‘We bought it in 1960 and it was on its last legs even then’
Bryan and Gillian Melon, Cardiff
Our MG has covered more than three hundred thousand miles, so it qualifies for the High-mile Club quite easily. To be honest, it was fairly worn out when we originally bought it in the Sixties, having already had its crankshaft ground four times, so you can imagine the mileage it had covered before that. We then put another 150,000 on it as the ‘daily’, – we needed a car and it did the job, but by 1970 it had to have a replacement engine. I kept the original unit that, after fifty years, I have just got round to overhauling!
The biggest change since 1970 has been the fitment of a Ford Type 9 five-speed gearbox, mainly because we live in the modern age. And you’ve got to be able to keep up! Because we use the car so much we need to be able to do more than 50mph on the motorway. It’s fine to be original, but we want to be practical. So there is also an electric fan, oil cooler and electric ignition, too.
It’s a 1948 YA model from just the second year of Y-type production at Abingdon on Thames and we are still completely in love with it. It took us on our honeymoon after we got married and back then, in the Sixties, my wife Gillian did ask me if we were going to get a new car, which never quite happened. But I did completely restore the MG myself at the same time as I adapted the Type 9 gearbox to fit – does that count as a new car?
We have owned other more modern cars over the years, but this MG has stayed with us and is still a front line ‘user’ .