1937 Rover 16 Sports Saloon

[Ballarat Bertie]

Can anyone help me regarding the headlining in my 1937 16 Sports Saloon. I’m restoring my car from ground up and soon I will have the body work finished and will have to start on the interior. I have replaced all of the timber and from photos I see that the roof lining flows around the timber cross member at the back of the sliding roof tray and is attached to its top edge. I have two formed cards that attach to the D post and are held by the rear window surround. My question is what holds the roof lining up above the cards and above the rear window frame. There is no timber on these areas and the Sports Saloon doesn’t use hoops. There is no glue on the backs of the cards and no holes for the blind cord. What does the corner eyelet that the blind cord changes from side to back, screw into?

[SHyslop]

It can be difficult finding exactly the same arrangement if the design was evolving. For what it's worth, my 1938 20SS has the headlining at the rear in three pieces, sewn together. There is the material that goes round the rear window and goes to the corners, then another piece a couple of inches wide sewn to it and then another piece sewn above it. At each of these seams there will be a loop sewn onto the back of the material and there is a metal rod going through it from side to side to give it shape. Are these the hoops you are referring to ? If so, then they are there in 1938 but clearly not 1937 if they are the same. The 46 car appears different because the wood round the rear window frame appears to be a much larger piece and into it is screwed the hooks for the rear window blind.

I'm sorry if that doesn't help as much as you need. I know the metal rod is there because I can see and feel it though a small hole but hopefully someone will have had a similar model to yours apart.

[Ballarat Bertie]

Thank you for your reply. I have photos of a couple of 37 16 SS and both are different. I think that one was reupholstered so I won’t put a lot of hopes on it. The other is original and is what I’m trying to copy. My car was missing a lot when I bought it including the parcel shelf and supporting timber at the sides. 1937 appears to be a year of sorting out ideas as later models seem to be more fixed in their design. I have looked for evidence of the rear window blind slider and hooks on my car and can only find screw holes on each top side of the window frame. As this car was an import to Australia maybe it didn’t have a blind. It also didn’t have a chassis number. The photo of the original model shows the blind cord coming through two holes in the curved card. The cord was exposed along the RHS to the slider. There is definitely no holes in the curved cards that came out of this car. The cards don’t curve around the top corner of the roof so there has to be something else that the head lining was attached to. As far as I can tell there isn’t any stitching in the lining either.

[SHyslop]

I was thinking about your car and your location. The bits going through my head were:

a section in James Taylor's book on 30s Rovers regarding exports to Australia says :"...Rover decided to ship only complete cars (Twelve and Fourteen models) for the 1936 calendar year , and exports to Australia of bare chassis ceased." There isn't a mention of the 16 or what happened with exports from 1937 onwards.

and

A recollection from a book about Nuffield exports, probably Riley but maybe Wolseley, where there was detail about how suitable various materials for the interior trim were for other climates. Heat, humidity and insects were some of the matters referred to,

The quote from James Taylor's book follows a section saying that there was no financial advantage to exporting chassis only but that got me thinking about various cars which have been exported to the UK and where the interior trim from the country of origin was replaced with trim more suitable for the UK market at the time. That made me wonder whether anything similar might have been the case with your car, especially with what you have said about other differences. It's the Sherlock Holmes bit, when the evidence points in one direction and you begin to wonder if the evidence is indeed pointing to the answer that shouldn't be the answer.

Totally different subject, I have cousins in Sydney and Melbourne so Australia has never seemed that far away !

[Ballarat Bertie]

I have a club magazine from Queensland Rover that featured “The Lucky Lady” my car. There were 2 previous owners mentioned in the article. This year we travelled north and I had the good luck to catch up with the owners. It was their belief that the car was imported to Australia by Doctor Hewitt. He used the car in his practice often travelling over bush tracks. This all make sense to me as the underneath of the car was very badly knocked about and there were several bush mechanic repairs done to it. I think that the car had seen some time in the UK before it was imported to Aus. The reason for this is the amount of rust and the places where the rust was. The area where the car was in Aus is a dry climate. I’m corresponding with Mike Evans who is restoring a 38 SS and the rust pattern and amount is roughly the same on both cars probably because of salted roads in UK. The two previous owners only owned the car for a couple of years each and weren’t much help locating earlier owners. One of the owners repainted the car from black to two tone blue and put white sided tyres on it, in his words to jazz it up. When I stripped the paint off it it’s original paint was dark blue.