Morgan Four Four

If the definition of a classic is something that has stood the test of time, then the Morgan 4/4 is the epitome of the expression. In continuous production since 1936, except for those gloomy  years of World War II when Britain didn’t produce any civilian cars at all, the 4/4 has gone from contemporary to venerable to outdated to rejuvenated to out-moded to timeless over the course of its 7 decades. Now that a new millennium has dawned, with the British car  industry teetering on the brink of implosion and/or suicide, it  appears truly a miracle that the Morgan make has survived. Yet, survive, it has, and prospered.

Unlikely beginnings

When one considers the story of Morgan, one doesn’t just marvel that it is around today. One has to wonder that it got off the ground at all. You see,  the founder of the feast, Henry Frederick Stanley Morgan, wasn’t very keen on building cars in the first place. Morgan,  born the son of a minister in 1881,  studied at the Crystal Palace engineering college, a school not known for its football team, and, at the same time, he took a job as a draftsman with the Great Western Railroad. His first close encounter with that then-rare species, the automobile, came right after the turn of the century, and it was not a joyful one. The Benz car  that he borrowed took off with him down a steep grade and crashed, setting him back some 28 pounds in repair expenses.

Though, despite that harrowing beginning,  the auto bug had bit, and in 1906 Morgan walked away from his job working on the railroad and entered  into a business as a garage owner and bus line operator. His fleet of buses consisted of one 10-horsepower Wolseley that seated 15 passengers, but the business was successful, and soon he became the local sales agent, i.e. “dealer,” for both Darraq and Wolseley.

Reaching some level of affluence, he  bought his first car, an Eagle Tandem three-wheeler with an 8-horsepower engine built by De Dion. In the tradition of James Packard and  Henry Royce, the engineer in Morgan told him he could do better. So, with the help of a professor named Stephenson Peach, Morgan drew up a  basic but  a well-thought-out design that was a significant improvement on the Eagle. Like the Eagle, it was a three-wheeler, a design that had significant benefits in light weight and ease of manufacture. Instead of  half shafts, a rear end,  and a differential, the power from the engine could be supplied very easily to the single rear wheel via a chain. In effect, cars  similar to the Eagle and Morgan’s were half-car, half-motorcycle and are generically termed “cyclecars.”

Many enhancements to the cyclecar

Morgan’s design  developed  the science of the cyclecar in three areas. First, it  made use of  a very stiff tube frame chassis that was also lightweight. Second, its independent front suspension was so good that it has continued through the Morgan line with just slight alterations for nearly 90 years. And, third, it was fitted with a robust  7-horsepower Peugeot engine that gave it one of the best power-to-weight ratios of its time. Consequently, in terms of acceleration, it was one of the  fastest cars of the time.

Even with a high quality machine on his hands, Morgan was reluctant to take it any farther, but so many acquaintances,   friends,  and strangers asked to buy copies of the first  3-wheeler that he realized he had a potential business success on his hands. So Morgan borrowed some cash from his father,  the rector,  and made the operation of Malvern Garage bigger   to build a series of cyclecars. Fortunately,  he didn’t affix the initials of his business to their radiator caps or he would have pre-empted the name of another legendary British sports car, the Triumph, no, no, sorry, the MG.

A brace of Morgan 3-wheelers made their initial public appearance at the Olympia Motor Show of 1910. Reflecting their motorcycle tradition, both were single-seat models.    (In fact,  Morgan’s first attempt at  a  motorized vehicle was a  2-wheel motorcycle,   but his 7-horsepower Peugeot engine proved very unwieldy in that configuration, so he fashioned the now-classic sliding-axle front suspension to keep from tipping over.) One of the show vehicles was fitted with a 2-cylinder 8-horsepower J.A.P. engine while the other had a single-cylinder  4-horsepower J.A.P. engine, but neither set the show on fire, and Morgan determined that he had better start  creating  more practical two-seaters.

Gold medal gets publicity

The two-seat versions of the eight-horsepower car debuted the following year, but in the meantime, one of the single-seaters had garnered  a gold medal in the London-Exeter-London Reliability Trial, which was terrific publicity for the fledgling enterprise. When the two-seaters hit the market, Morgan was so deluged with orders that he sought out a possible arrangement with a larger manufacturer, but such a  transaction was not forthcoming, and he again expanded his Malvern Garage facilities to build more and more vehicles.

It wasn’t until a year later in 1912 that Morgan Motor Company was  formally  formed with H.F.S. Morgan’s reverend father as chairman of the board, but by then, on the strength of an excellent  product, the company was well on its way. Apparently, that same year, with H.F.S. at the wheel, a Morgan broke the 1100 cubic centimeter class record at Brooklands, by covering just short of  sixty miles in one hour’s time. The company immediately added other trials and hill climb honors to its trophy case, and in one fuel economy test a Morgan turned in a remarkable 69.4 miles-per-gallon performance.

