Abingdon pairing in search of a new home
Other than his close friends, few were aware that Lewis Reader’s extensive workshop in Watsonville, California, contained three pre-war MGS in pieces. While he was in the US military serving in Germany in his youth, Reader made several trips to England and was a great admirer of MGS, especially the L-type six-cylinder sports model and the SA saloon, but he couldn’t afford to buy one.
Later in life he returned to the UK and bought APF 533, a 1933 L-type Magna (L0308), which he drove around England and to Spain to attend flamenco guitar shows.
Reader then shipped the car to California and put it into storage.
After he married his wife, Nancy, she was keen to learn more about English culture so they travelled to the UK three times to find, among other things, pre-war MG parts. In 1986, at a southern California MG event, they spotted a man in a T-shirt that listed one of his cars as an MG SA. Eventually Reader persuaded him to sell, and the 1936 SA (chassis SA0336) came with a second parts car (SA1884).
The previous owner had bought the unrestored SA0336 from an advertisement in Road & Track, and
Nancy recalls riding in the rebuilt SA with her husband during the 1980s and ’90s: “We called it the ‘happy car’, because people always smiled and waved.”
Reader later took the L-type to pieces, and had partially stripped the SA to replace the upholstery and get it ready for a repaint, but he suffered a deterioration in his health and in 2018 became confined to a wheelchair. “Lew enjoyed being in his workshop, where he spent his days researching parts and repairing things from his chair,” says Nancy. “A part even arrived in the mail after he died.”
Jessica Clay, Nancy Reader’s goddaughter, and her husband Douglas have now methodically photographed each of the cars and all the parts, hoping an enthusiast will take on the rebuild of the two machines before they sell on any spares that are left over. For further details, email info@3mgs.org