Robert McLaughlin started a carriage business in Enniskillen, Ontario, in 1869, at thirty-three, and spent the next several decades turning it into the largest of its kind in the British Empire. He had a motto he carved where the workers couldn't miss it. One grade only, and that the best.
He was not a man given to inspirational slogans.
Enniskillen was a crossroads twenty kilometres northeast of Oshawa. The carriage business started small, sleighs and buggies going to local farms, and grew as McLaughlin moved the operation to Oshawa where the rail connections were better and the market could absorb serious production volume. A fire levelled the main factory in 1899. Fifteen municipalities across Ontario lined up to offer McLaughlin somewhere else to go. He stayed in Oshawa. The city lent him fifty thousand dollars, and he rebuilt. By 1904 the factory was producing more than fourteen thousand vehicles a year and shipping them to customers as far away as India.
The Dictionary of Canadian Biography would eventually describe it as the largest carriage maker in the British Empire. It was.
Robert's son Samuel, known to everyone as Sam, came into the family business as an upholsterer, learning the trade on the factory floor. By 1892 he and his brother George were formally in partnership with their father. In 1904, Sam McLaughlin took his first automobile ride somewhere in Ontario on a road that was more ambition than pavement, and climbed out of the car with a fixed idea lodged somewhere behind his eyes. His father had spent forty years watching customers run their hands along perfectly built carriages and leave satisfied. Robert McLaughlin saw no compelling reason to change that arrangement. His sons did.
The Road to Automobiles
Between 1905 and 1907 Sam and George made two separate attempts to get into automobile manufacturing inside the carriage works. The first attempt ended in the worst possible way.
The McLaughlins hired an engineer named Arthur Milbrath to design their first car. The vehicle would be called the Model A, and it drew its inspiration from the Buick automobiles that William Durant was producing in Flint, Michigan. Milbrath was the right man. Before a single Model A turned a wheel on a public road, he developed severe lung disease and was done. Not a scandal, not a crisis. Just a man coughing himself out of the story, and a prototype that never shipped.
The McLaughlins needed a different approach.
William Durant had taken control of the Buick Motor Company in November 1904, inheriting a business that was a few weeks from collapse. He fixed it not with cash but with orders he wrote, promises he made, and an energy level that exhausted everyone around him. Inside four years he had turned Buick into the best-selling automobile in the United States. Sam McLaughlin watched what Durant was building in Flint and saw the arrangement that was sitting there. McLaughlin had skilled tradesmen, the body-building expertise to complement them, and a factory infrastructure that most automobile producers in North America would have envied. Durant had engines. The geometry of a deal was obvious.
The terms they worked out were straightforward. McLaughlin would purchase Buick engines and American-supplied mechanical components, build the bodies in Oshawa using Canadian craftsmen, and sell the finished vehicles in Canada and in select Commonwealth markets. Durant would not compete there. The arrangement was a manufacturing licence with a fixed term of fifteen years. Robert McLaughlin, still president of the carriage company and controlling shareholder of everything the family owned, formally accepted the deal on October 3, 1907. Six weeks after that, on November 20 of that year, the McLaughlin Motor Car Company Limited was provincially incorporated in Ontario, with Sam as president, George as vice-president, and their father holding the controlling interest.
The company built one hundred and fifty-four cars in that first model year.
Against a carriage factory producing fourteen thousand vehicles annually, one hundred and fifty-four automobiles was a modest number. But the direction was not hard to read. In 1908 Durant folded Buick and Oldsmobile into a holding company he called General Motors and added Cadillac and Oakland the following year. The McLaughlin operation, still a branch plant running on a fifteen-year licence, was now fastened to the most aggressively expanding industrial corporation on the continent.
By 1915 the carriage trade's future was clear enough to act on. Sam McLaughlin sold the carriage works to Carriage Factories Limited of Orillia and converted the entire Oshawa plant to automobile production, adding Chevrolet manufacturing for Canada and parts of the American market. The fifteen-year licence was set to expire around 1922. By the mid-1920s the plant employed three thousand people and produced more cars for Canada and the Commonwealth than every other Canadian manufacturer combined.
General Motors Comes to Oshawa
General Motors moved to acquire the McLaughlin operation four years before that licence ran out.
In 1918, the McLaughlin Motor Car Company and the Chevrolet Motor Company of Canada merged with General Motors to form General Motors of Canada Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of the American parent. The McLaughlin family received GM stock. Sam McLaughlin stayed on as president of the new Canadian operation and held that position until 1945. He had been born in 1871 and would not die until 1972, at the age of one hundred and one -- having watched the entire twentieth century from Oshawa, which is a rarer accomplishment than it sounds.
