Where are these cars and who owns them?

[chris lambert]

Over the last three or four years I have been following what happens to pre war Minors when they are being auctioned on eBay and advertised for sale elsewhere on the internet and in the traditional press. Ian has managed to track down many of the new owners of these vehicles and a high percentage end up joining the register. Many other cars just vanish and are not sighted or heard of again. I have a suspicion that many pre war Minor owning, non VMR members visit this web site, and for one reason or another do not wish to join our club (which of course is their perogative) or join in the debate/chit chat on this forum.
I want to use this thread to try and track down some of these MISSING MINORS. Therefore if your car is displayed below let us know that it is still around. To do this, simply join the forum either using a psuedonym or indeed your own name, and post an item on this thread providing any detail you wish about the car in question. Similarly, if you are trying to track down a car, make a post here and provide an image or just a description and we will use the combined might of the Register and Forumisti to try and find it. There is a good chance that we can help.
I'll make a start by posting four images:



This is the ex John Smith - 1931 'Last' Tourer



This '32 two seater was last seen in Basingstoke in August 2006



This '33 two seater was sold on ebay in 2006



This 4 seater cammy Tourer did not sell at auction in Kings Lynn in 2006

[Ian Grace]

Very important initiative, Chris.

I am going to set up the chassis registers in the Members' Area so that there will be a register of cars owned by register members (already there), giving full contact details of the current owners. Then there will be a new, global chassis register detailing all known surviving chassis. For chassis owned by non-members who are known, the contact details will simply state, ''Known to exist, owner unknown' or 'Current owner known', or whatever. In this way we can all see if a particular car is being tracked by the Register or not. I'll do this for the OHC Minors first, then I'll generate a survivor's list for the SV Minor, largely based on Gren Strickland's old list and then tackle the M Types, of which about 400 survive and abouit 10% are in the VMR. This then will be the model system which I will expand across all pre-war Morris models on the EMS website. (Today I registered http://www.earlymorris.co.uk and will move the site across as soon as F2S have set me up with space.)

It would help enormously if members would access the online registers and membership list from time to time, and send in any updates (particularly e-mail address changes!) to help keep the data as accurate as possible. Also, there are a few missing details - particularly in the SV register which I am in need of to fill in the blanks - some chassis numbers, engine numbers, first registration dates, etc.

[Toby]

Would it help if you had any reg.Nos appearing in the MR Journals that I have? Obviously there are few chassis No.s listed and numbers can be sold (but checked on the dvla site?). Also some people have, (and possibly still do, no names no pack drill! ) broken them since 1968. All the same, any use?

[Ian Grace]

Tony,

Yes, any and all references to cars, photos, etc. would be very useful, and I cnan archive it all for future cross-reference. The MR Journals and Newsletters are a great source of initial references. Several years ago I trawled through virtually every Journal and Newsletter going back to the M8TC days and extracted all the references to OHC Minors that I could find. Even Wanted ads are a useful source of information - if someone is wanting parts for a 1929 Minor tourer, it is a pretty good clue that he has one! What I need is the car/owner details, such as they are, and the reference where the info was found, for future reference.

This weekend I will put the OHC Minor known survivors list on the VMR and EMS websites. Then I planto generate similar lists for all the Morris models. These will then becoe the reference for everyone to see if a particular vehicle is known to the club or not.

[Ian Grace]

OK - I have just posted the OHC Minor Survivors List in the secure area of the website. It is a cut-down version of my master register, removing contact details of non-members. It contains details of around 342 known survivors or possible survivors, including cars which were known to have survived into the sixties or seventies in some cases. It is likely that many of these no longer exist, so any list like this has to be based more on art than science. Also, the list contains details of a couple of known surviving chassis plates, which aren't true surviving cars. So it is probably a fair bet that about 320 of these are actually still extant, of which 202 are in the hands of current VMR member, which I think is an excellent statistic - about 2/3 in the Register. I do hold more vague details fo other possible survivors, but when I took out the contact details of the possible owner, I was simply left with "Saloon, Unknown, Australia", which isn't very helpful, so I left those cars out. As you can also see, many of the knowns and unknows are in Australia or New Zealand.

I will also post the same list on the EMS website and next I'll tackle a similar list for the SV Minors, but this will be a bigger job as I have only recently started building a master register which will form the basis of a web survivors list. Needless to say, I would welcome any additions, correctins and blank-filling-in - partuicularly with the SV Minors.

[Ian Grace]

Just sussed out how to hyperlink cells in Excel, which means that I can hyperlink pics to each line entry in the registers. Until recently, the members' list on the VMR site was an html page with hyperlinked pics. I replaced this page with an Excel spreadsheet, because the html page was a real pain to update and duplicated my own spreadsheet. The trick with all this stuff is to make all the info available in the right format and in all the right places, but keep the number of files to an absolute minimum, and also make them generic across the VMR and EMS websites so I don't have to maintain parallel files everywhere. When I get a change of e-mail address from someone, I have to update it in about 13 files!

Anyway, I will now be able to append pics to all the register entries very easily. I can also hyperlink the e-mail addresses if I split them out into their own cells, like we had in the old html page. Watch this space...

[Ian Grace]

Right, now I have over 90 photos of individual OHC Minors sorted out and filenamed by chassis number. I uploaded one experimentally and linked it from the survivor's spreadheet in the members' area - it works! I have a spare 200Mb space on the old http://www.vmr.f2s.com so as soon as I have worked out how to ftp to that space, I'll upload them all. Then all I have to do is hyperlink the rest of them from the spreadsheet. Shouldn't take more than a few hours!
Then I'll start on the SV Minor survivors and do the same for them. Where I don't know the chassis numbers, I'll hyperlink from the registration numbers, etc. and name the photo filenames accordingly until the chassis numbers come to light. Then M Types, then all the rest.

[Ian Grace]

Now up to 147 OHC Minor images and still searching the archives.