M 131 Editorial
Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 2:39 am
Exceptionally, I am posting the text of the M 131 editorial in advance of publication on the Forum. I would welcome comments and feedback which I can format for including in the body of the Magazine. Remember that this is going out to the general membership and is not a reflection of active forum contributors and restorers.
The title of the Editorial is 'Time and Time Again'.
"The Vintage Minor Register was founded on a beautiful summer evening back in 2001, when two vintage Minor owners met in the Orchard at Prescott, and another ex-owner passed by. A few weeks later, an experimental first issue of this Magazine was distributed from Grand Rapids to sixty known owners of vintage Minors. Around 150 were known to exist at that time, as a result of personal research that had commenced ten years earlier. The cars on that list represented less than half of the number now known to have survived. We held our first rally in Cambridgeshire in the summer of 2001 – on our first anniversary. A dozen Minors gathered at the Royal Oak at opening time on a breezy Saturday morning – very probably the largest gathering of Minors since they left Cowley over seventy years earlier.
In the Register Ramblings of that first Magazine issue, the Minor was referred to as a misfit in the vintage world, and Anders Clausager, then curator of Gaydon, was quoted as saying that the Minor was a non-sporting car of no particular distinction. He was wrong. On page 13, a report of a journey to Yorkshire from Hounslow in a 1929 Minor tourer was reprinted from the Winter 1967 issue of the Morris Eight Tourer Club magazine. If anyone doubts the sporting character of the Minor, or its robust capabilities as a light car, they should read this article by the late Roy Hogg of his happy wanderings in MT 3286.
Those familiar with Star Trek Voyager will no doubt remember the epic final episode ‘Endgame’ where Captain Kathryn Janeway, now a Starfleet Admiral, returns to the past, and to the Delta Quadrant to bring her crew safely home, destroying a Borg transwarp hub in the process. When she meets herself as a Captain, twenty-three years in the past, Captain Janeway is skeptical of the knowledge that her future self brings to save her and her crew. If we received a visitor from the future, would we want to know what the future holds for our cars?
Like Voyager’s crew, many will not survive. Even today, the destruction of our cars for spares continues unabated. Mostly saloons and long wheelbase examples, of course, but even open Minors are not entirely immune. Of the cars that survive today in more or less one piece, a clear majority are not being driven or actively restored and many of these are slowly and insidiously rotting into probable oblivion in the not too distant future. Owners who would not have thought twice about driving their cars twenty or even ten years ago, now no longer feel inclined do so, but this seems to be an affliction unique to Minor owners. Sometimes they sell their cars on, more often they lay them up to sink quietly on their springs.
Since that first rally seven summers ago, Register membership has tripled, but no more Minors appear at our rallies. The record was 13 back in 2003 – the 75th Anniversary of the Minor. Since then, that number has not been surpassed. The Austin Seven also celebrated an anniversary a few years ago. The Austin Seven clubs hoped to gather 750 examples at Beaulieu. They failed. Only 600 turned up. What a disappointment that must have been for the organizers. Six hundred frail little baby Austins, many older than the earliest Minor. The same frail little Austins have virtually swamped the Vintage Sports-Car Club in recent years, where they compete with great gusto and equal success in both Light Car Section and Main Club sporting trials, driving tests and race meetings in huge and growing numbers. Their influence upon the VSCC has become so strong that all examples built before 1935 have recently been inducted into the hallowed Post-Vintage Thoroughbred List, so expect to see even more of them out and about on the hills and on the track in future.
While we are looking at numbers, let us also take a sideways glance at the M Types. Just 3,200 were built, and we are currently tracking around 450 surviving examples – that’s about fifteen times the survival rate of the Minor. The reader can form his own opinion as to how many of these are Minors in M coachwork, but the more salient point is that there is sufficient raw enthusiasm out there for there to be far more M Types on the road and in active competition than Minors which were made in vastly greater numbers.
