Talbot was originally founded in 1903 in Britain by Charles Chetwynd-Talbot, the 20th Earl of Shrewsbury. He started by importing the French Clement-Bayard cars and selling them as Clement-Talbot before importing parts from France and building his own cars called Talbot in North London.
After the First World War, Clement-Bayard stopped building full cars when they were acquired by Citroen and Talbot were acquired by the French owned subsidiary of Darracq SA, founded by Alexandre Darracq (who had an initial arrangement with Adam Opel and ALFA of Alfa Romeo). The British cars became Talbot-Darracq and in 1920 they merged with the Sunbeam Motorcar Company to become Sunbeam Talbot Darracq.
This company achieved notable success on the track that helped to market the sports car and luxury vehicles with success at the Le Mans 24 hour race and they even built the Sunbeam 350hp (named “Bluebird”) that used a V12 aero engine to capture the Land Speed Record in 1925.
After Sunbeam Talbot Darracq collapsed in 1935, the Rootes Group bought the Sunbeam and Talbot pieces to create the Sunbeam Talbot brand, which lasted until the mid 50s when the Talbot brand was dropped.
The Darracq piece was acquired by Anthony Lago who continued the development of cars as Talbot-Lago or Lago-Talbot depending on who wrote the history! Lago specialised initially in building rolling chassis for coachbuilders to clothe with luxury bodies. After the Second World War Talbot-Lago used Maserati, BMW and Simca engines but the French Government heavily taxed cars with engines over 2 litres and this had a big impact on the viability of the company. The French Talbots were success in early F1 racing in 1950 and 51.
In 1959 they were acquired by Simca (who originally built FIATs under licence) and in the same year Chrysler took an initial stake in Simca. This stake grew until the early 70s when Chrysler took full control of Simca. So for 15 years there were no Talbots at all being sold. Chrysler had also taken control of the Rootes Group and were slowly assimilating everyone into the Chrysler brand.
Chrysler Europe collapsed in 1977 when the parent company was struggling and the remains were bought by PSA Peugeot who resurrected the Talbot brand and renamed all the Rootes and Simca models.
Talbot appeared again in F1 during the early 80s connected to the Ligier cars as Ligier needed access to the Matra engine and Talbot/Simca had been working jointly with Matra for 10 years.
The last Talbot car, the Horizon hatchback was replaced in
1985 with the Peugeot 309 and the Talbot car brand finally died, although
Talbot vans were built until 1992.