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old car snaps

We have been looking at Dad's No. 1. Three years later, No.1 is still in the family, at home. So this isn't Dad's No.2, unfortunately.

We are looking at OG 6698, a Birmingham registered Riley Monaco of late 1930 or early 1931 vintage standing at a Berlin kerbside in the summer of 1932, with my father next to it. What a journey it has made, in those pre-autobahn days.

HMMUkColleagueBusinessTripBerlin1932img045copy.jpg

And another one, from the same moment:

BerlinukColleagues1932img651red.jpg

(The whole story behind these images has appeared before in this Forum).

Chris

(Sources: staffshomeguard website and family archive)
 
So we come to the car which IS Dad's No.2.

Onward a further three years from Berlin. It's summer 1935 and OJ 577, a Morris Major of 1932 vintage. Unfortunately, again, this is the best and only image I have of it. Black, with a 6-cylinder 13.9 h.p. engine. My elder brother recalled that within it there was a persistent smell of bad eggs, thought to emanate from the battery.

Major1935.jpg
I know from the background exactly where the car was parked when my sister was photographed sitting on the rear luggage rack. It was outside a farmhouse in South Devon which means that it also had had a fairly epic journey for its time: from where we lived, down the A38 and through the very middle of every town on the route – Birmingham, Droitwich, Bromsgrove, Worcester, Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Bristol, Taunton, Exeter, Newton Abbott, Totnes and Kingsbridge. A long, long day, I would imagine, for car and passengers!

This is what the car would have looked like, but this one is more colourful and certainly glossier than our family's original.

Mooris MajorWik.jpg

Chris
(Sources: family archive, Wikipedia and Chris Sampson)
 
So we come to the car which IS Dad's No.2.

Onward a further three years from Berlin. It's summer 1935 and OJ 577, a Morris Major of 1932 vintage. Unfortunately, again, this is the best and only image I have of it. Black, with a 6-cylinder 13.9 h.p. engine. My elder brother recalled that within it there was a persistent smell of bad eggs, thought to emanate from the battery.

View attachment 157681
I know from the background exactly where the car was parked when my sister was photographed sitting on the rear luggage rack. It was outside a farmhouse in South Devon which means that it also had had a fairly epic journey for its time: from where we lived, down the A38 and through the very middle of every town on the route – Birmingham, Droitwich, Bromsgrove, Worcester, Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Bristol, Taunton, Exeter, Newton Abbott, Totnes and Kingsbridge. A long, long day, I would imagine, for car and passengers!

This is what the car would have looked like, but this one is more colourful and certainly glossier than our family's original.

View attachment 157680

Chris
(Sources: family archive, Wikipedia and Chris Sampson)
Chris, super picture and a good bit of history!
 
A car that was of its time. I understand that lots of people bought them because you could drive with a motorbike licence.
 
A chap I worked with had one. He was regularly tipping it over. Think he had trouble in getting used to it. His previous vehicle was a Russian tank.

(He'd been in the Hungarian Army).

Chris
 
A chap I worked with had one. He was regularly tipping it over. Think he had trouble in getting used to it. His previous vehicle was a Russian tank.

(He'd been in the Hungarian Army).

Chris
Yes, I think they were prone to tipping over. I was a passenger with a girl once. She took an island too fast and went up on two wheels.
 
#203.

Every point that you would normally use for recognition of a car is obscured. The radiator and grille are not within the frame which takes away about 90% of the information used by car spotters, and even the wheel hub, which can be quite distinctive on certain models, is obscured by the old gent’s head. However, I am going to take a flyer, which is a technical term for something about half way between an ignorant punt and an informed guess, and suggest that it might be an Austin Light 12/6 Harley Saloon, with a Pressed Steel Co. body. 1931/34.

The problem is that a very similar set of pressings was used by both Hillman, on the contemporary Minx, and Morris on the Cowley and Twelve-Four. At least, I can say for certain that it is not a Rolls-Royce, nor is it a Ford from that era.

From the late 1920s on, the efforts of Ford, especially with the Model A and B, and the American steel pressings industry changed the way cars were built, from coachbuilt, i.e. wooden frames clad with aluminium or steel panels or in the case of Weymann bodies, leather cloth and a filling of kapok or similar fibre; to welded pressed steel components assembled on a jig. The massive presses needed, plus the cost of design and manufacture of the tools for those presses, meant that competing car manufacturers would use the same set of pressings and then try to disguise the finished body with different radiators, grilles and mudguards, or smaller items like hub caps or bonnet louvres, just to add to the fun. The more sets of pressings that could be squeezed (hee-hee) out of a set of tooling, the lower the investment to be amortised into the cost of each copy.
 
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A chap I worked with had one. He was regularly tipping it over. Think he had trouble in getting used to it. His previous vehicle was a Russian tank.

(He'd been in the Hungarian Army).

Chris
WOW a big come down fom a Tank to a reliant
Yes, I think they were prone to tipping over. I was a passenger with a girl once. She took an island too fast and went up on two wheels.
 
I had difficulty avoiding a Reliant, in the bad winter of 1963, by driving into someones yard. It was descending a hill in Newton Abbot, in snow, going in circles. :worried:
I also had difficulty avoiding a Reliant in the winter, a few years later though. I had just collected my wifes mini from the garage who had repaired the recent body damage she had sustained due to bad road conditions, so she said !
Went down a local side road that had ice packed ruts all along on the way home, oversteered , ended up on the other sid of the road and hit a parked Reliant which "cracked" all the way up the middle from the bonnet to the back across the roof.
I did knock on the door and own up to it, which didn't down very well as you can imagine, and also got another " scolding " when I got home and reported the new damage to my wifes mini.
 
I also had difficulty avoiding a Reliant in the winter, a few years later though. I had just collected my wifes mini from the garage who had repaired the recent body damage she had sustained due to bad road conditions, so she said !
Went down a local side road that had ice packed ruts all along on the way home, oversteered , ended up on the other sid of the road and hit a parked Reliant which "cracked" all the way up the middle from the bonnet to the back across the roof.
I did knock on the door and own up to it, which didn't down very well as you can imagine, and also got another " scolding " when I got home and reported the new damage to my wifes mini.
Chris, a wise man once told me the a good deed never goes unpunished
 
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