Byvan

Byvan identifies the unusual postwar light-delivery-vehicle family created by Turner Manufacturing Company of Wolverhampton. Turner traced its industrial roots to Thomas Turner & Sons in 1859, had manufactured steam and petrol cars from 1902 to 1928, and during the Second World War concentrated on recovery winches and aircraft undercarriage. Seeking peacetime products from its engineering capacity, the firm devised a compact vehicle around an integral engine-and-transmission unit carried by the steerable, driven front-wheel assembly. A sample By-Van seen in Brussels in April 1946 used a war-surplus 125/126 cc Royal Enfield Flying Flea engine and three-speed gearbox over pressed-steel forks. Series descriptions instead specify Turner's own fan-cooled 148 cc Tiger horizontal single-cylinder two-stroke, flywheel-magneto ignition, petroil lubrication, hand starting and chain drive. Light Delivery Vehicles Ltd was formed as the marketing company in 1947, operating from Lever Street; Turner itself built the machines at its Wolverhampton works. The By-Van was a two-wheel parcel carrier whose pressed-steel pannier body doubled as its principal structure. It used a two-speed gearbox, rubber suspension, approximately 5.75 cubic feet of cargo space, deployable Snap-Jack support legs and a published payload variously given as 1.25 or 1.5 cwt; the two-wheel machine is fully preserved in this history but excluded from automobile model rows under the catalog's wheel-count scope. The qualifying Tri-Van placed a coachbuilt body behind the straddling rider on a fabricated frame with two sprung rear wheels, three-speed gearbox and approximately 3 cwt payload. The Rixi adapted that three-wheel chassis into a rickshaw-like passenger carrier with a four-person seat over the rear axle. Published top speed was about 30 mph; stated economy was roughly 75 mpg for Tri-Van and 80–90 mpg for By-Van. Prices are reported as £150 for Tri-Van and £120 for By-Van. Turner's own chronology assigns the light-delivery vehicles to 1946–58, though specialist histories describe them chiefly as a late-1940s venture and do not prove continuous production, annual changes or totals. None achieved wide acceptance. Only one Tri-Van and at least two By-Vans were known to survive in a 2022 account. Two catalog rows therefore capture every recoverable three-wheel family—Tri-Van and Rixi—while the two-wheel By-Van remains explicitly accounted for without being misclassified as an automobile. Earlier Turner cars, Turner-Miesse vehicles, Yeoman tractors, engines, winches and transmissions retain their own product or marque identities and are not Byvan models.

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