1936 MG SA
FAMILY HEIRLOOM
We towed her home in May 1960, Dad (then 35) at the wheel, me (then five) trying out the back seat, impressed that they’d initialled a car after me. Faded red, hand-painted, and patch-primed, the car’d once been left in the estuarine tide for 24 hours after crashing off a bridge. And it showed.
The chippie selling her had let her jump out of third and she’d over-revved. Goodbye little-end pinch bolt; hello leg out of bed (con rod through the side of the engine block). Number two, as it happened. Fractured cast iron, oil everywhere — not a pretty sight. The chronometric tachometer needle had bent against its stop (meaning she’d momentarily hit 7000rpm!). He’d cut plywood patches and sandwiched them together with a bolt through the hole in the block. Then he’d found a Morris 12 (the four-cylinder version of the same motor) rod at the wreckers but had reassembled it with the big-end cap the wrong way around. Naturally enough, the motor had demonstrated a marked reluctance to turn over, so he’d towed her to the top of the old Lookout Point highway and, gathering suitable gravitational momentum, dropped the clutch. And stripped the splines off the right rear hub.
Dad bought her for 75 quid the following weekend where she’d coasted to a halt at the bottom of the hill; the as-is, where-is nature of the sale being obvious enough to scare other punters away. I can’t remember Mum being particularly enthused, but our Austin 16 was getting too small for a four-child family, and Dad knew what he was getting. You see, he had boarded with Sybil Lupp and her then-husband Percy. He had been a pit mechanic for Sybil on the TC MG that she’d driven to second place at the 2nd NZ Championship Road Race, Wigram in 1950. He had won the Sundstrum Trophy navigating for her, one slide rule for the maths, the other permanently set to their altered diff ratio. He’d had a business with Percy (making one of New Zealand’s first tape recorders), which they’d taken weekly turns driving each other to. And Percy’s car, which also towed Sybil’s TC to events, was a sleek black MG SA.
Remarkable record
Not that there were many SAS around — the middle of the Depression wasn’t the most auspicious time to import an upscale gentleman’s tourer. Six or seven arrived in New Zealand. Amazingly, three saloons and two convertibles still survive; a remarkable record. These cars were the first manifestation of the influence that Morris/ Wolseley/austin boardroom accountant– type thinking had on people who had thus far built things with pride and flair. (The ultimate expression of this stultifying approach would be the BMC badge-engineering we all grew up with in the ’60s and ’70s. The counterargument would be that MG had produced 44 C-types and eight R-types at huge R& D cost, and nobody can keep up that for long.) Philosophy aside, MG had always used Wolseley and Morris parts. This change in administration just limited both its range and availability — nowadays, we’d call it ‘rationalization’. Officially, design for MGS was shifted from MG to Morris from 1935 until the advent of the MGA. In reality, MG was too iconic a brand, and the MG workforce too talented, to ignore.
Long-time MG general manager Cecil Kimber swallowed that rat, and, in 1935, the SA emerged from the drawing board — proving that flair is hard to totally bury. He chose the Wolseley 18hp (13kw) motor — a
Dad had been a pit mechanic for Sybil Lupp on the TC MG that she’d driven to second place in the 2nd NZ Championship Road Race, Wigram in 1950
pushrod six that started life at two litres and ended at 2.6, mating it up to the Wolseley/ Morris gearbox and diff. (The Wolseley 18 was used as a London police car throughout World War II, but, having driven one for some years, I can report that everything aft of the clutch is spindly. Kimber knew what he was about.) Twin 1¼-inch downdraft SU carburettors were standard, as was a three-into-two exhaust system, but relics from Morris’s past included a wet-cork clutch and white-metal-in-the-rod bearings. Hat tips to competition practice included a fly-off handbrake, torque-reaction cables (preventing front-axle rotation under braking), and wire wheels with knock-offs. Maybe the SA was never intended to lap Brooklands, but it channelled the pedigree of its sassy little sisters in no uncertain terms.
Southern man
Dad hailed from rural Southland — Munro territory. He’d built his own lathe out of an industrial knitting-machine bed and knew how to use it. A wooden plug turned up on the lathe, a quick melt-up of some old bearing shells, a line bore of the cooled result (with the bearing cap the right way round this time!), and the piston was going up and down again as it should. The head didn’t even come off — the bores on the Wolseley 18 having a convenient feed-in taper for pistons and rings being pushed up from below. With an alloy plate over the hole in the block — held down on a rubber gasket with tapped machine screws — that engine would serve 40 more years, ending life with a 60-thou overbore and a 60-thou crank grind. Five holes were drilled in the wheel-centre flanges of the right rear wheel and the spare. These holes were continued through the brake drum and pegs were tapped into the axle-hub flange. Hey presto, drive restored.
