Fastidious Albion trundles on

reports.

HOW the mortal remains of the best part of the Scottish motor industry

have come to rest in a quiet (not to say one-horse) market town that

makes woolly goods is an epic yarn that takes some unravelling. Knitted

together are two separate strands of local history in Lanarkshire which

supply the tow between little Biggar (population 2000) and the

once-mighty Albion Motor that had a peak payroll of half as many people

again.

As Biggar begat the Albion in a tenement workshop up a close in

Glasgow, so it is on the road to providing a final parking place for its

offspring. First, a remarkable story has to be reversed into.

This industrial saga grew from traditional country skills. For

Albion's start to becoming a road haulier of the world's goods was

engineered by farm hands. History also tells how a little-frequented

rural patch leapt in two bounds from the Middle Ages into a driving seat

of the auto age.

Biggar began as a halfway place. It was where early pilgrims rested on

their progress from Edinburgh to Whithorn. Ore from the mines of

Leadhills on route to export from Leith wintered in Biggar. As well as

woollens it makes agricultural machinery. There are good hopes of

becoming more of a holiday destination.Apart from being the last home of

the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, so far as Biggar is much known at all, it is

as museumsville.

Biggar Museum Trust has six museums as well as caring for other

refuges of the past, including MacDiarmid's cottage. For its size it is

a town that has museums the way other places have Indian restaurants.

(Biggar has them, too.)As to why it has become so much of a conservation

area the only person to ask is Brian Lambie, who used to have an

ironmonger's shop on High Street, except that listening to him when he

explains what ignited Biggar's enthusiasm for museums is like sparking a

box of joke matches.

He just says that he has always liked gathering stuff, or what he

calls junk. His further pleasure is to put the blame on the Biggar

bonfire.At Hogmanay on a cobbled part of the main street is lit a pagan

pyre that Biggar keeps burning all through the night to Ne'erday

morning. To feed the blaze the children of the town gather fuel from the

beginning of December. And when Brian Lambie, who is 62, was a keen

young stoker there was much exotic junk for burning.

He recalls: ''It was just after the war and lots of people were moving

into new houses. All sorts of lovely stuff was being thrown out.'' His

eyes still glow about the find of a set of the First Statistical Account

of Scotland in a midden. ''There were lots of things I took home instead

of to the fire,'' he now confesses.

Once started, there was no stopping his obsession (his word) for

amassing everyday bric-a-brac, or junk. Then there came the day when he

had to decide whether to find a treasure-house for his collection or

another house for himself.So out of a former gospel hall was born

Biggar's Gladstone Court Museum, a happily regretful street museum of

wee shops and offices that evokes small-town life of yore -- the

chemist, the dressmaker, a bank, the bootmaker, a village library, the

local printer's emporium, and (of course) the ironmonger's.

Spectacularly out of place, and lording it, among so many foolish (and

ordinary and magical) things is an Albion dogcart, vintage l902. It has

back-to-back seats and a tiller to steer it. Its list price was about

#280, not cheap. Biggar found this pioneer horseless carriage in

Honolulu and it was brought to Gladstone Court for #40,000.

To put a starting handle to the Albion story calls for going farther

back down the Biggar road to l830.By then a big local estate had fallen

into such a state of medieval decay that it had at last to be sold off

in parcels to landowners of a new breed. They tended to be Glasgow's new

toffs -- bankers, shippers, ironmasters. ''They were a kind of

half-baked gentry,'' is how Brian Lambie describes them. ''They liked to

come home and be weekend lairds.''

Among them was a rare man of parts called John Murray, farmer, estate

manager, civil engineer, and self-taught architect. He built Biggar's

waterworks, still in use, its Post Office, two churches, and a hotel.

Public buildings were designed by him in Hamilton and Lanark. Into big

country houses he led hydro electricity. He constructed a pipe organ

powered by water. And he was mad about motors.

He wheeched about his work in a French car, once adventuring to

London. There and back his chauffeur, reckoned to be the first

professional driver in Scotland, took l500 miles -- about twice the

shortest distance -- because they enjoyed motoring so much. (Petrol in

wooden crates was sent ahead to be picked up at train stations.) Except

on London streets they did not pass one other boneshaker on the

way.Although John Murray's first choice of a car was an imported

Panhard, he went on to become the godfather of Albions.

HE STAKED his farm for a bank loan to set up the making of dogcarts in

an upstairs Finnieston, Glasgow, workshop by a partnership of his son,

Tom Blackwood Murray, an electrical engineer who had shared his father's

country practices, and Norman Fulton, whose early work had been in

food-processing machinery before he became keen on cars.

Tricky with industrial espionage, the business of creating the first

Albion had about it as much secrecy as goes with the unveiling of a

modern new model. While Norman Fulton went to America to pick up

production tips, young Murray at night designed their eight horse-power

dogcart, sneakily keeping on his day job with a rival car-maker.

Meanwhile down on the farm, his father was taking delivery of axles and

gearboxes sent by Norman Fulton from the US and quietly ordering machine

parts from elsewhere.

