ISBN 9780473217389; This a5 sized soft covered book by Bob Simmonds contains 260 pages, with 85,700 words and many images and illustrations of the vehicles mentioned.  The book was to be about COMMERS, & BEDFORDS trucks, and NUFFIELD tractors but ended up documenting every vehicle and almost each piece of plant that has gone through my hands between 1956 & 2010, with a  short piece on each of the 106 items. Right from my first job in 1956 until I retired in 2006 a BEDFORD or a COMMER or a NUFFIELD have been part of my life, and put simply I loved almost every minute I spent with them.   The COMMER name actually started as Commercial cars and ended up being shortened to Commer, by the mid sixties the Chrysler Corporation had the stick off the Rootes Group and by the seventies were openly selling COMMERS as DODGES. Even though I went from driving a Commer to a Dodge, then I was not aware of the connection, as we or I anyway never saw what looked like a Commer with a Dodge badge on it. I knew the KEW DODGES and the later DODGE 500 had been made at Kew in Britain but just assumed that for some reason we were importing American trucks from Britain. Not for a second did I think that the DODGES were commers or that the last commers  were actually DODGES.
While my main interest in rootes group  is mainly, from the ones I have owned and operated, my association with them goes back to my first job in 1956. Strangely, while my Dad owned a mixture of gear in his lifetime, and did have both  rootes & general motors  built cars he never owned a COMMER, BEDFORD or a NUFFIELD.  As the intention of this book is to mention almost every bit of gear that I have owned outright, and has been of any consequence to me, I have firstly spent some time coming to grasp with and understanding the companies history as I have seen it (rightly or wrongly). Followed by the section, that as the title suggests, deals with my bosses  gear as I was introduced to it,  then our gear as it was acquired, and I will continuing  to refer to the BOB BOOKS that are relevant. The strange thing about these vehicles is their heritage, I have always thought that the three of them were as BRITISH as you could get, but it was not until I was looking into their origins that I was confronted with and eventually had to accept the fact that  BEDFORD  never was, but did end up being British (Scottish) owned at the end.  While  COMMER on the other hand may have started as British  the last of them were not. The BEDFORD started life in England as a CHEVROLET, however it was General Motors in America that actually held the stick. NUFFIELD fared no better because it had started down its slippery path in 1952 when the Nuffield Organisation and Austin merged to form the British Motor Corporation. In 1966 BMC merged with Jaguar to form British Motor Holdings then in 1968 it was the end for the NUFFIELD. During the first few years while the blue LEYLAND was still basically a Nuffield it was not difficult to accept the new tractor. Nevertheless the mergers and renaming continued and in 1982 Leyland tractors were sold to  maeshall tractors  and I could not have cared less, in fact at the time I did not even know.
ABC