The fascinating history of the iconic Jowett car marque, based in Bradford.

The Jowett Bradford was rushed into production in 1946 as a stop-gap model pending the launch of the all-new Javelin saloon, which its young designer, Gerald Palmer, had been working on since 1942. It was based on the 1938 8 hp commercial and was basically a pre-war design in every respect. It was, however, very popular with farmers and small businesses such as bakers, greengrocers, fishmongers and drapers etc., as it was economical, cheap, rugged and simple to work on. It was powered by the flat-twin horizontally-opposed 1005 cc engine, which was basically the same as the one fitted to the first prototype Jowett in 1906 with minor improvements, it was so antiquated when compared to the new Javelin saloon Jupiter sports car. The Bradford was expected to be dropped from the range in 1951 but this never happened and remained in production right up to the closure of the factory in 1954 when Jowett's ceased trading. Ironically, it was the largest selling model that Jowett's ever produced with almost 40,000 being built.

Jowett Cars were built in Bradford, from 1906 to 1954. All pre-war cars up to 1935 were powered by a twin-cylinder horizontally opposed 7hp engine. In 1935 a new four-cylinder horizontally opposed engine was introduced with a 10hp rating running alongside the original twin-cylinder model which had been increased to an 8hp rating. Little changed during this pre-war period, many of the models were made in very small numbers, and sadly, there are no survivors today. The Jowett brothers experimented in the mid-1930’s with a new in-line power unit which did not go into production. The post-war period saw massive changes in the Jowett company, with both Jowett brothers retiring by the end of the war. The first all-new model was the Javelin saloon, launched in 1947 and the Jupiter sportscar in 1950. By 1951 there should have led to a completely new range of cars, vans, pick-up and estate cars, known as the Bradford CD range. There were plans for a racing Jupiter known as the R1 and to re-vamp the Jupiter for road use known as the R4. Sadly, none of these models materialised and Jowett’s history could have been so different had fate been kinder to them.

Memory and Community in Sixteenth-Century France engages the question of remembering from a number of different perspectives. It examines the formation of communities within diverse cultural, religious, and geographical contexts, especially in relation to the material conditions for producing texts and discourses that were the foundations for collective practices of memory. The Wars of Religion in France gave rise to numerous narrative and graphic representations of bodies remembered as icons and signifiers of the religious ’troubles.’ The multiple sites of these clashes were filled with sound, language, and diverse kinds of signs mediated by print, writing, and discourses that recalled past battles and opposed different factions. The volume demonstrates that memory and community interacted constantly in sixteenth-century France, producing conceptual frames that defined the conflicting groups to which individuals belonged, and from which they derived their identities. The ongoing conflicts of the Wars hence made it necessary for people both to remember certain events and to forget others. As such, memory was one of the key ideas in a period defined by its continuous reformulations of the present as a forum in which contradictory accounts of the recent past competed with one another for hegemony. One of the aims of Memory and Community in Sixteenth-Century France is to remedy the lack of scholarship on this important memorial function, which was one of the intellectual foundations of the late French Renaissance and its fractured communities.