Altas in Australia: Two Strange Tales of Espionage and Theft

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Few marque histories abound with the charm of a bygone age as much as Alta’s. Expelled from school for ‘borrowing’ his headmaster’s car, Geoffrey Taylor co-founded the Alta Car & Engineering Co with his mother in suburban Surrey, built his own rudimentary factory and, with a skeleton staff, constructed 38 cars between 1928 and 1952.

Taylor was obviously a character and so were his customers. Take chassis 21S, the first supercharged Alta, an 1100cc two-seater from 1934, and 55S, a supercharged 1500cc two-seater from 1936. After a racing with A J Cormack at Donington and Brooklands, 21S ended up in 1936 with Alan Sinclair, an English spy who campaigned it in Australia, his racing being his cover while shadowing the DKW motorcycle-racing team of Baron Klaus-Detlof von Oertzen, who was busy propagandising for the Third Reich.

Meanwhile, 55S sold to William Bennett, a young man with a considerable inheritance, and was also raced by George Abecassis and later Tony Crook. Along the way, it was uprated to two litres and ended up with a private collector and member of the Alta Register who entrusted its safe keeping to the register’s honorary secretary. The secretary, however, devised a preposterous scheme to steal it and sell it to another member in Australia.

The crime was discovered and the innocent Australian buyer was able to do a sterling job of restoring both cars. Mark Bisset carefully unravels two separate webs of deceit in the October issue of The Automobile, on sale now.

Words by Zack Stiling, Photographs by David Hewison
 

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