The plate is clearly a reproduction, as it quotes the chassis number as S/M1056 instead of 2/M1056.
But it was not only this, but the engine number that intrigued me. 114A sounds reasonable, and if an M Type engine, this would have been the 114th engine, since the M Type engine sequence started with number 1.
But then Mike sent me a photo of the block.
Prominent in the photo is the large round boss, with three bolts (there is a similar boss on the other side). These bosses were a feature of the very first few (and I don't know exactly how many) OHC Minor engines.
On the boss on the nearside are clearly stamped the number 114A and 3095. 114A is clearly the engine number, but what is the meaning of 3095? Not a date - what could it be?
Flashback 20 years or so, when I visited Gaydon and transcribed the data for all 34,599 OHC Minors and then copied them into a spreadsheet which became the OHC Minor 'Genome'. I recorded the body type for every car and all of the notes in the notes column, plus the full build data (chassis laid down, test, body shop, final test, despatch, engine number, body type) for all of the chassis known to be surviving at the time. Clearly it was impossible to manually transcribe all of this data for all these thousands of cars and, being before the era of digital cameras, I could not practically photograph every page. And in any case, I would probably not have been allowed to.
However, I found the early cars on the first page interesting and recorded all of their dates and engine numbers.
Not surprisingly, these early engines were not fitted in numerical order, and the lowest engine number in this list of the first 20 cars is number 131 - presumably the 31st engine, since Morris started both their chassis and engine numbers with 101.
But there is an oddity. The very first Minor - chassis MM101, had a rather higher number recorded in the Progress Book. And that number is 3095.
So the engine in Mike's M Type is the engine that was fitted to the first production Morris Minor, whose chassis was laid down on 12th September 1928.
Incidentally, we know that there were 12 pre-production prototype Minor fabric saloons and one prototype tourer - containing 13 engines in total. And here we have the 14th engine in the first production car.
Congratulations Mike - you have an historic engine in your M, and I believe it to be by far the earliest OHC engine in existence.
Now, where did this engine come from? Mike's M was originally fitted with engine 827A, so who replaced it with 114/3095 and where did he get it from? Was the engine saved from a scrap yard perhaps? Sadly, we may never know the fate of MM101.