We are grateful to Stewart Enzor who sent us these wonderful photographs of a brace of P-Types owned by friends of his family.
The photo above is P-Type chassis 19072. Built in 1931 as the company was taken into receivership and fitted with a metal panelled saloon body by Carbodies, it was not sold until 1936 when it was registered as CWB 665. During its life the car has been re-registered several times and is seen here when owned by Frank Dance and registered RA 9408.
Lea-Francis saloons of this age have not survived in great numbers and it is almost certainly due in no small part to Frank Dance who used this car extensively and maintained to a high standard that this car survives to this day, although now registered as it was originally as CWB 665.
Frank Dance is pictured above at Penshurst in 1969 with his Lea-Francis P-Type saloon.
Frank was not the only Dance interested in Lea-Francis. This photo shows Frank being driven by his daughter, Nancy, in her P-Type two-seater, chassis 19090. This car too was built while the Lea-Francis company was in receivership and was erected in 1932, with the body fitted by Avon in May that year. However, sales for Lea-Francis at this time were slow and it was not sold to its first owners, a Mrs Hobbs of Sutton, until 1934. It was registered the same year as KV 7750. In the 1950s the car was owned by Peter Bettridge who swapped the registration with another Lea-Francis, chassis 13939 and for some years, including during Nancy's ownership the car ran as in the photo as GC8441. We are pleased to say, both this P-Type and the car from which the registration was swapped have survived and are once again registered as they were from new.
We are unsure of the location but this is possibly a midway stop on a Vintage Sports Car Club rally. Both Frank and Nancy were active VSCC members and competed in a number of events with their Lea-Francis cars. They are seen here in the company of another P-Type two-seater, UH 8593, chassis 19000 then owned by Geoff Hare. Like the other two, this car is still in use today, albeit having passed through the hands of several Club members in the years since this photo was taken.
We finish with a colour photo of 19090 taken, we think in the late 1960s in a unknown location.
Once again, we are most grateful to Stewart Enzor for sharing these photos with us. If you have photos of Lea-Francis car, cycles or motorcycles you would like to share with us, or would like to know more about, please get in touch via this link. Unfortunately, to reduce spam you will not be able to send any photos directly via this website, but if you get in touch we will reply with an email address to which attachments can be sent.
This photograph was sent to me by Belinda Simpson and shows a Cross & Ellis four-seat tourer body on what is almost certainly an S-Type, Hyper chassis. The photo was taken between 1947 and 1952, when Belinda’s father, Bill Taylor, owned the car and the cheerful young woman sitting in it is her mother.
We know the car was in Liverpool at this time but despite this, we have been unable to identify the registration or chassis number of the car. If you have any thoughts, please get in touch Contact Us
Similarly, if you have any photos or other information relating to Lea-Francis that you would like to share, or would like us to try and identify, please do get in touch by clicking the above link.
A Club member shared this photo with the LeaFlet Editor a few years ago and was published in the LeaFlet in 2019, but it remains a bit of a mystery.
It is a wonderful photograph of a 14 Sports at an American raceway. Through the wonders of AI, it has been suggested that the location could be Englewood Speedway in Colorado, but there is very little information in the photo to pin down the location, so despite the best efforts of modern technology this is little more than a guess.
The date on the California licence plate is 1949 and on the badge bar is a Brooklands BARC badge with an RAC, BRDC badge and one which we do not recognise. Given the car is right-hand drive and the location of the photo we wondered if this was the car Ludgate and Rose took to the US when they were promoting the Lea-Francis engine for midget race cars, but we thought that car was silver/grey and the photos of it show no badge bar.
If anyone can shed any light on the photograph we would be very interested to hear from you.