Coventry Climax

The business began in 1903 as Lee Stroyer, a joint venture of Jens Stroyer and Horace Pelham Lee, moved to Coventry in 1905 and was renamed Coventry Simplex. In 1919 Pelham Lee bought Johnson & Smith Ltd, formed in 1917, and set up Coventry Climax Engines Ltd at East Street, Coventry, moving to Friars Road in the 1920s and in the late 1930s to the former Riley premises on Widdrington Road. Through the 1920s and 1930s it supplied engines to the light-car makers, added bus engines in the early 1930s and, as the car trade slumped, turned to diesels, electric generating sets and fire pumps. The 'Featherweight' (FW) portable fire-pump engine, designed by Walter Hassan and Harry Mundy to a government specification, was a commercial success and was taken up by the military; the 'Godiva' name for the pumps dates from about 1940. In 1946 the company announced the ET199, claimed as the first British-built fork-lift truck, and in the 1950s the FW engine, developed by Hassan into a lightweight overhead-camshaft unit, took Coventry Climax into motor racing and to Formula One world championships between 1957 and 1965. Vickers-Goodwin was acquired in 1953.

For the Land Rover fire engine Coventry Climax Engines Ltd of Coventry (telephone 28481, telex 31632) offered the 'model A.C.P. fire pump', on a leaflet 'approved by the Rover Co. Ltd for use with the Land-Rover' received by the Automobile Association's technical library on 8 November 1962. The A.C.P. was designed for front mounting on the fire-fighting vehicle, driven from the front of the engine crankshaft through a universal joint and a Metalastik tuned flexible coupling, with a positive sliding-dog clutch with synchromesh so that the pump could be isolated when not in use. It was a single-stage centrifugal pump with a volute body and hard-anodised shrouded Francis-vane impeller in heat-treated corrosion-resisting aluminium alloy, a stainless-steel shaft, the Coventry Climax carbon face seal and liquid-ring primer engaged by a single lever, a 4-inch suction eye, two 2½-inch screw-down deliveries with instantaneous couplings, and a panel of pressure, compound and engine gauges; the volute was ducted for engine coolant to keep it from freezing. Rated at 500 gallons a minute at 100 psi at 3,200 rpm, needing 55 bhp, it came as a kit of all parts weighing 185 lb (303 lb cased) for fitting to a Land Rover ordered with the diesel model's front springs and an oil cooler.

Jaguar Cars bought Coventry Climax in 1963, and with Jaguar it passed into British Motor Holdings in 1966 and then British Leyland. When Leonard Lee left in December 1971 he took the Godiva fire-pump business with him, merging it with his Iso-Speedic company at Warwick under the Pelham Lee group; Pelham Lee Holdings was sold to Booker McConnell for £1.9 million in 1979, SPP Pumps including Godiva went to the Braithwaite Holding Company in 1988, Godiva merged with Hale Products of the United States in 1989, and both were taken over by the IDEX Corporation in 1994, which still makes Godiva pumps at Warwick. The fork-lift division was sold into private ownership as Coventry Climax Holdings in 1982, went into receivership in 1986 and was bought by Kalmar Industries, trading as Kalmar Climax; the engine business was sold to Horstman Defence Systems of Bath in 1990, breaking the link with Coventry.