19/03/2010 - W de Forte finds out what made MGBs the vehicle of choice for flat-cap wearing Hooray Henries in the 1960s

MGB  Roadster

Being dismissed from a company you had founded and nurtured for a decade must be bruising to the ego, to say the least. That’s exactly what happened to dear old Cecil Kimber, the bod behind MG cars, who was given the order of the boot in 1941. In one version of history this ignominy came as a result of the way he went about procuring contracts for the WD. In another, it was because he disobeyed a directorial directive to sack a particular long-serving worker. Either way, far worse was to come, because having lost his job, just four years later Kimber lost his life in a silly train accident at King's Cross. He was 56. A sad end for a key figure in the British motor industry.

As every chap and his whippet will tell you, MG stood for Morris Garages, the Oxford branch of William Morris’s nascent automotive empire. Or did it? I have to point out that Cecil has been quoted as saying that MG - or M.G. as we used to write it - didn’t stand for anything. This was probably a little mischievous of him, but is apparently substantiated by original documents relating to the firm’s early years.

In 1923, Morris Garages started a little sideline, fitting rakish Raworth bodies to Cowley saloon chassis. Customers appreciated the effort, because by 1924 Kimber had branched out on his own, establishing M.G. as a marque with the soon-to-be-famous octagon badge blazing the way. Early cars weren’t too sporty, but as the Twenties roared on the name became synonymous with speed and technical innovation.

The first Midget appeared in 1929, the year the company moved out to a new factory in Abingdon. In accordance with publicity slogans promising ‘Safety Fast’, here was a high-revving little sportster that could literally run rings around all sorts of grown-up machines with much larger engines, as Pater discovered on several occasions when dicing around Blighty in his Bentley! Unfortunately, while the cars were undoubtedly marvellous, MG suffered along with the world economy as we headed into the 1930s. By 1935 the company was in Queer Street and was bought out by – yes, the Nuffield Organisation, aka William Morris.

Kimber stayed on at Abingdon, but found himself in the embarrassing position of being an underling of the acid tongued Leonard Lord, who closed down MG’s competition department, ending the Octagonal glory years in racing and record-breaking. ‘Stop racing and make money,’ was his typically blunt message to the workforce. To this end, he insisted that future models would be simple, affordable and profitable.

Hence the 1936 debut of the Midget TA, a Morris/Wolseley-based creation with a more tedious specification than had gone before. Crude or not, at £222 it was irresistible, and went on to spawn a series of sports cars that became increasingly important to MG’s success, particularly in post-war America.

The mildly updated TB appeared just before Mr Chamberlain waved his useless bit of appeasement paper in front of newsreel cameras and after a busy war making armaments, Abingdon soon resumed production of cars with the TC

The succeeding TD was designed mainly for the export market and the TE never happened for fear that it would be nicknamed ‘Tee-Hee’, so the TF came next, in 1953. But for many it was out of step with a world awakening from the stultifying effects of WW2. MG’s pre-eminence was under threat from within and without, in the form of the Austin-Healey and Triumph TR2, so a completely new car was overdue.

Enter, in 1955, the MGA, a curvaceous, modern machine powered by a 1500cc version of the B-series engine first seen in the 1947 Austin A40. The performance was already better, but the subsequent installation of an 85bhp, 1588cc four brought about significantly more urge. Still more power was available in the short-lived Twin Cam. At least, that was the theory. In practice, the complicated engine rarely functioned for long enough to find out. My road test example expired in a cloud of oily steam almost within sight of Abingdon, I recall, as I mashed the loud pedal in an attempt to verify the claimed 115mph top whack while en route to Banbury. If the factory chaps couldn’t make it work, what chance had one’s local village mechanic?

BMC revived the Midget badge in 1961, and a year later, the A was replaced by the B. All jolly logical. MG’s new roadster was quite advanced in its construction. Rivals from Austin-Healey and Triumph still relied on a separate chassis, but the B featured a unitary bodyshell designed by modest Abingdon stalwart Syd Evener. The structure was impressively rigid, so the B suffered minimal scuttle shake and its suspension was able to do the work of absorbing bumps and keeping the wheels in line.

As the B was no lightweight it needed a beefier power unit than the A just to keep pace. BMC’s no-expense-dared solution was to enlarge the long-suffering ohv four once again, this time to 1798cc. But with only three bearings supporting the crankshaft, 95bhp proved to be more than enough to cause problems, resulting in the introduction of a five-bearing engine two years later.

I exaggerate only slightly by saying that development stopped at that point! Although the MGB changed in detail virtually every season, it was basically the same car trundling down the production line until 1979, when Abingdon became a casualty of crazed axeman, Michael Edwardes, who had been appointed Chief Executive of BMC’s sickly child, British Leyland.

It’s my duty to report that the last MGBs made were inferior to the first, being slower, less economical and having, in 1975, lost their handling poise to US regulations that lumbered the poor things with a huge pair of black plastic buffers. To be candid with you, reader, I never cared much for the MGB, nor the people who usually owned them, who were wont to wear flat caps and talk far too loudly while propping up the bar in country hostelries.

Bravely, the owner of a splendid 1964 B roadster let your scribe take it for a spin. After a brief struggle with the hood, a device directly descended from the tent I used as a Boy Scout (that’s one thing they did improve), I delighted in the distinctive deep gurgle of the exhaust as we pootled off into the moors.

Too many Bs are ruined by worn suspension and rotten, floppy bodyshells, but when all is well they steer accurately and are a rewarding drive. Not a fast one, though. The ton is all you can expect in normal circumstances. Still, I grudgingly concede that speed is less important to us all these days, so 95bhp, 35mpg and the wind in one’s follicles is now a more pleasurable proposition.

Allowing for some waywardness caused by the suspension, the original B is a fine little motor car in the right circumstances. It’s ironic that after we Brits abandoned the simple, mass-market ragtop, it was left to the Japanese to step into the void. Mazda’s pretty little MX-5 is in so many ways what the MGB should have become, if Abingdon hadn’t been starved of funds in the sixties and seventies. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, is it not?