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The ADO16 Story The Apache Story The Spanish Story My Apache Information Copyright 2008 |
Blackheath & Leykor Blackheath, the plant where Leykor products were assembled. An excerpt from Ryno Verster's book on the name, Leykor: "The name for the South African operations took quite some consideration and an interesting "South Africanised" solution came up. The Leyland Motor Corporation of South Africa was established in September 1968 and was constituted from a number of operating divisions and a controlling staff group. The most important of these divisions was the Car Division, which operated through two companies, namely Leykor Manufacturing and Leykor Distributors. Leykor was launched on 9 December 1968, making South Africa the first country in the world where Leyland products are marketed through a subsidiary division carrying a name other than Leyland. Production was centralised at Blackheath, which meant that Rover and Land Rover had to move from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town (Blackheath), Triumph from Motor Assemblies in Durban to Blackheath and production of Austin and Morris commercial vehicles from Cape Town to Durban to link up with Leyland commercial product line. The marketing organisation moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg and was placed in the hands of Leykor Distributors, thereby confirming Blackheath's responsibilities to production only." In a further email discussion With Ryno Verster, the following may explain the registration numbers on the various cars: "CFR registration number was actually
for the municipality of Kuils River in which Blackheath was in later years
located. It seems that in early days (before there was a Kuils River
municipality) BMC tried to be loyal to both of the closest municipalities to
Blackheath. They had several Cape Town registration numbers like CA 71 that was
used on the Prototype Mini brought in for tooling in 1959, the first 997 cc
Cooper road test car and later on a Jaguar. The other closeby municipality that
they wanted to please was Stellenbosch municipality. So the first works Austin
Healey that was raced by Roddy Turner had the registration number CL 129. The
first works Austin 850 that Peter White and Roddy Turner raced for the factory,
also carried this registration number. The first hydrolastic Mini that was road
tested was incidentally also CL 129. It seems that with the establishment of the
Kuils River municipality BMC had to stay loyal to their local municipality." Below is a photograph of some of the names associated with the Apache and mentioned on this site:
January 1973 Press Advertisement
November 1974 Press Advertisement
For more information on Blackheath: A potted history... on the Unofficial Austin-Rover website. Leyland South Africa soldiered on until 1984 with the Mini being the only small model along with the Land Rover, Rover and Jaguar models. The current Land Rover Defender is still being built to this day in the Blackheath facility. In 2001, MG Rover returned to South Africa with a limited selection of the Rover and MG models, including, strangely, the Streetwise, although these were, until the company's demise in April 2005, fully imported models from Longbridge.
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