MG CREAM CRACKER
The tiny MG Midget ‘Cream Crackers’ team cars were famed in their heyday for tackling endurance trials of unlikely scale. John Simister drives a unique survivor
Experiencing the supercharged works Midget
OLD CARS, EH? W hen they don’t work properly, it’s all part of the character. After all, car manufacturers didn’t really have a clue back then, and neither did their customers, who just accepted their lot. So when an old car doesn’t work quite faultlessly today, you just chuckle knowingly. You expected nothing better.
Well, maybe we should expect better. The old-carsare-innately-hopeless mindset is defeatist – and it’s wrong. Old cars, if to correct specification and correctly maintained, can be far better than their detractors assume. Sometimes, back in their day, they were put through extraordinary feats of endurance and came through fighting. Feats such as the so-called Classic Trials organised by the Motor-Cycling Club since the start of the previous century, tackled by cars as much as motorcycles as the decades progressed.
The three most famous of these were, and are, the Exeter, the Land’s End and the Edinburgh, the last of which has in recent times gone nowhere near Scotland. Car manufacturers such as arch rivals MG and Singer made much publicity from their cars’ trials successes, even fielding works-supported teams of small sports cars able to slither, bounce and graunch their way up steep, unmade tracks without too many parts breaking or falling off.
One such team was the MG Cream Crackers, three P-type Midgets finished in the butter-cream and biscuitbrown of the company’s logo (before it changed to a red background). The team first appeared with this colour scheme at the 1935 Land’s End Trial, although the cars thus painted had been competing as a team – MG Car Club Team A – since the previous year. One of the cars was driven by – and, from October 1934, was owned by – successful trials driver Jack Bastock. You’re looking at it now, its Berkshire ‘JB’ registration, often seen on old MGs, neatly matching Bastock’s initials.
The weather forecast for today is not great. Rain, thunder, hailstorms, all are on the schedule. But this little MG, chassis number PA 0682, original engine size just 847cc, is well-used to such conditions. It spent much of its sporting life in the 1930s, and quite a lot of time since, mashing its way over mud and pounding through puddles, so a bit more of this won’t hurt the Midget. It will just add to the patina.
A REGULAR P-TYPE was good for 74mph and took a lively-for-1934 32.2 seconds to reach 60mph. Jack Bastock and his team-mates Maurice Toulmin (a wellknown MG dealer) and RA McDermid, however, reckoned the MG was too slow to achieve glory on the trials hills, partly because it was too heavy. This hadn’t prevented Bastock from taking JB 3854 to a second-class award in that year’s MCC Buxton Sporting Trial on 13 October 1934, and the team from winning the team prize a week later on the North West London Motor Club Inter-Team Trial, but nevertheless the Midgets returned to MG’s Abingdon workshop to be signficantly enhanced in time for the Exeter Trial on 29 December.
Bastock’s MG had originally left the production line on 15 May 1934, becoming a factory development car for a short time before Bastock took custody. Since then, it had regularly returned to the factory even before the enhancement session, because Jack Bastock was both a vigorous driver who used the Midget on many events and a man unwilling to accept below-par performance.
The huge history file that still lives with the MG includes many MG Car Company worksheets detailing a cylinder head overhaul here, a steering box re-shim there, rattles fixed, clutch drag cured. Bastock would report a flattened exhaust pipe, brakes that were ‘very poor’ and much more, all fixed at no charge by the ‘works’, often with a personal note from manager John Thornley to his staff and an informal letter to his friend Jack, aka ‘Bass’.
However, the December workshop visit was the big one. A preview of what was to happen came with Thornley’s letter to Bastock on 13 November 1934, which spoke of ‘an alternative form of induction manifold’ and
asked if Bass thought that Bamford Clough (one of the Edinburgh Trial hills, a proper car-killer with an evil rocky shelf halfway up) might be a suitable test venue.
On 14 December, Thornley wrote again to Bastock with news: ‘We now have three cars standing in a row in the Service Department here.’ These were the three later-tobe Cream Crackers, about to undergo significant weight reduction by means of K3 Magnette-style cycle wings and a new bonnet, all in aluminium, plus new pneumatic seat cushions, a lightened clutch plate and the removal of the windscreen. Aeroscreens would suffice instead.
The compression ratio was to be reduced to 7.5:1, and the same day’s list of removed parts included the twin carburettors and their manifold. For good measure, the rear axle lost its functioning differential (later reinstated) and became ‘solid’: great for traction on slippery hills, not so great for cornering on a grippy surface.
Note that the fitment of a supercharger is not mentioned, nor is its addition alluded to at any other point in the MG’s period history until April 1937 and a job sheet detailing a major engine rebuild. That cost £50 including work on brakes, suspension and steering; ‘Keep cost down to a minimum,’ it said on an internal MG note, because Bastock was himself then paying for the longsuffering Midget’s continuing work. The sheet for job number 4988 noted ‘Oil pump on blower turned off?’ That’s the first indication we have of the blower’s presence.
History, however, seems to assume that the Cream Crackers were supercharged, as small MGs often were. Was the fitment of a single-SU-fed Centric supercharger, of a type it still has today, Thornley’s ‘alternative form of induction manifold’? Why else would the compression ratio have been reduced? Or does Thornley’s reference to larger carburettors in a letter to Bastock on 17 June 1935, two months after the Land’s End Trial – ‘I am sending the large ones off to you to try’ – suggest the P-type was still normally aspirated at that point? We just don’t know.
