Morgan, Malvern and Motoring

By: Martyn Webb . new book, minor tear on the cover

Few factories have survived a century in family ownership but one, Morgan, is also the world's oldest privately owned car manufacturer. Morgan has had a link with the spa town of Malvern for its entire hundred-year life, but it wasn't the first car manufacturer in the town. Two decades before, in a small workshop in Malvern Link, the Sander brothers constructed Britain's first four-wheeled, internal-combustion car. Originally powered by steam, then a gas engine, by 1894 it was powered by a single-cylinder petrol engine. In 1897, the company made one of Britain's first motorcycles. Unfortunately, by 1922 Sander had stopped manufacturing cars.

H.F.S. Morgan, son of a Hefordshire clclergyman, was to put Mvern onon the car- manufacturing map, where it firmly remains to this day. The Morgan 'Runabout' was to be the first of a long line of three- and four- wheeled Morgans that still leave the Mvern fafactory today.

After a period at the Crystal Palace School of Practical Engineering, followed by three years at the Great 'Western Railway's Swindon works, Harry Morgan, aged twenty-three, opened a garage on Worcester Road, Malvern, in May 1905. In 1909, after forays into providing Malvern's first bus service, he set to work on a lightweight car of his own design, using facilities at Malvern College. In 1910, work started on three new protoypes at Repton School, Derby, and they soon appeared at the International Cycle & Motor Cycle Exhibition at Olympia. Somewhere between twenty and thirty cars were ordered as a result of the show, and Morgan set about producing them. 'Worcester Road was tiny and much work was sub-contracted, including to Sander's, but Morgan was now a fully fledged motor manufacturer.

Morgan, Malvern & Motoring tells the story of Harry Morgan and his first forays into motoring and car manufacture, set against attitudes to motoring in those days.

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