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Britain's greatest car is celebrating its 50th birthday, but Bill Cull, the engineer who made it all possible, has yet to receive his due

Finally, as the candles gutter on this year's 50th birthday cake for the Mini, tribute is being paid to the man who actually made the little car go.

Not Sir Alec Issigonis, who died festooned with awards for his revolutionary design, but an unsung Yorkshire engineer who came to the rescue when it wouldn't work. He was Bill Cull, perfector of a universal joint of great beauty, even to those of us who failed physics-with-chemistry O-level. Cramming steel rods, ball-bearings and grooves into a tight metal ball, it transferred power from the Mini's engine through nearly 90 degrees to the car's Lilliput-size front wheels.

"Nothing else worked," says Bob Grice, apprentice of the year at Longbridge in the Mini's launch year, 1959. "Everything broke, including a superjoint licensed from Porsche." The secret Mini team were tearing their hair out when a patent trawl – the 1950s equivalent of Google – unearthed Cull.

The joints had previously had a tiny run as a secret component in Royal Navy submarine periscopes. They worked steadfastly on all 5,387,862 cars, including the Mini-trac, a one-off with caterpillar tracks used by Australian scientists in Antarctica which was built in a workshop in the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine.

Plans are now afoot to fix a plaque to a similar lock-up building in Shipley, near Bradford, where Cull ran his own business after leaving the local Scott motorbike company. His previous designs included Scott's Flying Squirrel, an adapted engine that powered the 1930s kit plane The Flying Flea, a sort of aerial Mini that proved too dangerous to make the commercial big time.

A modest man, absorbed in experiments until he died in his 90s, Cull never challenged the man nicknamed "Arragonis" for his place in history, and others were mostly too busy to push on his behalf. An exception is a retired colleague, Peter Wheeler, who fought successfully for Cull to be given his company Mini when he retired. "For goodness sake," he told penny-pinching colleagues who wanted to keep the car. "If it wasn't for this man, none of you would have jobs."







Cull's story is told for the first time in A Mini Adventure by Martin Wainwright, published this month by Aurum Press.MotoringMartin Wainwright
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