Austin Specialised Vehicles brochure
A change from Austin’s motor car brochures, this being one for the “civil servants” of the vehicle world – the specialised bodywork fitted to Austin truck chassis for various municipal uses. These vehicles such as refuse trucks and collectors, gully washers and tower wagons, were aimed at councils and other such undertakings and could be fitted to Austin’s range of 2-ton and 5-ton truck chassis.
As the brochure notes, many of these specialist bodyworks were constructed by the well-known company of Eagle Engineering Co Ltd. of Warwick – just along the road from Austin’s main plants in Birmingham. The cover shows what appears to be a ‘nightsoil and cesspit emptier’, used in areas without sewerage or wastewater systems, and that is badged up for “Blantyre Town Council”. This could as well be for Blantyre in Malawi (the Nyasaland) as for the Scottish town.
The heavy slab-serif caps used for “Austin” are from Beton extrafett (1929/1930), the first style of Heinrich Jost’s series for Bauer. All other text is set in various styles of Monotype’s Gill Sans, including its Condended which is used with faux small caps for “The Eagle Engineering Company Limited”.
This page, entitled “civil servants”, shows a variety of the specialist bodies fitted to such truck chassis. As well as an auxiliary night soil attachment fitted to a cesspit emptier – this being used in areas that were unsewered – there is an example of the Compressmore body for refuse colelection and a side loading refuse truck . These latter vehicles are badged up for the Rushden Urban District Council in Northamptonshire and the Government of Qatar.
This page shows a variety of the specialist bodies fitted to such truck chassis/ They show a gully and cesspit emptier for the Lowestoft Urban District Council, a pressure washer and sprinkler, a three-stage tower wagon of the type used for street lighting, tram and trolleybus overhead, and a Compressmore tipper bodied refuse collection vehicle badged for the Municipio di Milano on a left hand drive chassis.
The last two images show a side loading refuse truck and another view of the Eagle ‘Compressmore’ refuse collector.