So what is going on with the Minors? There is certainly a good deal of heroic restoration under way and some ‘new’ cars emerge every year. But we seem in general not to be making any headway whatsoever, which is hugely frustrating. For every restoration that is completed, another car or two simply disappears without trace. Number plates are stripped, chassis disassembled when they should be being assembled and bodies appear on eBay from chassis that seem to have been beamed off the planet. Or are they cloaked? Are aliens abducting our cars? The Borg, perhaps?
Last year a huge effort was mounted to gain VSCC eligibility for the thirties Minors. That effort largely failed, while the thirties Sevens cruised into eligibility – without so much as a formal case being presented by the Seven clubs. Our case failed because of a number of complex factors, but chief among them was the perception that the Minor is simply not up to the game – a black sheep, a misfit, an object of derision - Morris Bloody Minors as they came to be irreverently referred to on the VSCC forum.
But how can this be? Any student of automotive engineering would tell you that the Minor is a far better piece of motor engineering than the Seven, and every bit as robust as the M. And we know that Sevens and Ms are all over the vintage car scene like a rash every weekend.
To be perfectly blunt, and in the full knowledge that this is a sweeping and highly unfair generalization, the problem is not the cars, but the owners. If we cannot bring ourselves to drive our own cars to our own rallies and pub meets, then how on earth can we possibly hope to convince such an august body as the VSCC to let us in to play with the Sevens and others? Not everyone wants to join the VSCC, of course, but we should all want to see our cars being driven – whether on the Welsh or to Wales – to the Lakeland or to the Lakes. And if they were, then they would earn and enjoy a far higher reputation in the broader pre-war motoring world.
The Vintage Minor Register was founded with a single aim – to save and to return to the open road as many Minors as possible. Virtually everything we do is aimed at striving for this goal. Spares are horse traded on the forum on a daily basis. A master chassis register and membership list is updated daily on the website so that owners of like cars can find, help and encourage each other. Rallies and pub meets worthy of far larger clubs are laid on regularly – indeed the Register has earned a reputation for hitting far above its weight.
If we want our cars to survive into the future in meaningful numbers, then we had better get them bolted together now, get them back on the road and put some miles on them. Many miles."
The title of the Editorial is 'Time and Time Again'.
"The Vintage Minor Register was founded on a beautiful summer evening back in 2001, when two vintage Minor owners met in the Orchard at Prescott, and another ex-owner passed by. A few weeks later, an experimental first issue of this Magazine was distributed from Grand Rapids to sixty known owners of vintage Minors. Around 150 were known to exist at that time, as a result of personal research that had commenced ten years earlier. The cars on that list represented less than half of the number now known to have survived. We held our first rally in Cambridgeshire in the summer of 2001 – on our first anniversary. A dozen Minors gathered at the Royal Oak at opening time on a breezy Saturday morning – very probably the largest gathering of Minors since they left Cowley over seventy years earlier.
In the Register Ramblings of that first Magazine issue, the Minor was referred to as a misfit in the vintage world, and Anders Clausager, then curator of Gaydon, was quoted as saying that the Minor was a non-sporting car of no particular distinction. He was wrong. On page 13, a report of a journey to Yorkshire from Hounslow in a 1929 Minor tourer was reprinted from the Winter 1967 issue of the Morris Eight Tourer Club magazine. If anyone doubts the sporting character of the Minor, or its robust capabilities as a light car, they should read this article by the late Roy Hogg of his happy wanderings in MT 3286.
Those familiar with Star Trek Voyager will no doubt remember the epic final episode ‘Endgame’ where Captain Kathryn Janeway, now a Starfleet Admiral, returns to the past, and to the Delta Quadrant to bring her crew safely home, destroying a Borg transwarp hub in the process. When she meets herself as a Captain, twenty-three years in the past, Captain Janeway is skeptical of the knowledge that her future self brings to save her and her crew. If we received a visitor from the future, would we want to know what the future holds for our cars?
