Gerald Palmer

Who was Gerald Palmer?

Gerald Marley Palmer was a British car designer.

Born in England, Palmer grew up in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where his father was chief engineer to the state run railways. He returned to England in 1927 where he started an engineering apprenticeship with Scammell, the commercial vehicle builders, and studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic. In his spare time he designed and built a sports car for the racing driver Joan Richmond and called it the Deroy after a tin mine his father owned in Mozambique. He completed the Deroy in 1936 and drove the car to the M.G. works at Abingdon where he showed it to Cecil Kimber. Kimber arranged for Palmer to be interviewed by chief engineer Vic Oak, which resulted in Palmer getting a job in the Morris drawing office at Cowley with responsibility for development of a new generation of M.G. cars. During 1937 and 1938, Palmer was responsible for leading the design of the MG Y-type which, due to the onset of hostilities, would not begin production until 1947.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, Gerald Palmer was reassigned to work on portable anaesthetic apparatus, the Oxford Vaporiser, for front line use. On completion of this he pursued development on a new 2-stroke engine and production of Tiger Moth training aircraft.