From the archives of Bob Montgomery, motoring historian
THE REMARKABLE REX MCCANDLESS: Rex McCandless was born in 1915 into a farming family living near Hillsborough, Co Down. He was a poor student at school and it was only with extra tuition that he passed the entrance examination to become a boy apprentice at RAF Halton, only to then fail the medical examination.
Back home, Rex went to work with E T Green's, the Belfast millers, before returning to England where he found work servicing the fleet of lorries which delivered the Daily Herald to London's stations.
Meanwhile, an aunt had given him a present of a 1923 side-valve Raleigh motorcycle. It was a gift which was to alter the whole course of his life. With the extra money he was now earning, Rex bought a 250cc Triumph.
At the outbreak of the second World War he returned to Belfast and a job at Short Brothers & Harland. He bought a 1940 Triumph Tiger 100 - then just about the fastest road-going motorcycle one could buy - and, as a result, became friends with another Tiger 100 owner, Artie Bell.
Both were now racing their motorcycles and Rex scored a notable win to take the 500 road race championship at Phoenix Park in 1940. Other wins followed and Rex continued to race successfully for several more years.
After a short-lived partnership in a light engineering business with Artie, Rex and his brother Crombie started their own construction machinery business together. Rex continued to develop his motorcycles and produced one to his own design which he called the Benial.
The Benial - the name means the beast - had many innovative features, in particular a very rigid frame and a new approach to rear suspension. It handled superbly and would later become the basis of the famous Norton Featherbed, the most famous motorcycle frame in the world.
Rex's association with Norton came about when he and his close friend, Freddie Dixon, set-up the Triumph Grand Prix machine of Kildareman Ernie Lyons at the 1946 September Manx races. Ernie proceeded to trounce the opposition despite a broken frame on the Triumph.
As a result Norton approached Rex, beginning a very successful seven-year association.
In the early 1950s, Rex turned his attention to cars, in particular the design of an off-road four-wheel-drive vehicle for military use. Harry Ferguson became involved in the project, and the eventual result was a vehicle called the Mule.
The Mule had incredible performance. In a test on Ferguson's estate near Birmingham a Jeep averaged 18mph over a set course, a Land Rover 20mph and the Mule 35mph. The British army showed strong interest and just when it seemed success was on hand, Rex and Ferguson fell out. With Ferguson's death in 1960 the project fizzled out.
Meanwhile, Rex was working on two other cars. The first was a trials car, the second was an attractive, aluminum-bodied two-seater sports car. Both cars shared their underpinnings: a 1172cc Ford engine whose gearbox and torque tube to the back axle formed a rigid spine to which the independent front and rear suspensions were attached. Sadly, only a handful of these innovative cars were built.
Around this time Rex and Crombie bought a De Havilland Hornet Moth. It required a runway and Rex soon began to think there must be a better way! The result was the McCandless Autogyro powered by a Triumph twin cylinder motorcycle engine.
Rex soon discovered that there was strong official opposition to this type of aircraft because of a number of unexplained fatal accidents. Rex studied the problem and discovered the cause of the problem. However it was to take a further 12 years before he managed to change the minds of officialdom.
Today, the Autogyro and other machines designed and built by Rex can be seen at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum at Cultra, just outside Belfast. Rex McCandless, a remarkable self-taught engineer and designer, died in 1992.