One of the first and best-known names to pop up when discussions of England's famous specialty sports car "cottage industry" arise is TVR, a brand that has been in and out of the news numerous times in its tumultuous five decades of existence, often as much for its changes in ownership as for the raw power and outrageousness of its two-seaters. And like those changes in ownership, the way in which TVR expressed its nameplate changed from time to time.
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The company was established in 1947 by Blackpool native Trevor Wilkinson, and its name came from his: TVR was a contraction of his first name. Apprenticed at a local garage at age 14 in 1937, Wilkinson's first post-war venture was a garage-workshop called Trevcar Engineering, and he specialized in manufacturing items ranging from bakery equipment to a machine that coated ice cream blocks in chocolate. It was around this time that he built an aluminum-bodied two-seat sports special on an Alvis Firebird chassis, and after teaming up with Jack Pickard in 1947, he founded TVR Engineering.
The company's early sales were of tubular chassis units topped with hand-modified fiberglass bodies, powered by engines from Coventry Climax, MG and others. The earliest form of TVR badge fitted to these cars was a fairly crude casting that encompassed a large, widely spaced V off of which six horizontal bars emerged, forming the shape of two wings; a smaller T and R were placed on top of the wing forms, at either side of the V.
By the time the Grantura--considered the first production TVR--was being built in numbers in the late 1950s, it was wearing a more sophisticated badge. The emblem was a chromed casting, and the design consisted of TVR letters in a tight oval, which had short stalks on the horizontal plane. The outsized V in TVR had a base that extended below the oval, and its stalks extended up out of the oval, where two wing-like horizontal extensions curved off and tapered up at their ends. This design was later used in a one-piece, V-shaped cloisonné badge, with mild modifications to the letter V's shape.
It was shortly after Trevor Wilkinson sold his interests in his eponymous company in the mid-1960s that a new emblem was designed, and its basic style would remain, in modified form, to the present day. This emblem used a stylized typeface whose V extended to the left to form the top of the T, and whose right line also formed the curves of the R; this sharp typeface was placed on a plain green or blue rectangle, with the word "ENGLAND" below.
The wedge-shaped 1980 Tasmin introduced another take on the iconic typeface letters. Often seen as a large decal on the car's nose, the angular letters were filled with thin horizontal lines that allowed the car's body color to show through. This style would continue in metal form in the next two decades; the letters' horizontal lines were colored or black, and the chrome plating formed the relief. In its latest form, a bar was removed from the emblem's T to echo the earlier rectangle-housed typeface style.
This article originally appeared in the September, 2009 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.
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