For 20 years after the second world war, the British motor industry was one of the great industrial engines of the UK economy. Outside America, it was also one of the most prolific and productive, looked up to by emerging competitors, such as Japan, for its abilities in design and production engineering. Jack Daniels, who has died aged 92, was the development engineer and draughtsman who, as right-hand man to the Mini designer Alec Issigonis, brought about a revolution in popular motoring.
Born in Oxford, Daniels came from a farming family and was educated at Oxford Central school, before joining the MG company as a teenage apprentice in 1927. There, he worked on various projects including the advanced R-type racing car, which had the then advanced feature of fully independent suspension.
On the closure of the MG racing programme in 1935, the MG design staff, including Daniels, were transferred to the parent Morris plant at Cowley, where he met Issigonis. Together, the two young men started experimenting with the new independent front suspension ideas coming out of America. Up to that time, British production cars almost universally used "cart" springs and solid axles.
Little came of this work before the start of the second world war, which saw both men working on various military vehicles for Morris. However, by 1942, Issigonis began design work on a new popular car, the Minor, originally called the Mosquito, and got Daniels, who he described as "the best all-round draughtsman in the country", assigned to his project.
Daniels was perhaps the only colleague who could steer the inspirational, if arrogant, Issigonis away from his less practical ideas. When I met Daniels some years ago, while researching Issigonis's work, it was evident why he was the ideal lieutenant to the opinionated design chief. Self-assured, quiet, yet amiable and firm, Daniels seemed quite unlike the combative and chippy characters who abounded in the motor industry. He said of Issigonis, "We got on well together, but he was the gaffer."
"Issigonis basically wanted to design everything," Daniels recalled, and "he got what he wanted, even if it was wrong." But although there was no "intentional delegation", Issigonis relied crucially on Daniels's ability to take his brilliant, impressionistic sketches and turn them into dimensioned engineering solutions - a process which gave Daniels considerable discrete control over interpretation and execution.
When their Morris Minor was released in 1948, reviewers enthused about roadholding and controllability that was "streets ahead of virtually any other production car".
Issigonis and Daniels (who now had complete control of the Morris design and development office) then devised two experimental Minors which were to be critical to the future. One was rubber-sprung, fitted with suspension units and devised by another visionary engineer, Issigonis's friend and collaborator, Alex Moulton. The other project entailed adapting the rear-drive Minor to front-wheel drive.
The front-drive Minor had an immense propaganda value within the company, Daniels recalled, because he parked it under the window of George Harriman, then the boss of BMC (formed by the merger of Morris and Austin), and used it through the awful winter of 1955-56 to travel between company sites, saying, "I'll take the safest vehicle we've got."
In 1956, Issigonis returned to BMC after a spell at the up-market carmaker Alvis with a commission to design a new small family car. With the Suez crisis "oil shock", the brief shifted towards an ultra-small economy car that would become the Mini. Issigonis quickly "grabbed Daniels" and took him up to "the Kremlin" - then the BMC headquarters at Longbridge.
As on the Minor project, Daniels became the right-hand man, running the project on a day-to-day basis, turning Issigonis's sketches into working drawings. Daniels also ran "the cell" - the self-contained project group that Issigonis set up for each car project. Members of those teams recall that "these cars weren't designed in vast offices, maybe six people and a couple of fitters". However, a highly demanding brief is a spur to the creative designer, and Issigonis set out to exceed current standards in handling and comfort in a car no longer than 10 feet (3.04m) and "we fought for every quarter inch". None the less, the project was completed in just over two years, in part because of experience with the front-drive and the rubber-sprung Minors.
With the Mini, launched in 1959, the ideas that had been circulating in the industry and in Issigonis's brain really came together. It had front-wheel drive, with a new ultra-compact engine/transmission layout, it was nose heavy for stability, and it had space-saving independent suspension all round, using Moulton's rubber units.
The Mini revolutionised the world's motoring, and established an architecture for the small and medium-sized car that is universal and still with us. Nevertheless, as Moulton remarked, in industry "one man on his own can accomplish exactly zero". Daniels, who retired in 1977, was the perfect foil to Issigonis and an essential figure in bringing these designs to fruition.
He is survived by a son and daughter. His wife Mabel predeceased him, as did another son.
· William John Daniels, engineer, born February 8 1912; died November 27 2004