The next few years saw her serving 40,000 miles (64,400km) as the family car. One day, Dad applied the brakes and stripped the splines on a front hub, too, so he organized a dividing head on that lathe, had all the hubs spiral welded, and spent a week of evenings hand gashing four lots of 88 splines. As you do. Then the front windscreen pillars started to collapse, so he bent up two pieces of 25x25mm steel box section. They ran up the scuttle, doglegged past the dash and up to the roof, ran along above the doors, and bolted down to the back mudguard arches. Now the new pillars could be cosmetic sheet-metal, wrapped around the box section but carrying no load. The forward-opening doors never involuntarily opened on chattery gravel roads after that — a decided bonus! And the perished pneumatic driver’s seat — you let out air to lower your stance, visited a garage air pump to raise it — got an inner tube inserted.
There were trips to everywhere, some of which stand out. Coming back from an air show with a nappy wrapped and pinned around a split radiator hose. Executing a perfect 360-degree spin up a frosty Kenmure Road, twitching straight, and continuing as if nothing had happened. Running the gauntlet of a Southland thunderstorm, we boys in the back holding our thumbs across the overhead drains from the sunshine roof — the hoses to the back mudguard arches having long since perished. And, always, whether at the beach or thundering up Rattray Street to pick us up from school — that glorious flow of mudguard and running board, Kimber’s timeless visual candy.
One memorable Friday night (the traditional Dunedin shopping night back then), a twotone blue SA crossed us at the lights, and Dad swung in behind — a chance in a million. It was a Christchurch car at the time, but we never saw it again and think it was the one which “had an argument with a railcar”. Someone reported seeing the engine, sump corroding into the damp under a Timaru house — but there the trail ended. The Lupp car similarly vanished from sight.
Dad hailed from rural Southland — Munro territory. He’d built his own lathe out of an industrial knitting-machine bed and knew how to use it
Interesting features
The cam got a grind, the head got planed and lost a cupful of material to porting and polishing, valve springs got doubled, straight-through pipes ended in twin Cooper ‘silencers’ — odd description; you could hear her coming several blocks away! She would rev to 5300 — not bad piston-speed given the 102mm stroke — and cruise all (pre-radar) day at 75mph (121kph). And with two 6V batteries sited under the back seat, she was superbly balanced. She had some interesting features too — the petrol gauge became an oil-level one at the flick of a switch, and there was a dash lamp that came on at 25mph (40kph) and went off at 30 (48kph). She also had remote suspension-greasing points on the side of the scuttle, but they and the remote jacking system — a low-dragging load of unsprung weight — had long since been removed.
Inherited patina
Then we outgrew her. A 1950 Humber Super Snipe came along and the ‘old girl’ mouldered in the downstairs ‘garage’. I pulled her head off in ’66, and we lifted the engine and box out in ’68 and hoisted the body to the garage roof. The remaining go-kart on wire wheels seared itself into my boyhood memory bank. It reeked of Brooklands and Pendine Sands, of George Eyston and Tazio Nuvolari — 100mph just standing still. We did desultory work on her until the announcement of the 1972 International Vintage Car Rally. Then we — my late brother Roger, myself, and Dad — got serious. It was a bare-chassis-up restoration but entirely amateur and non concours. It’s what we are, and, given her history and inherited patina, it’s what the old girl is, too.
The only thing we sent out was the upholstery — everything else happened at home. In typical fashion, we went for things like threaded spring pins (well, we had these bolts …) and a host of other improvisations. The half shafts were originally splined at each end, but splines in a cast-iron hub are a potential disaster.
(The night before Wigram ’73, I lined the Wolseley 18 up alongside a beach buggy at the Colombo Street lights, dropped clutch — and chewed out the cast-iron hub. I walked into a garage, asked if I could borrow its drill press. When asked why, I said, “I want to drill and tap two 3∕8 Whit holes opposite each other, through this hub. Then I’m going to wind two bolts into the splines and drive back to Dunedin on them. Carefully.”
“If you’re game to do that, go for your life,” was the mechanic’s pre-osh reply. I did, got it home, then the following Wednesday forgot and floored it, as you do when you’re young — I still have that hub somewhere.)
Anyway, one had already been altered to taper and key before our time, but Dad did
the other one and machined up a spare, which has lived in the boot ever since.
