Whitson

Whitson ,was one of the more interesting small coach-builders that sprang up in the buyer’s market of the late 1940’s. Its founder was Alfred Ernest Whuttit, who had been a foreman with Northern Counties immediately after the Great War, but moved on to the Riley car company in the 1920s. He was with the Dennis coach-works department in the 1930s and subsequently became Works Director at Strachans (q.v.) from 1938 to 1940. Nevertheless, Whittit did not give his own name to the company he founded, which became James Whitson & Co. Ltd and was initially at Sipson Works, Sipson, in West Drayton, Middlesex. As early as 1946, the company was building single-deck coach bodies and over the next few years these were mounted on a variety of chassis – Crossley, Leyland and Maudslay among them. Some had full-front coachwork; most had thirty-three seats and forward entrance. From 1949, Whitson’s branched out with a new venture. This was the half-deck or observation coach, an idea that had been seen before, but which took on a new elegance in Whitson guise. The company had a virtual monopoly of the type for about three years, building them on AEC, Leyland, Foden and Maudslay chassis. Work on underfloor-engined types began indirectly, as the company is believed to have assembled some bodies for the Sentinel integral single-decker, using panels supplied by Sentinel. Its own flamboyant Grand Prix 41-seat central-entrance coach body appeared in 1952, with the protruding front styling adopted by some others at the time, allied to multiple side styling strips. The company hedged its bets by making preperations to body rear-engined chassis, taking out a patent for engine-cover support struts in June 1951. From 1952, Whitson’s moved to High Street in nearby Yiewsley and began to build fire engine and other Commercial bodywork rather than PSV types. I moved into the GRP field from about 1956 and secured the contract for the first 250 Peerless car PSV bodies in 1957-9. At its peak, the company employed 350 people, but the PSV business had stopped by the mid-1950s. The company remained active, building GRP components for Commercial vehicles.