The Morgan is an automotive anachronism, a dinosaur of a design that was already out of date in the 1950s. The Morgan exists in its own tiny niche without rivals and has seemingly refused to progress since the days of raffish gents in flat caps and string-backed driving gloves. Built in the sleepy Worcester village of Malvern amongst equally antiquated wood-framed dwellings by a group of pipe-smoking master craftsmen, the Morgan is a motoring summation of 'traditional' chocolate box England. It is the embodiment of a lost age that appeals to a very specific group of stick-in-the-muds who pine for the days of unregulated drink driving and casual misogyny. That isn't to say there haven't been many attempts, both official and unofficial, to bring the Morgan up to date over the years. A secret underbelly of streamlined bodies, glassfibre and - whisper it - weather protection that would have any Real Morgan Enthusiast choking on his warm ale.
The most well known of these is the Morgan Plus 4 Plus, the famous failure of 1963 that proved what those Real Enthusiasts already knew; People didn't want to buy a Morgan that didn't look like a Morgan. The gestation period of this car was brief; At the dawn of the 1960s, Company director Peter Morgan decided that a more up-to-date design would compliment the already ancient 4/4 and +4 in the Morgan range, and like so many car makers at the time, realised a moulded GRP body would be the cheapest and quickest way to get a new car into production. The traditional Morgans with their ash framed, aluminium-clad bodies were notoriously labour-intensive to make and Morgan's near-mythical waiting list was a good advertising point, it was hardly a great business model. Having no experience of GRP, Peter Morgan approached a couple of companies with a design brief and let them know they would be competing for a contract to design and build a new medium-volume production car for Morgan.
Coventry Laminates had - as far as I can ascertain - no car-building experience but given their name must've been a dab hand at GRP moulding. David Hunt was Technical and Design Director and he was put in charge of the project for the new Morgan. He came up with a rather dumpy proposal very much in the TR2 idiom which, whilst being streets ahead of the traditional Morgans, was still pretty outdated for 1961. Only a quarter-scale model of the car was built.
The other firm in competition for the contract was Edwards Brothers Ltd, better known as EB Cars and already a seasoned producer of GRP special bodies since 1959. Their take on the new Morgan was somewhat different from Coventry Laminates' being a low-slung, rakish roadster of incredibly stylish design. Peter Morgan was impressed - no doubt by the fact that EB had designed and built a fully working prototype car in the time it had taken Coventry Laminates to build a scale model - and EB won the contract to build the new modern Morgan. The EB-Morgan special still survives and has been in the same loving family ownership for many years.
The car that was eventually born of the EB/Morgan marriage was stylistically barely related to the initial prototype. The Plus 4 Plus, when it was launched in 1963, had gained a more recognisable Morgan grille and the wings and headlights now sat proud of the bonnet in a vague nod to the separate wings of the 'regular' Morgans, no doubt a misguided attempt to appease the traditionalists. They needn't have bothered, as the car was a resounding failure. It soon became clear that the initial plan to build 50 a year was a mere pipe dream, and just 26 were sold in 4 years. Real Morgan Enthusiasts could be heard chuckling into their beards throughout the country. Morgan's first and only attempt to build a modern car quietly died in 1967, the company learned a valuable lesson and (until very recently) made no further attempts to build a modern car.
The most obvious difference between the two prototypes and the finished Plus 4 Plus is the production car's roof. A rather odd looking carbuncle that always seemed like a total afterthought to me. Now, this is merely conjecture, but I'd bet the addition of a hard top had something to do with another 'Modern Morgan' that appeared one year before the Plus 4 Plus' launch.
This was very much an unofficial project, undertaken by Herr Wehrlin, the Swiss Morgan concessionaire. He took the simple approach of buying an Ashley Sportiva bodyshell and mounting it on a 1954 Morgan +4 chassis (after transporting the shell from England to Switzerland strapped to the roof of his Opel Estate - a heroic feat). The car was built up to a very high standard and displayed on the Morgan stand at the 1962 Geneva show as the Morgan +4B (for Berlina, one assumes). Wehrlin received a huge positive response from Swiss Morgan owners who were tired of their cars minimal weather protection. The only person who wasn't impressed with the car was Peter Morgan himself, who was furious that it was being displayed on the Morgan stand and ordered Wehrlin to break the car up or lose his contract with Morgan altogether. Wehrlin agreed but simply hid the component parts of the car in the back of his garage and amazingly it still exists today in this partially disassembled state awaiting restoration. As the Morgan Plus 4 Plus appeared a year later with it's odd turret-like roof, I am inclined to believe Peter Morgan added the fixed roof as a direct response to the positive reaction the Ashely saloon Morgan had received in Geneva...
Switzerland is hardly the centre of the automotive world, but if there is one place in Europe that has even less of a car industry it has to be Luxembourg, yet this is where perhaps the most dramatic of the modernised Morgans hails from. Sadly the details of this car seem to be lost in the annals of time, but what I do know is that Luxembourger Paul Conrardy showed his Morgan-Conrardy Grand Sport Coupe in 1953. It looked a little like a Vignale Ferrari that had been left under a heat lamp, but did a great job of disguising its origins and must've been a real show stopper when it was first seen. The body shape suggests GRP construction but I'd be very surprised to see that in 1953. I've uploaded a period magazine article here that somebody might be able to decipher if they sprechen sie deutsch
Another car that is sadly lacking in history is this 1955 4/4 by Spanish coachbuilder Pedro Serra. Serra was probably the best known Carrocero in Spain, active from the late 1940s up to 1980, his most famous creation is the bluff Dodge 3700 Boulevard but throughout the 50s & 60s he created a host of distinctive designs on Pegaso, Seat, Dodge and foreign chassis including one of my favourite Aston-Martins and a gaggle of Triumph-engined cars - a TR3, a Doretti and this Morgan. Most of Serra's coachwork was built specially to order for private clients so individual car history is shaky. Beyond this photograph I know nothing about this Morgan but it's a lovely design - one of Serra's best - and I hope that it still exists hidden away somewhere in Spain...
That seems to be that for the Continental Morgans, although I hope there are another couple lurking out there in the mists of time. Back in Blighty, things were a little less exciting, especially before the glassfibre explosion of the mid '50s. One of the tiny old-school coachbuilders that sprang up after WWII was Leacroft or Egham, Surrey. The history of this firm is extremely sketchy but they seem to have existed between around 1947-52 before seemingly becoming part of Coachcraft, a similarly obscure firm. Leacroft were at one time owned by Gordon Watson and Bob Cowell - later Roberta Cowell, the first male-to-female sex change patient in the UK and former RAF fighter ace/ racing driver. Leacroft only built a handful of cars including a BMW 328, a handsome Lagonda saloon, a Jowett Jupiter plus the first Connaught bodies, and in 1948/49 this neat Morgan. Hardly the most earth-shattering design, and barely more modern than the regular production car, but a noble attempt from a forgotten firm that no doubt impressed at the British concours events of the day.
Right, off to work now, part two of this on Sunday hopefully!
