by  Robert Cumberford

The triumph of style over substance
 

Paris - I've always had a soft spot for Morgans, from the first time that I saw one on the San Fernando Road while heading toward the Art Center School in Ron Hill's ratty old '35 Ford in 1952. We used to see the same car quite often,  and it had an authentic visual charm quite lacking in the MG TD then current. I thought I might get a Morgan four wheeler someday. After all, it had come into the world the same year I did, and I consider that a more-than-respectable vintage.

 In 1966 my brother James and I tried to buy Morgan - the company, not just the car. Sole owner P.H.G. Morgan - Peter - was vacillating about staying with the enterprise begun by his father, the dynamic H.F.S. - Harry -who started making spindly three-wheeled cyclecars in 1910. Impending U.S. legislation could well have meant an end to exports to the United States, then Morgan's biggest market. Peter was not quite sure about what he would do, and he remained not quite sure for years, always hoping that his TV cameraman son - Charles - would finally come into the firm. We came to realize that until Charles pronounced a definitive yea or nay Peter would never commit, despite the fact that from time to time he provided all sorts of information about the company, including financial data that had us salivating. That was and is confidential, but it is fair to say that the little company in Malvern Link was what the Wall Street types like to call a "money pump", so long as it is left alone to be itself, uninterested in growth. Not for nothing did Harry drive a Roll-Royce and Peter indulge himself with Ferrari V-12s.

All this led to a very pleasant sporadic relationship, with occasional Cumberford visits to Malvern. The last time my brother and I were together with Peter was in 1987, and since at that moment we had in hand an exclusive option to buy Aston Martin (with other people's money, of course) we didn't talk about a Morgan acquisition. That must have really put Peter at ease, as for the first time in twenty-two years he picked up the lunch tab.

Bear in mind that through all these years it was my conceit that I wanted to buy the company never having been in a Morgan, so that I would come to the task of necessary redesign with a clear mind. In the early Nineties I did  ride in one, obliged by the fact that the owner of a car I was writing about used a Morgan for daily transportation.

When I learned that my wife has wanted a Morgan for some forty years, having seen one in her little French country village when she was a little girl and fallen in love with it, I decided we'd better check out the possibility of buying one. I had promised her a new Citroen 2CV. When its production stopped I had the chance to buy one of the last twenty made, so I borrowed a press car for a couple of days, after which she declared that the idea was nice, but she'd been there and driven that, and no thank you. So, at great expense (a thousand bucks for forty-eight hours and 250 miles), I rented a Morgan 4/4 with 1.8 liter Ford Zetec power.

Resplendent in cream paint, it "bonnet" top perforated with fifty-six louvers (I counted them) artfully misaligned so you know that expensive handwork was involved, the car was a splendid sight. From a distance. Up close with a critical eye, you could see where the hand-painted undercoating lapped around to the outside, making the wheel openings appear to have been hacked out with a hammer and chisel, when in fact they are tooling-formed from superplastic light alloy.

When she was an independent businesswoman, my wife had been discouraged herself from buying a Morgan by friends who insisted that the harsh ride would be too much for her. It is firm, but there are many worse riding cars available today, and of course half of America is trundling along in clunky 4x4s that make the Morgan seem like a Mercedes limo. Running along a smooth, curving road on the banks of the Loire with the top down on a cool May morning was a pure kinesthetic pleasure, a pleasure enhanced by the signs of approval from other drivers and people in the towns we traversed.

With Morgan, there's no point in talking about cowl shake and driveline snatch or ergonomics and practicality. There's plenty of the first two, little of the second pair of attributes. You don't analyze a myth. Morgans are folklore and legend, a definitive statement of the triumph of style over substance. Harry had an eye for line, but he allowed it to be tempered by the need for really, really cheap construction, and it is the inherent honesty and simplicity of  his design solutions that makes the Morgan attractive to people who have absolutely no knowledge about or interest in automobiles.

In the sixty-four years the the four-wheel Morgans have been made, engines from the Coventry Climax, Standard-Triumph, Ford, Rover and Fiat have been used. (I was the instigator of the last, when Ford refused to adapt the east-west Escort engine to Morgan's needs. Telling Peter he could get the Lampredi-designed Fiat 124 twin-cam engine and its five speed box for less than he was paying Ford for a pushrod engine with a four-speed did the job. Once Ford higher-ups heard about the Fiat encroachment, they instructed the people who refused to help Peter when the Escort went to front-wheel drive to provide him with what he wanted immediately.) But it doesn't matter what is under the hood. What defines a Morgan is that wonderful authentic shape. It's not retro, it's not an interpretation, an evocation..it's the real thing. True, when bullet headlamps went out of production in England it was necessary to fair in the seven-inch lamps, and it was expedient to change the flat radiator grille to a curved one as a means for allowing the valance between the fender and the hood to support the headlight.

The leading edge of the fender was dropped, with consequent improvement in aerodynamic efficiency. I have designed dozens of Morgans over the years, but I have never wanted to change the look of the cars. I have sketches and specification sheets for different chassis, proposals for a number of different engines - many of them American - and plans for cockpits with more room (gained by eliminating the gearbox cover, not by making the car wider) and I would not disdain power steering, air conditioning or any of a number of advances, but I would never want to restyle the car. One, it doesn't need it. Two, it can't be done while retaining the factor that makes a Morgan a Morgan. You can reproportion to your heart's content - as Morgan showed in the Sixties when they lopped a substantial amount out of the height of the body sides or when they created the Plus Eight - but you can't changes the flat-topped fenders, the single-curvature deck lid surface, or the flat rear body sides. You can't really change much of anything. Charles Morgan's new racing V-8 (Big Blue) is too much modified in shape and approaches the grotesque, with all the grace gone.

On the other hand, Charles' racer has an all-alloy chassis developed with the help of Jim Randall, former chief engineer of Jaguar and one of the best automotive engineers alive today. I am in no way privy to Morgan Motor Company plans, but I would not be at all surprised to see the racer's chassis in production. Now that Charles has committed to his family company, I would no longer be interested in owning it. There is something quite delightful about having this eccentric English concern go on into the third generation, and I hope that there will be a fourth generation to follow, perhaps even a daughter.

Will the present Cumberford generation buy a Morgan? Francoise says that she regrets not going against all advice and buying one thirty years ago. With its tin tube and sheet of fabric top that must be  assembled over a quarter-hour or so, the Morgan is not really very practical for mature people in Europe. So, suggests my beloved, "Wouldn't it be nice to live in California again so we could have a Morgan?". Now that's a powerful design.