Description
By: Brian Moylan . 2014 REPRINT
The MG, from being a Morris car modified in the corner of a backstreet workshop, evolved into a sports car in its own right. The demand for this fiery little car caused the production to move to four different and progressively larger sites in and around Oxford, finally moving out of the city ten miles away to Abingdon and a factory that might have been custom built for it .
This factory was on the site of a tannery that had inflated to over twice its size catering for the 1914-18 wartime demand for its leather products. The coming of peace caused it to deflate back to its previous level of production, leaving empty the rows of large hangars that had housed the wartime production effort. It was to this factory that Cecil Kimber, who had resigned his position as Managing Director of Morris Garages, brought his brain-child that he called the MG. race.
The 160, many never seen before, pictures in this book chronicle every aspect of the factory from its opening amidst great euphoria in 1930 to its closing amidst great recriminations in 1980.
Features
- Includes many pics taken by employees and kept in private collections.
- Reveals the many facets of factory life
- Illustrates the willingness of the employees to adapt to change
- The little known work carried out during the war.
- Illustrates the way that the factory governed the mens’ working and leisure lives.
- Captions reveal an intimate knowledge of the pictures’ subjects.
- Will in times to come to be accepted as an important record of MG history.
- Reveals MGs initiative in designing testing facilties to conform to EU & USA regulations
- It tells stories of the generations of families working together in the factory.
- It would prove to many people that Abingdon could have still been in the forefront of sport car manufacture
