The Harry Potter car that helped make Ford

It may not look much to today’s eyes, but the Ford Anglia was hugely important.

It was the car that finally helped put Britain back on the road after the austerity following the war that Britain won but which left the nation flat broke. In the process it cemented Ford’s place in the country’s automotive firmament that it holds to this day.

One windscreen wiper. One sunvisor. No interior light. That was the specification of the almost sadistically basic 1953 Ford Anglia, by then in its third generation and a distant ancestor of today’s Focus. Through the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s Ford was known for building simple, affordable and very austere cars in an attempt, mostly successful, to render them attainable for the British working family. 

Radical

The ‘53 Anglia was nevertheless a vastly more modern device than the tall, upright, vintage-influenced Anglia that preceded it, the new 100E featuring a radical monocoque body with integrated wings, no running boards and independent MacPherson strut front suspension. 

Overtaking ambition

But its modernity was patchy; it was propelled by an old-tech side-valve engine, while that solitary windscreen wiper was still vacuum-driven from the inlet manifold, an arrangement often leading to unwelcome rainy-day excitements. Why? Because the further you sank the accelerator the slower the wiper wiped, until there was a very real possibility that the blade would freeze in its smeary tracks during wheezing overtaking moments.

Enter the 105E

Despite this not insubstantial drawback and a maintenance schedule as demanding as a Hollywood film star’s, the third-generation Anglia found more customers than the last, aided no doubt by the addition of a second wiper.  It would see nowhere near the success of the fourth and final 1959 generation (pictured). 

Shaping a classic

This Anglia shocked with a bizarre, reverse-rake rear window, which was even more arresting than its shark-like grin of a grille and modest tailfins. Claimed to preserve rear headroom while allowing a lower roofline - which it did - it improved visibility too, the overhanging roof preventing the glass from getting wet.

But more than anything it gave the Anglebox a look all its own despite sharing this flourish of fenestration with the short-lived 1961 Ford Consul Classic. Early ads featured an image of the Anglia’s Z-shaped D-pillar captioned with the line, “Who dared? Ford did!”, though radically angled glazing was nothing to the technical ambition of the Mini launched in the same year. 

Advances

But the Anglia had plenty going for it, not least the new 997cc Kent engine, whose oversquare design allowed it to rev to heights unheard of for a lowly bearer of Blue Oval badging. It was this engine’s tunability, a flick-switch gearchange and the Anglia’s robustness that made it a racer’s favourite, even if much work was needed to kill understeer of the dinghy-in-torrent variety. Electric wipers - a pair, no less - were a boon too.

On the road

Despite the race pedigree it never gained disc brakes nor much of a power hike, the 1200 Super putting out 54bhp to the original’s 39bhp. Which is why the Escort overshadows it today. But 191,752 Anglias were built at Dagenham in 1960 alone, a Ford record for a single model, aided by a keen selling price of £600 – around £13,000 (US$17,700) today.

New fans

The Anglia remains a star thanks to the Harry Potter franchise, a blue 105E enjoying the powers of flight and invisibility, though the second of these properties eventually befell most examples as rust munched venomously through the front wings, the doors, the rear arches and, usually to terminal effect, the front suspension towers, the MacPherson struts suddenly punching through the inner wings to strike the underside of the forward-hinged bonnet.

Dramatic, but plenty of other ‘60s machines died amid similar flurries of ferrous flaking. It was the Anglia that propelled Ford into post-war modernity, its flamboyant styling and bold colours conjuring an aura of affordable affluence, a theme that would soon see massive success in the shape of the Escort that replaced it.