It’s Tuesday evening where I am, some way beyond our usual appointment with the musty pages of motoring past, so let’s get straight down to business.
The Rootes Group is late and relatively unlamented, given its fascinating history and the diverse range of products it churned out. Its constituent brands included Hillman, Singer and Sunbeam, more about which we’ll see in a future Carchive instalment. Jewel of the crown, though, was Humber. It sat at the top of the Rootes tree, and was its most luxurious nameplate – the VIP-approved Humber Super Snipe among its poshest products. Today, though, we’re looking at the Sceptre – the final model to bear the Humber name. Welcome back to The Carchive.

Images become larger and more legible after a damn good clicking

“Sceptre – the fast, quiet, perfectly-poised, impressively-luxurious saloon already renowned for its quality. Sceptre standards are high. Sceptre performance is superlative”.
The Humber Sceptre was the ritziest member of the Arrow series Rootes Group cars. It’s a sister to the Singer Vogue and Hillman Hunter (which The Carchive has already documented in its post-1976 Chrysler form). It’s also worth mentioning that it went on to be built as the Paykan Hunter in Iran for a number of years, eventually donating its rear-wheel drive chassis to have the bodywork of a front-wheel drive Peugeot 405 draped over it.
Of all Arrow iterations, it’s the Hunter that most folk recall most readily, and which was the first to land in showrooms – in the latter part of 1966. The Sceptre built on those foundations, and was distinguished by its four headlamps and deep horizontally vaned grille, along with a leathercloth-covered roof. Compared to what had gone before, the Sceptre was by far the least Humber of all the Humbers.

“…the Sceptre’s seating is a triumph of design, based on a novel tubular construction overlaid with deep moulded latex foam. Anatomically shaped, it reaches that ultimate in comfort when you are scarcely aware of it.”
Still, this only mattered to those among whom it mattered. Looked at on its own merits, the Sceptre certainly was a very well appointed and comfortable car, of neat, crisp design with a good deal of modesty. Only the whitewall tyres tipped the Sceptre into ostentation.
Compared to the Hunter, the interior was somewhat transformed to fit its quasi-luxury brand positioning. The dashboard was carved out of timber, clad in walnut veneer with a higher sheen than the earth viewed from space. Those ‘novel’ seats weren’t leather but something even better – AMBLA. This, said Humber, was “chosen for its almost indestructible beauty”.

“Almost without noticing, we’ve moved on from the comfort conducive to safe driving to sheer pampered luxury”
There are some fantastic lines of text in this brochure. “The facia is laid out as neatly and efficiently as your office desk with its telephones and intercom”, which rather suggests that the favoured audience for the Sceptre consisted managerial types, not the kind of oily-fingered urchins who would be satisfied by a Hillman Hunter.
By ’60s standards, the dashboard was pretty well furnished, with a rev-counter, dials for oil pressure, amps, fuel and water temperature, and a speedometer that read to 120mph – optimistic enough to accommodate even the very longest of steep downhill gradients.
 

“The Sceptre is designed for drivers who know how to handle power, and use it for safety as well as speed. When you take it overseas you’ll find it capable of speeds over 95mph which means plenty of thrust in hand for British motorways.”
Power came from a 1,725cc slant four, and it was a game enough engine, but one whose status in life was rather more shop worker than chauffeur. Indeed, the Hillman GT (the ‘sporty’ version of the Hunter) boasted the self same engine, and to be fair, it was a second carburettor and a high-lift cam away from 70bhp family car tune. But it was priced almost 20% higher than the Hunter, and the competition was rather tempting, too.
It included the Ford Cortina 1600E – the poshest version of what was among the most fashionable cars on the late ’60s market, and which was a couple of hundred quid cheaper, too. Sadly, the Sceptre simply wasn’t big enough for its price.
Once the Super Snipe died in ’67, the Arrow series was the biggest car Rootes had to offer. Ford, meanwhile, had the Cortina as a Hunter rival, with the slightly larger Ford Corsair slotting in just above it in the range. It was that which the Sceptre really had to compete with, but it was a bit of a stretch.
(All images are of original manufacturers’ publicity materials, photographed by me. Copyright presumably belongs to Peugeot, who took over Rootes interests after Chrysler Europe disintegrated in the early 80s. Would have been even more interesting if that hadn’t happened, and the Humber name fell under the MOPAR / FCA umbrella….. Isn’t history fascinating?)