The designer who gave James Bond his wheels

HAROLD BEACH

CAR DESIGNER

15-2-1913 - 24-1-2010

By MARTIN BUCKLEY

HAROLD Beach, the engineer with overall responsibility for the design of Aston Martin's most important and charismatic postwar cars - the DB4, DB5 and DB6 - has died in England. He was 96.

These cars put the company on the map as the builder of Britain's finest and most glamorous GT cars, helped in no small measure by the familiar silver DB5 which, with lethal additions, appeared as James Bond's car in the films Goldfinger (pictured with Sean Connery in 1964) and Thunderball (1965).

Later V8-engined Astons, also conceived by Beach, were larger and, to some, less appealing. Before he retired in 1978, he engineered a power-operated soft-top for the V8 Volante model.

The DB models were styled by Touring in Italy, with an engine designed by Tadek Marek, a Pole, but it was Beach's platform chassis and suspension that tied them all together. He also contributed the trademark wing vents used by every subsequent Aston.

Born in Acton, west London, Beach was educated privately and studied engineering at technical college to become a draughtsman. In 1938, he started at Barker's, the London coachbuilders, and went on to assist Viscount Curzon, a director of the Rolls-Royce coachbuilder Barker, with his racing cars. Exposure to the finest high-performance machinery of the day - Alfa Romeo, Bugatti, Delage and Mercedes - fired the young man's enthusiasm for fast cars.

Aged 20, Beach left Barker for a job as a draughtsman for Beardmore, the taxi and truck builders, but after three years joined a Barker colleague, James Ridlington, making parts for Rolls-Royce and other companies. There he designed a lightweight aluminium racing body for a 4.25-litre Bentley, commissioned by Eddie Hall, a cotton-mill owner and racing car driver.

During World War II, Beach worked for the Hungarian engineer Nicholas Straussler on military vehicles, including the floating tanks used in the D-Day landings.

In 1950, by then married and working for Garner-Straussler Mechanisation, he spotted a job advert for a design draughtsman for David Brown Tractors automobile division - in other words, the Aston Martin and Lagonda factories in west London that Brown had recently acquired and amalgamated.

In September 1950, Beach started work at Aston Martin Lagonda on a successor to the DB2 - working alongside the former Auto Union grand prix car designer Robert Eberan von Eberhorst, and produced the DB2/4 and the DB MkIII. By the time he replaced Eberhorst as chief designer at Aston Martin Lagonda in 1956, plans were well advanced for the DB4.

The 224 km/h DB4 was launched to huge acclaim at the Earls Court motor show in 1958 and, although there were early problems with Marek's engine, it was a major success.

Beach retained his position after Brown sold loss-making Aston Martin in 1972 and through two other changes of regime, including the liquidation debacle of 1974, until the company began to find its feet again in the late 1970s.

His wife, Mabel, predeceased him; a stepson survives him.

GUARDIAN