Triumph’s origins trace to 1885, when Siegfried Bettmann founded a Coventry bicycle business that adopted the Triumph name the following year. Motorcycle production followed from 1902, and the company built its first car, the Triumph 10/20, in 1923 at its Priory Street works in Coventry.
The Priory Street factory was destroyed by German bombing in 1940, shortly after the original Triumph Motor Company had gone into receivership in 1939. The Standard Motor Company bought what remained of Triumph in 1944 and moved production to its own Canley plant on the edge of Coventry, where the marque built its best-known models, including the TR series, Spitfire, Herald and Dolomite.
Standard-Triumph was absorbed into Leyland Motors around 1960-61 (sources differ on the exact year) and then British Leyland in 1968. Triumph-badged cars continued until 1984, when the marque was retired by British Leyland; the business was not renamed Rover Group until 1986, two years later. BMW acquired the rights to the Triumph car name in 1994 alongside the rest of Rover Group, though no Triumph car has been built since. The unrelated Triumph motorcycle brand, defunct since the early 1980s, was revived separately in 1983 by John Bloor and has no corporate connection to BMW or to the car marque.
The TR7 sports car, launched in 1975, was unusually peripatetic even by Triumph’s standards: built first at Speke, Liverpool, then Canley, Coventry from 1978, and finally Solihull from 1980 until the model’s demise in 1981.
