Original trim specifications
Information from the horse's mouth..........


By Dan Mooney
 
A couple of days ago I was chatting with Eric Suffolk (Suffolk & Turley)
about various points of originality with regard to E Type interiors.

As some of you will know, Eric was the chief interior man at the Jaguar
factory for many years before leaving to set up his company. When he left
the Browns Lane factory, Jaguar presented him with the blue prints and
specs for all the Jaguars that were no longer in production.

On one particular point, he deferred my question to Martin Robins, one of
his staff. I learned that during the 60's, while 'young' Martin was nailing
together hides and putting them in E Types, he put his signature on every
seat he trimmed out. He told me that (e.g.) where an E Type seat back is
stapled along the bottom tucked edge, rather than just use a straight line
of staples, he would arrange 4 of them to form the letter M, something like
this:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ I\/I _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

He was also able to answer my question fairly emphatically. He went and
examined an original 66 seat that he had just been sent to recover. It bore
his trademark stapled signature (so we knew it to be original), and I
therefore felt like never before that I had truly received my information
'from the horse's mouth'.

Return to bulletin board