"I had two spells as a Jensen Motors employee in 1959 - 1961 and 1964 - 1967. In the first period I was a junior draughtsman at the Carter's Green factory under the tutelage of Eric Neale and in the second period I was a chassis design draughtsman working under Kevin Beattie, at the Kelvin Way factory.
My greatest claim to fame is designing the front subframe and alloy front diff. carrier for the FF model.
Most (33 years) of my working life was spent with Peugeot U.K (Chrysler U.K. when I joined) and ended up as a marketing manager responsible for customer communications and sales promotion. In that capacity I instigated the 205GTi Owners Club, whose successor, the Peugeot Sport Club, still exists today.
Three years ago I started publishing an automotive based blog -
You might be particularly interested in these two posts -
http://twincam-serendipity.blogspot.co. ... s-and.html
This article was re produced in the Austin Healey Club of America's magazine, 'Marque', in April of last year.
http://twincam-serendipity.blogspot.co. ... -show.html
The reason for me deciding to join the Jensen forum is this -
Last year (2013) I unexpectedly found myself blogging about Jensen's involvement with the building and development of the Healey 100>.
It would not surprise me at all to find that this subject has been touched on before on this forum. It is a very interesting and sometimes controversial subject but one that is at the very heart of the Jensen Motors story. It could be argued that if it wasn't for the 'Healey contract' many of the Jensen models would not have been built. The story of the Healey/Jensen relationship (I write it this way so as not to confuse the Healey 100 story with the Jensen - Healey story which is totally different) has come into prominent focus, as far as I am concerned, with the establishment of an excellent Museum in the Netherlands dedicated to Donald Healey and the products which he created, mainly cars and boats.
I was struck by the fact that Jensen was not referred to in the Museum's portrayal of the Healey 100 and I started an, on going, discussion with a senior member of the Museum's staff. He and the owner have been most courteous in all their responses to me and it will be interesting to see what transpires from this contact.
All this Healey centric activity made me realise that I was giving a great deal of time to a car, the Austin Healey 100 to 3000, that was not on my list of 'favourites', all because I wanted the work that Jensen did on this car to be properly recognised. So, I thought that I should see what was happening on the 'pure' Jensen scene, that explains my presence on this forum, I hope
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so I offered to write an article about the Jensen Healey for the Dutch Austin Healey club magazine . They accepted and the 5 page article with photo's was printed in their March 2013 issue. I did the Same for the Lotus club, who were indeed very keen to know more about the Lotus/ jensen connection.
