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British automobile pioneer
Montague Stanley Napier was an English automobile and aircraft engine manufacturer. His grandfather, David Napier (1785–1873), had moved to London from Scotland and by 1836 had established an engineering company in Lambeth called D. Napier & Son. Montague Napier bought the business from the executors of his father's estate in 1895, and diversified into producing machine tools for the cycle industry.
Motor historian Peter King describes Napier as "very secretive by nature"; not much is known about his early life. He was born on 14 April 1870 at 68 York Road, Lambeth, London, the youngest of the four sons of James Murdoch Napier and his wife, Fanny Jemima, née Mackenzie. His father had taken over his own father's interest in the engineering business he had set up there by 1836, making printing machinery for the newspaper industry. The business diversified unto making coin-weighing machines for the Royal Mint, but by the time of James Murdoch Napier's death in 1895 it was in decline. Napier had worked in the family business from an early age, but he was not doing so at the time of his father's death. He bought the business from the executors of his father's estate and diversified into producing machine tools for the cycle industry. As an avid racing cyclist he had been participating in races of the North Road Cycling Club alongside riders like Selwyn Edge. In the 1891 100 Mile Road Race on the Great North Road he finished fourth.
Napier met Selwyn Edge again in 1899, for whom he agreed to build a car based on Edge's Panhard et Levassor, which he had bought after it came second in the 1896 Paris–Marseilles race. So impressed was Edge with the result that he contracted to buy six more cars, and set up a showroom in London from which to sell them. The first cars were ready by 1900, and so successful were they that Napier decided to move his company to larger premises in Acton, London. While Napier concentrated on the engineering Edge focused on the marketing and publicity. In 1902 he drove a Napier to victory in that year's Gordon Bennett Cup, the first British victory in an international motor race. Napier cars dominated the British luxury car market until 1906, but Napier was unconvinced that there was a sustainable long-term market for such vehicles, unlike Rolls-Royce, his main competitor. Napier therefore set up a new company to develop more popular cars. Following the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Napier's interest turned increasingly to aircraft engines. Initially Napier's built engines designed by the Royal Aircraft Factory, but at his own expense Napier subsequently designed his own, the Lion. By 1924 about half of all British aircraft were powered by Napier's engine, and Napier automobile production had ceased.
Biographical detail compiled from Wikipedia and Wikidata, which are edited openly and may be incomplete or out of date. Fleet data is our own. Source →