''A lathe wrapped in straw went to and fro between Biggar and

Glasgow,'' Brian Lambie says. ''They tested their first model on the

quiet roads around here. Albion grew out of agriculture. When farming

people needed something they went and made it themselves. A hammer and a

spanner were enough to keep an Albion lorry on the road.''

Although Murray and Fulton at the end of l899 had registered their

company as Albion Motor Car, a handful of years later they were also

building commercial vehicles and by l9l3 were making nothing else. By

then the assembly line had been moved farther out of Glasgow to

Scotstoun.

At the start of the First World War, during which almost the entire

production was of chain-driven army lorries, Albion claimed to be the

biggest builder of commercials in the Empire.Schweppes, Cadbury,

Harrods, Tate and Lyle, Smiths Crisps, Lyons, Hoover and Bass were among

the household names on Albion fleets. All the railway companies used

Albions. Exports went to Russia (in time to be used during Lenin's

revolution), Canada, South Africa, and Ceylon. India and Australia were

especially enthusiastic customers.

Although Albion's name after a takeover by Leyland had by l972 slowly

disappeared, Australia remains rich in veteran vehicles, but India is

poor. Brian Lambie explains: ''While in Australia old trucks were dumped

in the bush where they didn't deteriorate, in India everything is

recycled and ends up as something else.''

Also scrapped is any record of who dreamed up the firm's motto, Sure

as the Sunrise, and even the source of Albion's name is only surmise.One

possible clue lies in how at the start of this century about half of the

horseless carriages in Britain, like old man Murray's first galloper,

were imported.

Brian Lambie guesses: ''I think it was just a name that sounded

patriotic. But it alphabetically put Albion at the top of directories

ahead of Argyll and Arrol Johnston, their Scottish rivals.''

What remains sure and certain is the Albion style. Output was

Clyde-built, meaning heavy but reliable. Its designers were seldom

innovative. Tried-and-true was more the Scotstoun way. From the start

the partners were canny.

They were more tuned to sturdy work-horse motors than with the

fashion-conscious, fickle, fiercely competitive, and financially

demanding world of car mass production. Sound plain quality was their

strength.The key creation of Tom Murray and Norman Fulton was the

reputation of fastidious Albion.

Continuing world-wide enthusiasm for their work is personified by Bill

Struthers, a garage owner in Jackton, when he parks at the former

sausage factory where Biggar now hospitalises wrecked Albion ancients.

Working on two other beautiful brutes, he has restored a l950 lorry of

which the original bodywork was done by his family's coachbuilding

firm.ONCE upon a time his cherished FT23N model carried brock for a

Lanarkshire pig farmer when it wasn't carting fertiliser from Leith

docks.

Of all the lorries that went in and out of the Jackton garage when

Bill Struthers was an apprentice, he still prefers Albions. He says:

''They were not the most luxurious vehicles. They were more spartan

than, say, Foden or ERF. But they were better for being robust and

sturdy. Indestructible is probably a good word to use about them.''

Although enduring, the makings of Biggar's next museum have needed

uphill drive to collect. Some important Leyland Daf people now share the

Albion obsession but it was not always so for long after the first

takeover in l95l.

Brian Lambie recalls: ''In the early 70s they humoured me a wee bit.

Leyland would sometimes postpone the day they were going to blooter

Albion's name out of existence altogether. But the plant managers kept

changing. We would always have to start again explaining that we were

the clowns who were trying to do something about preserving Albion.''

Biggar has not done badly. Some stonework, including the war memorial,

has been rescued from the former Scotstoun site (now a car park). The

museum trust made a film of the whole works. In the Albion Archive

complete job sheets and historic spares lists have been saved. Stored

items go down to factory details like cutlery from the directors'

dining-room and even ashtrays.

And Biggar magpies have the pecking order of every chassis the firm

made so they can date the 500 or so sturdy Scotstoun survivors around

the world, most of them still running.

''I think we have more of Albion than there is at Albion,'' Brian

Lambie can claim.

EVERY year since Tom Murray's centenary in l971 Biggar has celebrated

its motor pioneer with a rally of vintage and veteran wheels.

One very important vehicle expected from Lancashire is the l927

(Albion) Lyons tea lorry which won first prize in this year's

London-to-Brighton run for commercials.

For next month's Biggar gathering 200 cars and lorries will be on the

road, with Albions accounting for about half of the commercial class.

Tom Murray (he died in l929) is remembered fondly in the town, but

without awe. Biggar people called him Drainer Murray because as a boy he

liked to channel puddles from the school playground.

They say the most use he was about the place was for repairing old

clocks.Although an autocratic magnate, he was a generous neighbour.

''Everybody who turned up at the factory gate looking for work, if they

were from Biggar or Carnwath, they were in,'' Brian Lambie says.

Biggar Vintage Rally will have agricultural relics, old military

trucks, and vintage tractors all appearing to music from a fairground

organ.Admission is #2 (#l and 50p) from l0am on Sunday, August l6.