"That was a grand thing for Oshawa," Sam McLaughlin said of the sale.
Robert McLaughlin, who had built the largest carriage factory in the British Empire and then watched his sons convert the trade in favour of gasoline engines, died in 1921. He had started with a one-room shop in a village northeast of Oshawa and run the whole operation on a single standard. The motto held, even if what it was applied to had changed beyond recognition.
The Royal Tour Cars
Canada turned sixty in 1927. The Diamond Jubilee of Confederation called for a celebration, and what a country does to mark the occasion is invite royalty. Edward, Prince of Wales, arrived in August alongside his younger brother Prince George and moved through the country's major ceremonial obligations. Toronto's Union Station was officially opened on August 6. The Peace Bridge linking Ontario to Buffalo, New York was dedicated the following day, in a ceremony that drew approximately one hundred thousand people. And on August 30, both princes were at the Princes' Gates of the Canadian National Exhibition to cut the opening ribbon. Edward had personal reasons to welcome the trip; he owned a ranch in Alberta's High River country, acquired in 1919, and the Diamond Jubilee provided an occasion for it that nobody could argue with.
They needed cars. Open touring cars specifically -- no roof, the kind that let a prince wave from the back seat while the crowd gathered below in whatever August delivered. Sam McLaughlin, president of General Motors of Canada, received the commission and noted, with a precision that was almost certainly intentional, that his company did not currently manufacture open touring cars.
He was told to build some.
He built two.
His craftsmen worked from a prototype 1928 chassis with a 128-inch wheelbase, fitted with Buick's Master valve-in-head inline six-cylinder engine producing 77 horsepower. The bodies were designed and built entirely in Canada. Only the engines were imported, shipped from the Buick plant in Flint, Michigan, where the mechanical heart of every McLaughlin-Buick had always come from. The finished vehicles were seven-passenger open tourers, long and low and built for being looked at. The firewall identification plates on both cars read 1928. Sam McLaughlin had not manufactured open touring cars in 1927.
Two cars because one needed to be driven ahead to the next stop while the princes were still using the other. Edward and Prince George worked through the itinerary in that leapfrog pattern, which was efficient and more or less invisible to the public. Prince George would later become the Duke of Kent. He is identified in numerous accounts of the 1927 tour as the future King George VI, which is a persistent error; King George VI was a different brother, Prince Albert, and the confusion appears often enough in otherwise reliable sources to be worth flagging directly.
One of the two cars is now in the collection of the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. The second came home to Canada in December 2015 and is held at the Lang Collection in Chepstow, Ontario.
The Most Romantic Car in the World
The memory of those cars stayed with Edward.
He had ridden in them across the country and found the experience very agreeable. Eight years passed. He spent those years as Prince of Wales, working through his official duties and appearing in all the right photographs, and conducting a private relationship with an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson that the British establishment was going to find profoundly inconvenient. He was managing both with varying success when, in the late summer of 1935, he walked unannounced into the London showrooms of Lendrum and Hartman Ltd., on Albemarle Street.
Captain Hartman was two doors down the street, having a shave. He was summoned.
What Edward wanted was a private limousine built to specifications he had clearly given real thought to -- drinks cabinets, vanity mirrors, reading lights, correspondence facilities, a radio, a smoker's cabinet, a jewellery cabinet, compartments for canteen and luncheon trays, and a drawer sized to hold London telephone directories. The car was to carry two passengers in complete luxury and complete privacy. The two passengers were Edward and Wallis Simpson.
The order went to the General Motors of Canada plant in Oshawa. The craftsmen there built a custom body on a stretched 1936 Buick Limited Series 90 chassis, powered by a 5.2-litre straight-eight engine. Edward placed the order as Prince of Wales, with the London summer still in the windows of the Albemarle Street showroom. King George V died in January 1936. The car arrived in February, and by then Edward was King Edward VIII.
He used it for approximately ten months.
On December 10, 1936, a limousine stopped in front of Number 10 Downing Street. King Edward VIII stepped out and went inside to meet Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. The meeting was short. Edward was there to notify the Prime Minister that he intended to abdicate the throne of the United Kingdom in order to marry a divorced American woman. He came back outside. The rear blinds were drawn as the car pulled away.
The car had been built in Oshawa, Ontario, on a Buick chassis, by craftsmen whose trades had come up in a factory where the standard was one grade only, and that the best.
Edward, the Duke of Windsor now, was driven to France. He and Wallis Simpson used the car on their honeymoon, which is how a limousine made in an Oshawa factory came to be called the Most Romantic Car in the World. The car was sold at auction in London on December 3, 2007, for 100,500 pounds sterling including the buyer's premium.
Nobody in Oshawa got a cut of that.