, the Talbot is rakishly handsome and low-slung for a ’30s car.

It would have been considered very quick 80-plus years ago, being good for nearly 90mph and almost 70 in third.

With the front doors open, the depth of the sturdy chassis is very obvious and the seating is close-coupled.

The pillowy crimson leather front chairs meet in the middle (just in case you want to take a very skinny third passenger) and look almost too big for the car.

They are still taut with horsehair stuffing and don’t give much, so this is one pre-war machine in which you probably could not wear your trilby while driving.

The rebuilt Talbot 105 B1 Airline had covered only two miles before heading to Pebble Beach

The views out are good for a closed pre-war saloon, with two large squares of glass for a rear window and commanding views along the grand bonnet.

The two-tone, gunmetal-over-black livery (by Jay Adam of JMA – the Talbot was his first vintage car) was arrived at after a patch of original paint was found on the windscreen pillar, and it suits the shape nicely.

Under the bonnet, the engine is a tall, shiny black enamel box of neat but unassuming appearance.

There are twin horns (loud and soft) and a handy drain tap for the sump.

The steering box and valve covers are magnesium for lightness, but impossible to weld.

The luggage set was standard for this Talbot

On the move, the B1 Talbot is a pleasing combination of refined stateliness and poised sportiness.

The engine is smooth and very flexible, although the preselector masks the latter quality to a certain extent.

The steering is incredibly light once motoring and, at two and a half turns between decently compact locks, pretty high-geared.

There is nothing particularly hefty or unwieldy about handling the car, which sweeps up the road with an eager mutter of straight-six refinement.

Steering-wheel-mounted switches include the gearbox’s preselector and headlight controls

The brakes are great, too – it’s to do with the self-servo action of the leading shoe essentially locking to the drum – and the ’box makes changing easy, coming from an era when most cars still had crash ’boxes that required skill to use quietly.

The ‘traffic clutch’ engages at 900rpm, so you can sit in queues with your foot on the brake, in first and ready to go, just like in a normal automatic.

Up or down the ’box it makes for super-quick changes: you can move the little lever on the quadrant without taking your hand off the steering wheel, then use the ‘clutch’ when you want to select the required ratio.

That such a young person had the confidence to take on an 80-year-old restoration project, knowingly in the footsteps of three failed previous attempts, is remarkable to say the least.

The fact that the Airline won a coveted invitation to Pebble Beach last year – and came third in its class – is just the cherry on top of a truly inspiring cake.

Images: Tony Baker; Charlie Elliott archive; H&H Classics; Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance

Factfile

Talbot 105 B1 Airline

Sold/number built 1935-’37/97
Construction steel ladder-type chassis, aluminium body over ash frame
Engine all-iron, ohv 2969cc monobloc straight-six, downdraught Zenith carburettor
Max power 119bhp @ 4800rpm
Max torque n/a
Transmission four-speed preselector, RWD
Suspension: front rigid axle rear live axle; semi-elliptic leaf springs, Luvax/Hartford dampers f/r
Steering worm and nut
Brakes drums
Length 16ft (4877mm)
Width 5ft 8in (1727mm)
Height 5ft (1524mm)
Wheelbase 10ft (3048mm)
Weight 4256Ib (1930kg)
Mpg 16
0-60mph 19 secs
Top speed 89mph
Price new £625
Price now £500,000*