After the First World War, William Beardmore and Company, the Glasgow shipbuilders and engineers, set up Beardmore Motors to build cars and London-type taxis at factories around Glasgow. The 11.4 hp car, built at Anniesland, was launched at Olympia in 1919, and a Super Sports version came with a certificate that it had lapped Brooklands at 70 mph. When Anniesland closed in the mid-1920s, car production moved to the taxi factory at Paisley.
The first Beardmore taxi, built at Paisley from 1919 to meet the Metropolitan Police’s Conditions of Fitness, was so tough and reliable that it earned the name “the Rolls-Royce of taxicabs”. After William Beardmore was removed from the board in 1929, the directors bought out Beardmore Motors and moved taxi production to Hendon in north London, where the Paramount models of the 1930s used Commer engines; with everything up front, they were nicknamed the “greengrocer’s barrow”.
After the war Beardmore at first sold the Nuffield Oxford cab, then returned with its own Mk7 Paramount in 1954, with an aluminium-over-ash body and Ford or Perkins diesel engines. Weymann took over body production at Addlestone in 1956 and soon the whole cab, and when Metro-Cammell bought Weymann in 1966, production moved to Washwood Heath in Birmingham, where it ended late that year.
