McLaughlin Motor Car Company

McLaughlin Motor Car Company Limited was a Canadian manufacturer of automobiles headquartered in Oshawa, Ontario. Founded by Robert McLaughlin, it once was the largest carriage manufacturing factory in the British Empire.

Around 1905, Robert's son Sam started building automobiles. By 1907, this enterprise had grown to include the manufacture of McLaughlin automobiles with Buick engines. In 1915, the company manufactured Chevrolet vehicles for the U.S. and Canadian market. The carriage end of the business was then sold to Carriage Factories Limited of Orillia, Ontario. James Brockett Tudhope's Carriage Factories ended carriage production and changed to manufacturing truck and car parts. The Tudhope firm was sold in 1924 to Cockshutt Plow Company and merged into the Cockshutt Plow owned Canada Carriage and Body Limited of Brantford, Ontario. The Brantford-based firm is now Trailmobile Canada.

McLaughlin was taken over by General Motors in 1918 and merged into General Motors of Canada.

History

McLaughlin Carriage Company

thumb|McLaughlin's fifth-wheel

thumb|1910s Democrat [[buckboard]]

thumb|1910 Model 41 touring car

thumb|McLaughlin Model B24 (1913-1915)

thumb|McLaughlin Model B25 (1913-1915)

thumb|McLaughlin Model 25 (1913-1915))

thumb|McLaughlin Model 3 (1914)

thumb|McLaughlin Model B36 (1914-1915)

thumb|McLaughlin Model B37 (1914-1915)

thumb|McLaughlin Model 41 (1914)

thumb|McLaughlin Model B55 (1914-1916)

thumb|McLaughlin Model D60 (1916)

thumb|1915 touring car

thumb|1923 Master Six Special touring car, manufactured by GM Canada

Robert McLaughlin began building carriages in 1867 beside the cutters and wagons in his blacksmith's shop in Enniskillen, a small village northeast of Oshawa, Ontario. In need of more workers to build his horse-drawn carriages, staunch Presbyterian McLaughlin moved to Oshawa in 1876.

McLaughlin developed and (in the early 1880s) patented a fifth-wheel mechanism, which greatly improved comfort and safety. Attracting a great deal of demand, he ignored tempting offers and elected to sell the mechanism to his competitors rather than license other manufacturers. This enthusiasm, now for his complete carriages, spread across Canada. Before the end of the century, there was a McLaughlin sales office in London, England.

On 7 December 1899, the carriage works was destroyed by fire. "We were helpless," R.S. "Sam" McLaughlin later told Maclean's Magazine, "we could only stand and watch our life's work go up in flames. Not only we McLaughlins, but the six hundred men who depended for a living on the carriage works." The City of Oshawa lent McLaughlin $50,000 to rebuild.

McLaughlin Carriage Company of Canada Limited was incorporated in 1901. Production numbers that year topped 25,000 units and included 140 different models, and sales exceeded one million dollars. The major carriage manufacturers did not close their doors but switched to automobile bodies. "We brought him [Milbrath] to Oshawa," Sam later recounted, "and installed him in one of our buildings, on the west side of Mary Street, which had been set aside as the automobile shop. We equipped it with automatic lathes and other machine tools, planers, and shapers - dozens of machines. From a Cleveland firm, we ordered cylinders, pistons, and crankshafts to our specifications, and engine castings to be worked in our own shop. The car was to be more powerful than the Buick."

When McLaughlin wired Durant for assistance in September 1907, the next day, Durant and William H. Little, another Buick executive, arrived in Oshawa. The two carriage men, Durant and McLaughlin, hammered out a fifteen-year contract under which McLaughlin would buy drive trains from Buick Motors. These cars were sold with the brand-name McLaughlin, although the name McLaughlin-Buick also appeared on some vehicles. This alliance with Buick Motor Company was controlled by an exchange of a large parcel of McLaughlin stock for a corresponding amount of Buick stock. Durant, also a partner in Durant-Dort, had a great deal in common with Sam McLaughlin, as both were part of the largest carriage companies in their respective countries.

In 1908, the McLaughlins manufactured 154 vehicles, the same year that Durant leveraged Buick to form General Motors.

General Motors of Canada

right|thumb|McLaughlin-Buick Model 25

right|thumb|McLaughlin-Buick Model 58

General Motors of Canada was incorporated in 1918, when it merged McLaughlin and Chevrolet Canada. General Motors Canadian Corporation spent $10 million building a Walkerville, Ontario, plant with the sale of the Chevrolet stock and establishing Canadian products. In 1923, the name of the Canadian-bodied model was officially changed to McLaughlin-Buick, and cars with this name continued to be produced until 1942. Later, production was labelled Buick without the addition of McLaughlin or Canada.

Sam McLaughlin remained chairman of the board of General Motors of Canada, and vice-president and executive director of the parent company, until his death in 1972 at the age of 100.

The automobiles

The first McLaughlin automobile was the 1907 Model F.

In 1936, a custom tailored McLaughlin-Buick Town Sedan was purchased by the Prince of Wales.

In 1936, the Dunsmuirs, a coal magnate family in Victoria, British Columbia, ordered three special-order 1936 Buick-McLaughlin Phaetons for three of their daughters. In 1937, the convertible phaeton bought for Elinor Dunsmuir was used to drive U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt around Victoria during his state visit. This is verified by photos appearing in the Times Colonist and the Victoria Times newspapers of 1 October 1937, because each of the Dunsmuir phaetons was unique.

Two custom built, dual-cowl McLaughlin-Buick Phaetons were built for the 1939 Royal Canadian Tour of George VI and Queen Elizabeth. One of these later carried Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, during their 1986 visit to Canada. || align="right"|1,098 || Model B24 ; Model B25; Model 25; Model 3; Model B36; Model B37; Model 41; Model B55

| 1915 || align="right"| 1,012|| Model B24 ; Model B25 ; Model 25; Model B36; Model B37; Model B55

| 1916 || align="right"| 2,859|| Model B54; Model B55; Model D60

| 1917 || align="right"| 3,418|| Model D44;

| 1918 || align="right"|6,317 || Model E50

| Sum || align="right"| ||

Duties and other import taxes

Residents of other rapidly developing countries living under conditions not unlike the U.S. and Canada had a strong preference for well-engineered and robust American cars. The countries of the British Empire – England, India, South Africa, Australia, and others – gave preference by charging much lower import taxes on goods from another member of the Empire, such as Canada. Taxes were adjusted to the proportion of Canadian content. Canada made and supplied General Motors vehicles to those countries, fitting them with right-hand drive. During World War I, Britain erected high tariff barriers to protect their industry from America's low-priced mass-produced but good-quality cars. By 1923 Canada had the world's second-largest automotive industry. These exports fell to a trickle after World War II because Canada was part of the dollar area and therefore set apart from the British Empire's sterling area. The British were struggling to repay U.S. War Loans and unwilling to allow their businesses unrestricted access to Canada's currency to buy Canadian cars.

Notes

References

Bibliography

Heather Robertson, Driving Force, The McLaughlin Family and the Age of the Car, McClelland & Stewart, 1995, .

External links

Ingenium – Canada's Museum of Science and Technology
McLaughlin family fonds, Archives of Ontario