Like Voyager’s crew, many will not survive. Even today, the destruction of our cars for spares continues unabated. Mostly saloons and long wheelbase examples, of course, but even open Minors are not entirely immune. Of the cars that survive today in more or less one piece, a clear majority are not being driven or actively restored and many of these are slowly and insidiously rotting into probable oblivion in the not too distant future. Owners who would not have thought twice about driving their cars twenty or even ten years ago, now no longer feel inclined do so, but this seems to be an affliction unique to Minor owners. Sometimes they sell their cars on, more often they lay them up to sink quietly on their springs.
Since that first rally seven summers ago, Register membership has tripled, but no more Minors appear at our rallies. The record was 13 back in 2003 – the 75th Anniversary of the Minor. Since then, that number has not been surpassed. The Austin Seven also celebrated an anniversary a few years ago. The Austin Seven clubs hoped to gather 750 examples at Beaulieu. They failed. Only 600 turned up. What a disappointment that must have been for the organizers. Six hundred frail little baby Austins, many older than the earliest Minor. The same frail little Austins have virtually swamped the Vintage Sports-Car Club in recent years, where they compete with great gusto and equal success in both Light Car Section and Main Club sporting trials, driving tests and race meetings in huge and growing numbers. Their influence upon the VSCC has become so strong that all examples built before 1935 have recently been inducted into the hallowed Post-Vintage Thoroughbred List, so expect to see even more of them out and about on the hills and on the track in future.
While we are looking at numbers, let us also take a sideways glance at the M Types. Just 3,200 were built, and we are currently tracking around 450 surviving examples – that’s about fifteen times the survival rate of the Minor. The reader can form his own opinion as to how many of these are Minors in M coachwork, but the more salient point is that there is sufficient raw enthusiasm out there for there to be far more M Types on the road and in active competition than Minors which were made in vastly greater numbers.
So what is going on with the Minors? There is certainly a good deal of heroic restoration under way and some ‘new’ cars emerge every year. But we seem in general not to be making any headway whatsoever, which is hugely frustrating. For every restoration that is completed, another car or two simply disappears without trace. Number plates are stripped, chassis disassembled when they should be being assembled and bodies appear on eBay from chassis that seem to have been beamed off the planet. Or are they cloaked? Are aliens abducting our cars? The Borg, perhaps?
Last year a huge effort was mounted to gain VSCC eligibility for the thirties Minors. That effort largely failed, while the thirties Sevens cruised into eligibility – without so much as a formal case being presented by the Seven clubs. Our case failed because of a number of complex factors, but chief among them was the perception that the Minor is simply not up to the game – a black sheep, a misfit, an object of derision - Morris Bloody Minors as they came to be irreverently referred to on the VSCC forum.
But how can this be? Any student of automotive engineering would tell you that the Minor is a far better piece of motor engineering than the Seven, and every bit as robust as the M. And we know that Sevens and Ms are all over the vintage car scene like a rash every weekend.
To be perfectly blunt, and in the full knowledge that this is a sweeping and highly unfair generalization, the problem is not the cars, but the owners. If we cannot bring ourselves to drive our own cars to our own rallies and pub meets, then how on earth can we possibly hope to convince such an august body as the VSCC to let us in to play with the Sevens and others? Not everyone wants to join the VSCC, of course, but we should all want to see our cars being driven – whether on the Welsh or to Wales – to the Lakeland or to the Lakes. And if they were, then they would earn and enjoy a far higher reputation in the broader pre-war motoring world.
The Vintage Minor Register was founded with a single aim – to save and to return to the open road as many Minors as possible. Virtually everything we do is aimed at striving for this goal. Spares are horse traded on the forum on a daily basis. A master chassis register and membership list is updated daily on the website so that owners of like cars can find, help and encourage each other. Rallies and pub meets worthy of far larger clubs are laid on regularly – indeed the Register has earned a reputation for hitting far above its weight.
If we want our cars to survive into the future in meaningful numbers, then we had better get them bolted together now, get them back on the road and put some miles on them. Many miles."