We do know about the colour scheme, though. The three Midgets had already been wearing bonnet stripes in the MG Car Club’s brown and cream before Bastock came up with a publicity-attracting idea in a letter of 8 April 1935: paint all three cars in matching colours, which would draw attention to the stripes. That led to the next idea – that the cars should all have a cream body with brown wings and a brown bonnet top – and the Cream Crackers were born. Bastock’s car became Cream Crackers II (not Cream Cracker II, oddly).
In its brand-new paint, Bastock’s MG scored a secondclass award on the Land’s End Trial held on 19-20 April 1935. It missed out on a first because it failed to climb Beggar’s Roost (another car-killer), a disappointment after the MG’s first-class award on the previous December’s Exeter Trial after that lightening session, possibly helped by fortification of the driver from a flask of whisky mac. The rest of 1935 saw four more trials outings, the results including a first-class award on June’s Edinburgh Trial and two ‘Premier Awards’.
The official Cream Crackers team name was bestowed upon a new team of Midgets for 1936. Bastock was no longer one of its drivers, having signed up instead to a team called The Musketeers. However, he kept JB 3854 until war arrived, continued to compete in it when not Musketeering, and had a 939cc PB Midget engine block fitted in 1938. During the war it belonged to Gilbert Couzens, who restarted the MG’s trials activities in 1947. These continued into the mid-1950s, first-class awards on the MCC’s three major trials among the triumphs, and then JB 3854 went to ground.
STEPHEN DEAR, FOUNDER of the MG Car Club’s Triple-M Register (Midget, Magnette and Magna), eventually found it in Huddersfield in 1970, got its lost registration number reinstated, and restarted the MG’s trials career. By 1987, JB 3854 was well and truly worn out, as new owner Alan Grassam discovered. There followed an immense restoration, keeping as many original parts as possible. These did not include the broken and rotted lower body timbers, nor much of the body panelling, but to this day the top of the scuttle is the one built in Abingdon 87 years ago and the woodwork under the aluminium skin bears the original body number.
The brakes, about which Bastock often complained, had been converted to hydraulic operation but Couzens reinstated an original mechanical cable system. The engine’s crossflow cylinder head was cracked so a new, reproduction one took its place, complete with a new overhead camshaft. MG engine expert Derek Davies, who had made the head, fitted a new vertical camshaft gear-drive plus a modern steel crankshaft and connecting rods able to take MGB shell bearings – somewhat larger than the PB’s white-metal originals. The Centric C160B supercharger’s casing was cracked so that, too, was replaced.
And, yes, Alan Grassam then went MCC trialling, because that’s what JB 3854 was for. Eventually, though, he cried enough – maybe the car did, too – and he set about re-restoring the MG before selling it. Now its owner since 2014, Stephen Akers, has it for sale again – but not before I’ve had a go in this thoroughly used, much-abused but nearly always loved MG.
It’s an eager-looking little thing with its abbreviated mudguards and aero-screens, its pair of spare wheels, its lack of running boards and its side-exhaust. And now, snuggled low down in the driving seat, I look towards my feet and realise how much less structure this car has than
‘Splash! Water powers past the bonnet, and all over me. The cockpit is awash’
you might reasonably expect. Almost all of the gearbox is visible, as are the bonnet sides, and if the bonnet were open you’d be able to see straight down to the pedals.
Straight ahead is the rev-counter, the inner scale of which is a speedometer, its readings relevant only in top gear. MG-denoting octagons are everywhere: dial surrounds, gearbox access plate, gearlever knob, choke and hand-throttle knobs and, under the bonnet, oil-filler cap and camshaft-cover bolts. There are probably others.
The engine starts with a let’s-go vigour, so off we go. It’s important to remember that the gearchange gate is a mirror-image of normality – just one of many things to think about, such as double-declutching and wondering how wet I am going to be soon. Those are normal postvintage MG thoughts. Soon I’m sharing more thoughts with the ghost of Jack Bastock, as I realise why someone converted the brakes to hydraulic between then and now. The reinstated cable system, at least as currently adjusted, is dire. So far does the pedal travel, before not much happens, that any chance of heel-and-toe – vital for a neat double-declutch downshift – is scuppered.
The gearshifts themselves are as quick as a non-synchro shift can be, though, thanks to a clutch with a very short travel and a bite like a maltreated Alsatian’s. Once you’ve got the hang of it, the clutch’s ferocity and the ultra-direct accelerator linkage fit well with the smooth-revving engine’s keenness to fit as many of those revs as possible into each second, never mind minute.
Yes, there are snags, the sort of snags that Jack Bastock would have presented at length to the Abingdon service department, but all fixable. The passenger door tends to fly open when the very choppy suspension chops just a bit too much; tightening the hinges and softening the rear friction dampers should put those right. And the wipers have just stopped working as the rain gets heavier, so it’s down with the windscreen, on with the goggles and hope the aero-screens deflect the worst.
But I can forgive a lot of this as I feel the engine’s surge of enthusiasm when it passes 3000rpm and the boost gets going, and as the super-quick steering tips the MG into a bend, makes the tail sit into the edge of rolloversteer and obliges me to unwind a touch. This is a car that never stops talking to you.
Now here’s a big puddle across the road, just the job for the watersplash shot that our photographer thinks would be too good to miss. So through it the MG and I hurtle, imagining I’m on one of those trials on the way to another evil hill. Splash! Water powers past the bonnet, what passes for a bulkhead, the floor, the door gaps, and all over me. The cockpit is awash.
It’s just another day in the life of a rather famous MG P-type Midget trials car, but after a few more passes I, at least, am completely cream crackered. End
THANKS TO owner Stephen Akers; Ashridge Automobiles, ashridgeautomobiles.co.uk, where Cream Crackers II is for sale.