A man with attitude
We only just made it to scrutineering, almost asleep on our feet after three consecutive all-nighters. Then, on the shakedown trip to our Invercargill starting point — presumably after some sleep — we touched 5200rpm (call it 90mph [145kph], allowing a bit for wheel slip). On the rally, rust in the long-neglected petrol tank started to weep fuel, which had us slapping on bondy in the Wanaka camping ground and holding it up by hand until it cured. (That’s nothing — summer of ’65, Dad lost a tooth filling, mixed up a little bog and thumbed it in, sitting open-mouthed in the South Kaikoura camping ground as it set — petrol tanks are child’s play to a man with attitude!) An SU float bowl also threatened to drop off, which a whittled wedge of West Coast beech sorted. Otherwise, she snarled along happily — most rewarding. Somewhere I have the 8mm movie clip that I shot of Dad punting her around the Nelson ‘Le Mans’ circuit; he was always adamant that she was the thirdfastest outright. Who knows? An XK150 Jaguar was reported as fastest at 90mph (145kph) (but that would be an end-ofstraight time rather than a whole-circuit average), and Hamish Moffat’s Type 35 Bugatti wasn’t exactly hanging around either. Roger and Dad are gone now, as will be a goodly number of those participants 46 years later. It’s a poignant (and rapidly becoming private) memory.
Rallied, transport, and neglected
She sometimes got rallied, sometimes used as transport, and sometimes neglected as the ’70s and ’80s rolled by. I was driving the Wolseley 18 through Otaki in 1976 and spotted a familiar profile in a wrecker’s — turned out to be a Wolseley 25. The box was gone, but I extricated the diff, packed it off on the train, and rang Dad from a phone box, telling him to anticipate a package. It is in the SA today, the original now a spare. Dad found two of the later synchro boxes (she was an early 1936 crash-box model, complete with flip-up gate on reverse), but, over the years, we blew the third cogs on both. We think that it’s due to a design defect, but we’re alone in that diagnosis — blowing cogs is something the English gentry don’t seem to admit to. The wet-cork
One day they may even stop her jumping out of third. There’s no urgency about that, though — after 58 years, holding her in gear has become part of our DNA
clutch needed re-corking every 20,000 miles or so (always done in the kitchen, warm oil baked on the stove — a smell you never forget). We wrecked three Wolseley 18s for parts over the years, and my own has recently become a donor, too. As Dad got older, the rallies became more prevalent — MG and pre-’56 ones all over the country. He rewired the old girl with relays and created an electric drive for the sunroof.
Then another little-end pinch bolt let go, somewhere south of Manapouri. This time, the block was toast. Far too oldschool practical an engineer to worry about matching numbers, Dad took the best of our Wolseley 18 blocks, stripped it down, and started from scratch. He used a set of plus-60 pistons that I’d found in Auckland, found modern bearing shells that suited the crank, and machined the rods and caps to accept them. He white metalled the mains and sent it off for line boring; planed 3mm off the head (raising her from the original 6.5:1 compression ratio) and inserted hardened valve seats for lead-free fuel; re-faced the oil pump, inserted a modern filter, and organized a remote oil cooler in the radiatorcore; drilled the tail of the Wolseley 18 crank to let the oil into the clutch housing, balanced everything in sight, and reassembled it with care — the last major act of faith from an old-school aficionado.
As he got older, he often mentioned retaining the old girl in the family — saw it as his legacy, really. I’d do some of what was needed — back springs reset, kingpins rebushed, warrants got, and servicing done — but my petrol-head days are well over (although my love of good engineering and aesthetics remains). And, as he got older, he needed someone else to do the driving — that someone else turning out to be our youngest son, Jaryd. I have a treasured photo of them together out on the lawn a decade ago, replacing motor and gearbox after a clutch-re-corking job and having a ball. The SA clearly had a new generation of custodian and Dad was well content.
Jaryd has since given her new brakes right through (funny, we did them in ’71, can’t imagine why they needed to be done again …). He’s also given her a new petrol tank (that rust finally won) and a Kevlar-faced clutch plate (not sure how that would have gone down). Being old and British, she’ll never be ‘reliable’ in the modern sense; there’s a revolving list of to-dos, and inevitably there’s a spare for everything except the next two items on the list. Some things may never get redone — the remote greasing system for one; the wiper motor hacked into an exquisite piece of inlaid timber for another (or does that pass as patina/history after more than 60 years?).
She recently took pride of place at Jaryd’s wedding and she was there at his mother’s graduation. He drove her to Dad’s requiem and he’ll no doubt drive her to mine. I remember her doing those kinds of duties a generation earlier, and I guess that’s what heirlooms are all about. He and his brother are already talking about celebrating her 100th birthday. And who knows? One day they may even stop her jumping out of third. There’s no urgency about that, though — after 58 years, holding her in gear has become part of our DNA.