On Saturday 25 July the Bata Reminiscence Centre was visited by Czech car enthusiasts as part of their 14th annual rally titled ‘Forts & Factories of Essex’.
The cars, all rear-engined and air-cooled, were Czech-built Tatras that included two 1946 cars of a type launched a decade earlier, and the youngest was from 1996. The farthest-travelled car had been driven from Tabor in the Czech Republic. Tatra Register UK, with members around the world, was founded in 1993.
What would become the Tatra company was already half a century old when it made its first car in 1897, and when it built its last in 1998 was the third-oldest manufacturer still in production, after Mercedes-Benz and Peugeot. Tatra still builds trucks in the Czech town of Kopřivnice, and has an assembly plant in India, not to be confused with Tata that also builds trucks there.
The group visited the Bata museum and were given a talk and a guided tour of the Estate by the volunteers.
Many who had visited Zlín in the Czech republic, where Bata was founded and based, were able to appreciate the unmistakably Czech architecture of the housing and factories at East Tilbury, and learn the fascinating history of Tomáš Baťa’s world-wide shoe-making organisation and its English operations.
Author: Ian Tisdale, Chairman of the Tatra Group
