Triumph Roadster: dickey seats, Bergerac and the last of a breed (1946–1949)

Sir John Black wanted a sports car to take on Jaguar, and what his Standard works actually built in 1946 was something far stranger and more loveable: the Triumph Roadster, a three-abreast tourer with the last production dickey seat in the world, an engine borrowed back from Jaguar, and a silhouette no other post-war car attempted. Thirty-five years later television made it immortal as the car of a Jersey detective, and the Triumph story’s most theatrical opening act has never lacked an audience since.

Aluminium ambitions

Standard-Triumph emerged from the war with aircraft-grade aluminium supplies and no sports car, so the Roadster was drawn around what the works could get: hand-formed aluminium panels over an ash frame on a tubular steel chassis, built without expensive press tooling. Frank Callaby’s styling looked backwards and forwards at once, pre-war wings and post-war width, with a bench up front for three. The 1800 Roadster of 1946 used the 1,776cc overhead-valve four Standard supplied to Jaguar, and in 1948 the 2000 Roadster adopted the new Vanguard 2,088cc wet-liner engine, the same tough unit that later powered the TR2 and half the world’s grey Ferguson tractors.

The last dickey seat in the world

The Roadster’s party piece lives in its tail: lift the rear deck and two extra seats fold out into the open air, complete with their own fold-up windscreen and a step on the bumper for boarding. Dickey seats belonged to the twenties and thirties, and the Roadster carried the idea past the war purely because Coventry judged charm a sellable commodity; no production car anywhere fitted one again. It seats five in defiance of all weather forecasting, and at shows the deployed dickey draws crowds like nothing twice the Roadster’s value.

Bergerac: a decade of Sunday-night fame

From 1981 to 1991 John Nettles drove a maroon 1947 Roadster around Jersey as detective Jim Bergerac, and the BBC gave the model a second career: for a decade the Roadster was on television most Sunday nights, lodged permanently in the national memory. The effect endures, an instant recognition that few 1940s cars enjoy, steady value support, and the same question from every passer-by. Owners report the programme still sells the car to people who have never heard of a dickey seat, which would have delighted Sir John Black enormously.

From Roadster to TR: the bridge

The Roadster’s commercial failure taught Coventry the lesson that built its greatest success. Sales of 6,501 in three years told Sir John Black that charm alone would not beat Jaguar, and the 2000 Roadster’s Vanguard engine pointed the way: the same 2,088cc four, breathed on, powered the TR2 prototype that stunned Geneva in 1952 and founded the TR line that carried the company for two decades. Roadster owners enjoy the connection enormously, their unhurried tourer sharing its heart with outright sports cars, and the club scene overlaps accordingly. In the marque’s story the Roadster is the necessary first draft, the car that found out what would not work so the TR could find out what would.

What a Roadster is like to drive

Expect vintage manners with post-war reliability. The steering is heavy and low-geared, the column change (three-speed on the 2000, four on the 1800) unhurried, and 68 bhp moves the aluminium body with more dignity than urgency, 75 mph flat out and happiest at a 50 mph amble down a summer lane. But the engines are tractor-tough, the chassis rides gently, and visibility over that long bonnet is pure theatre. It is a car for arriving, not for hurrying, and everyone who rides in the dickey once remembers it for life.

Buying a Triumph Roadster today

The ash frame is the survey: aluminium panels resist rust but the timber beneath and the steel chassis both want expert inspection, and body restoration is coachbuilding, priced accordingly. Mechanical parts are simple and shared, the Vanguard engine especially, with the Standard Vanguard and tractor worlds keeping supplies healthy. The owners club register knows most surviving cars. Check dickey mechanisms and hood irons for completeness, as remaking either is specialist work, and prefer documented body repair over shine.

Values: theatre at saloon prices

Eighty measured sales at a £15,900 median make the Roadster unusually liquid for a 1940s British car: usable examples from £12,000, good ones £16,000 to £25,000, the finest beyond £30,000. That buys the last dickey seat in production history, television fame, and an entrance no 1940s rival can match at any money. The Roadster was never the sports car Sir John Black wanted, and posterity has decided that was the best thing about it.

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