Lea-Francis Logo: Meaning, History and Evolution

The Lea-Francis logo is a round badge with a red ring that carries the name LEA-FRANCIS across the top and COVENTRY along the bottom, around a silver centre with a heraldic creature. Lea-Francis was a British maker of bicycles, cars and motorcycles that started in Coventry in 1895.

Lea-Francis Logo

The Lea-Francis emblem is a circular enamel and metal badge. A deep red ring holds the name in small white capitals: LEA-FRANCIS arcs over the top and COVENTRY follows the lower curve. The centre is a silver disc with the Lea-Francis symbol, a creature drawn in the style of a heraldic beast next to a monogram of the letters L and F.

The Lea-Francis badge was fitted to the radiator at the front of the car. It sits on a flat plate of the radiator shell on the 1928 Hyper and on the front of the radiator on the 1929 Hyper Le Mans. The red, silver and white colours make this Lea-Francis car logo easy to pick out against the polished metal, and the page offers the Lea-Francis logo PNG with a transparent background.

Lea-Francis Logo History

The Lea-Francis logo kept the same round badge design over the years shown here. The old Lea-Francis logo, seen on the 1928 Hyper, has the red ring, the name above and COVENTRY below, and the silver centre with the creature and the monogram.

The new Lea-Francis logo, from the 1949 HP 14 Sports, is the same badge in the same layout. No change to the design is visible between the two cars, 21 years apart.

Lea-Francis History

R. H. Lea and G. I. Francis started the business in Coventry in 1895, and it began by building bicycles. The company branched out into car manufacturing in 1903 and motorcycles in 1911. It built cars under licence for Singer, and from 1919 it began building its own cars from bought-in components.

A sporting image began to appear from about 1925, leading to models such as the Hyper and the Ace of Spades. The Hyper, also called the S-type, was the first British supercharged production car, with a 1.5 litre Meadows engine. In 1928 a Lea-Francis Hyper won the Ulster TT, driven by Kaye Don. After the war car production restarted in 1946 with the 14 hp models.

The last model was the Lynx, a roadster with a Ford Zephyr 2.6 litre six-cylinder engine, shown at the October 1960 British Motor Show. Only three were made, and almost 10,000 Lea-Francis vehicles were built in all. The motor manufacturing part of the company passed to a receiver in 1962. Barrie Price later bought the name, and his firm has serviced surviving cars and built new ones to order since 1980.