Adelaide

The Holden story begins in the 1850s when James Alexander Holden left England and established a leather, saddlery and coach ironmonger business in King William Street in the centre of Adelaide. He could not have imagined the extent to which his family name would become so attached to an Australian icon almost 100 years later when the first Holden car rolled off the production line in 1948.

In 1885 Holden joined with Henry Frost to establish Holden & Frost. This company built and repaired horse-drawn vehicles, as well as continuing to produce leather products. The company moved to building motorcycle sidecars in 1913 and then, a year later, car bodies.

In response to the demands of World War I, including import restrictions, Holden’s Motor Body Builders Ltd was established in 1917 as a subsidiary of Holden & Frost. The company was dedicated to manufacturing car bodies for Chevrolet, Ford and Buick, in premises on Grenfell Street and then at a new factory on King William Street.  

Woodville

In 1923 Holden’s Motor Body Builders purchased a 22-acre (9 hectare) site at Cheltenham, although the plant was named after the neighbouring suburb Woodville. Also, in 1923 General Motors contracted the company, now run by Alexander Holden’s son Henry, to build car bodies for them. By the second half of the 1920s, Holden was building 36,000 car bodies per year.  

With the outbreak of war in 1939, Holden began producing war ordnance, including aircraft engines, machine guns, boats and armoured cars. For most of the war, all 5,000 employees at Woodville became employees of the federal government. By this time, Holden had expanded interstate with a new factory at Fishermans Bend, Melbourne.

The Woodville plant was particularly instrumental in the production of the first all-Australian Holden car, which was completed in 1948. Woodville was responsible for the bodies and the metal work.

Birkenhead

In 1926 Holden leased a 5.5 acre plot (9 hectares) from the South Australian Harbors Board on what is now the corner of Nelson Street and Semaphore Road.  The location seemed fortuitously located close to the Port River and the railway, but it was also quite a distance to the centre of Adelaide which proved problematic in the future, especially because there was no bridge across the Port River until 1940. 

Originally, the Birkenhead plant was intended to employ 100 workmen to produce 35 cars per day. Two years later the workforce had more than doubled but the Depression impacted car sales dramatically and, to consolidate manufacturing efforts, staff were transferred to the Woodville plant and Birkenhead became redundant for seven years.  

Elizabeth

GMH was so successful, and the Woodville site limited in opportunities for expansion, that another factory became necessary. The new plant in Elizabeth, 27 kilometres north of Adelaide, was part of a £7.5 million investment for GMH in South Australia. Set on 235 acres (95 hectares), the Elizabeth plant employed some 1,400 people in Stage 1 alone.   

GMH’s physical expansion signalled a boom in Holden car production, but the location of the factory was equally as important. Elizabeth was not only a place to work, but also a place to live. It attracted new migrants with the promise of a modern home and a job with Holden. It was named for Queen Elizabeth who visited the suburb, and of course, the Holden plant as well, in 1963. 

The site for the Elizabeth plant was chosen because of its favourable location for transport and communication, but also because GMH benefitted from the concurrent development of Elizabeth as a town. For example, because the growing population of Elizabeth had access to new gas pipelines and rail connections, so too did GMH.   

By 1985, the complex had grown to 123 hectares with 4,400 employees, and was producing over 200 vehicles per day. Holden Elizabeth was viewed as a leading manufacturer and a reliable supplier to world markets.

This number was helped by the advancement of technological equipment. However, GMH was careful to strike the right balance between robots and human labour, as seen in the following film excerpts.