The specialist: Armstrong Siddeley Owners’ Club Ltd

By Martin Buckley

| 21 Feb 2025

Classic & Sports Car – The specialist: Armstrong Siddeley Owners’ Club Ltd

The Armstrong Siddeley Owners’ Club, a not-for-profit limited company, has been supplying parts for more than 50 years.

That’s longer than Armstrong Siddeley existed as a car maker before falling victim to the jet age in 1960: as part of the Bristol Siddeley group, Armstrong Siddeley designed the Olympus engines that powered the Vulcan and Concorde.

The club’s spares store near Shrewsbury is now open five days a week, following a gargantuan rebuild, and it’s busy with enquiries from all around the world: the Thai royal family still runs Armstrong Siddeleys, and the ASOC works closely with its Australian counterpart.

From left: chairman Keith Dewhurst, stores manager Robert Pinner and Sam Owen

No other small club does spares on this scale.

Many parts cross over with other British cars such as Alvis, Daimler, Bristol and Rolls-Royce; Humber supplied Armstrong with gearboxes – plenty are available should you need one.

There are hundreds of boxes of small parts, and service items such as brake shoes are – not surprisingly – among the faster-moving items.

These are joined by racks of new-old-stock and used panels for later cars, along with clutches, power-steering pumps and radiators.

The Armstrong Siddeley Owners’ Club Ltd’s inventory includes doors and body panels

There are some remanufactured items, too, such as wheel cylinders and road springs, but the more instantly recognisable parts include head gaskets, water-pump bodies and rows of new bumpers, windscreens and glass for pre- and post-war models.

The ASOC is proactive considering Armstrong cars haven’t been made for more than six decades.

The club is keen to get younger people interested, too, and has just provided a post-war Whitley saloon to a 30-year-old for a year, as part of the Classic Car Loan Project.

Plus, it co-operates with the various Daimler, Alvis and Bristol clubs to pool resources.

Shelf upon shelf of smaller components in the Armstrong Siddeley Owners’ Club Ltd’s spares store near Shrewsbury, UK

The site also houses the Armstrong Siddeley Heritage Trust, with a temperature-controlled room for the fascinating factory archive.

When the company stopped making the Star Sapphire in 1960, it pledged to produce spares for all models for the following 10 years.

The ASOC was formed in ’62, and raised the money to buy the spares from Rolls-Royce in ’72 in the wake of its bankruptcy.

The cache included the original green factory shelving and the rights to the name in as far as it related to motor cars.

The Armstrong Siddeley Heritage Trust archive lives on site, in climate-controlled storage to preserve the documentation

The haul was moved from the Parkside plant to a farm near Bradford-on-Avon, to be housed in a barn and two ex-Canadian Air Force Nissen huts.

This location was rented until 2020, when the landlord decided he wanted to build houses on the plot.

“He wanted us out immediately,” says club chairman Keith Dewhurst, “but we negotiated for the time to relocate.

“We soon realised we needed a low-cost area that was more central.”

Racks of chrome bumpers are among the larger items in the Armstrong Siddeley club’s parts store

“With so many slow-moving parts, it had to be an affordable means of storage,” he explains.

“We may only sell one of any given item every five or 10 years. Buyers are often amazed we have them, even for pre-war models.”

Transporting the many components from the rather inaccessible farm took a huge amount of work: 10 14-hour days of packing, then months of sorting and filing everything on the computer system at the other end.