The company’s reputation was improved still further in 1913 when it went racing in earnest, building a longer, lower chassis and fitting it with an overhead-valve J.A.P. engine. One such machine  garnered  the French Cyclecar Grand Prix that year with journalist-racer W.G. McInnies at the controls, another public relations triumph. But, sadly, the days of the three-wheeler were numbered. Over in America,  the cyclecar phenomenon had never prospered  to the extent it had in Britain and on the Continent. Wealthy U.S. playboys demanded more substantial sports models like the Mercer and the Stutz, while those seeking cheap transport opted for the Ford Model T.   Even in Europe,  the trend was to light cars and 4-wheel cyclecars instead of the 3-wheeled contraptions, but though Morgan did design a prototype 4-wheel vehicle in 1915, it never reached the production stage. Instead, after World War I was over  in late 1918, Morgan Motor Company expanded its market by offering four-passenger three wheelers.

In 1920, Morgan was still  more of a cottage industry than an industrial giant with a production rate of some 50 cars per week.

Racing benefits

The company enjoyed continued victory through the 1920s, mining the idiosyncratic niche of the European and British  three-wheeler market. Not surprisingly,  with two of its three wheels up front, Morgan was a founder  in the installation of front-wheel brakes during the decade. It also continued to enjoy success on the racetrack, and there were times, according to Morgan lore, that the swift three-wheelers were  needed to start a lap behind their four-wheeled classmates to even their advantage. The brand developed such a reputation that copies were soon being produced under license in France.

The onset of the Great Depression put a crimp in Morgan’s progress, but as maker of  inexpensive transportation,  it was able to move forward with a substantially revamped version  in 1931. Not only did the vehicle still have three wheels, it also contain three forward speeds, reverse and single-chain drive. By 1933,  the  company  introduced another new model, the “F” Super Two-seater complete with a 10 horsepower Ford engine. But by the mid-Thirties,  Morgan was on the brink  of a revolution. In the Paris and London motor shows of 1936, as Hitler was beginning his land-grabs in  Czechoslovakia and the Rhineland, Morgan exhibited a four-wheel vehicle.

The new model was called the Morgan Four Four, a redundant  attempt  to differentiate it from the three wheelers. The  initial  “four” signified four cylinders, while the second designated four wheels. In its design,  the 4/4, used the experience the Morgan works had aachieved in its quarter century of light car manufacture. The steel chassis,  made  of Z-section stock, offered boxed cross members for exemplary stiffness. Atop this sound structure was a featherlight aluminum body hand-hammered over an ash (baseball bat wood) frame accentuated by the now-popular  “droop-snoot” grille.  As always, Morgan was more than content to use engines built by others, in this case a rather unremarkable but reasonably dependable  four cylinder of 1.1-liters. As with the three wheelers, the secret of the 4/4’s success was not  mere  horsepower, but a  cunning combination of power to weight achieved largely through the use of the aluminum-on-wood body structure.

The Four Four quickly popular

The 4/4 roadster was an immediate hit, and it was followed in 1938 by the Morgan 4/4 Drophead Coupe, something we Americans would call a convertible. Soon thereafter World War II intervened in the Morgan story, and production didn’t resume until 1945. This time around the 4/4 was powered by a 1267 cubic centimeter Special Standard engine, a deal made possible by Standard chief Sir John Black, who as a young man had drawn up Morgan’s original patent papers.

After the war the three wheelers didn’t last long–the last of them were built in 1950–but the 4/4 proved evergreen, sliding through the Fifties with a few revisions and an occasional shift in the engine supplier. In 1951 the 4/4 was joined by the Plus Four, which was essentially a 4/4 with a more powerful engine. It retained the Thirties-look fenders, grille and headlight arrangement, aluminum-on-ash construction and sliding-pillar front suspension. The big change was the installation of a more powerful 2088 cubic centimeter Standard Vanguard four-cylinder engine.

As a bigger-engined version of the 4/4, the Plus Four morphed into the Plus Eight in July of 1968 when the revised model was shown with a Rover V-8 engine that was based on an early Sixties Buick design. Shown at the Earl’s Court Motor Show that year, the Plus Eight is still with us.

Remarkably, now, more than three decades later, the two closely related vehicles, the 4/4 and the Plus Eight, are the mainstays of the Morgan lineup. The 4/4 has seen a variety of powerplants over the years, but these days it is still as true to the vision of H.F.S. Morgan as it was in 1936, a light and sturdy car that is fun to drive. That is the legacy of the son of a rector who didn’t even want to build cars in the first place yet ended up building the model that has been in production longer than any other.

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