Donate SIGN UP

Morris Eight !

Avatar Image
mikey4444 | 08:15 Tue 10th May 2016 | Motoring
31 Answers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Eight#/media/File:Morris_8_saloon_-_1939.jpg

I saw a smashing Morris Eight yesterday (not the one above)

The chap had only bought it the previous week, so he was still getting used
to taking it to Asda and coming back out, to find people gathered around it !

The car had been exported to New Zealand as soon as it was made, in 1939, and lived there until 10 years ago, when it was brought back to the UK again.

It had been completely restored and was in the same condition that it would have left the factory all those years ago ! The chap said it was only 8 hp.

Maroon and black.....it was stunning....look at that wonderful grill !

The chap is local, so I am sure I will be seeing him again....hopefully !

I will take a photo next time.
Gravatar

Answers

1 to 20 of 31rss feed

1 2 Next Last

Best Answer

No best answer has yet been selected by mikey4444. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.

For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.
Not even a heater but a Blanket!!!
Question Author
TWR...it had an electric windscreen wiper on the drivers side but in a bad rainstorm, you have to rely on your passenger to use the other one manually !

The windscreen could be tilted out, at the base, for fresh air, and the chap said this was the best aircon that he had ever used.

It was actually remarkably roomy inside...plenty of room in the front and you could get two adults/three kids in the back.

He said that it was on a classic car insurance, which cost all of £150 a year, and that included road-side recovery. It cost him £7000 but when you consider that no work is needed, I thought that was a fair price to pay for such a smashing car.

Whats not to like !
Bear in mind Mikey that hp in 1939 (for vehicles) was based on the bore of the engine and number of cylinders, so is not related to modern horse-power. It was just a number used for tax purposes.
Question Author
bhg...thanks, I didn't know that. I watched him drive out of the car and then go up a reasonably steep hill, and there didn't seem to be problems.

According to wiki, the top speed was around 58 mph.
My Father was into buying / selling Mikey, he had plenty of these + the Old Ford Pops.
Ah, the old Ford Pops. Vacuum operated windscreen wipers on those - if you went up a hill with your foot to the floor you could stop them.
Still remembered the one my Father kept as his own Bhj, COB 654, that plate would have been worth a bob or two now.
My parents first car was an Austin 8. Apparently passengers had to walk up steep hills, but they could travel down hill. Dad used to call it a "Rollscanardly".

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02328/1939-Austin-8_2328519k.jpg
I love seeing these old cars, I have a section for cars on my phone I take pictures all the time of interesting stuff. Great to see them on the road. Yeah as bhg says in those days HP was an equation rather than a measure of actual HP. the Modern term is Break Horse Power, determined from a dynamometer. 8 BHP would barely move that so I'd say it's more like about 20BHP just as a rough guide.
Question Author
TWR....our first car, back in the 1950's, was an Standard Ten, in Phantom Grey, reg no. WYP 910.

When my Dad passed away 17 years ago, my brothers and I found the original invoice, from South London Motors Ltd, of Streatham, and I am looking at it now.

The car cost £636 : 2 : 4, including purchase tax of £184. This must have been a fortune for my Dad to pay in 1959,as his weekly take-home pay was no more than £30-£40 a week.

We used it for a few years and went up and down to deepest Devon many times. He then part-exed for a huge grey Ford Consul, in about 1963.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Motor_Company#/media/File:Standard_Ten_1959_Castle_Hedingham_2008.JPG

I seem to recall that we had an Austin A30 before the Standard, although there is now no one left alive that can confirm that. It was grey as well....
3 grey cars in a row !....I wonder if grey was a kind of "standard" colour back, that no extra charge was made for ?
As I remember Mikey, every other car was Black, build like a brick s.h. the old London Black cabs had 4 Jack's fitted in case of a flat Tyre, can you or anyone remember that?
Question Author
TWR....my maternal grandfather was a London cab driver, before and after the war, and a Fireman during it. I have a photo taken just after the war, with him in his cab. It was one of those cabs with the empty space where the front passenger seat would have been, for luggage.

My Mum told me that he had done the "knowledge" before the war, by riding around London on a bicycle, with a small clipboard on the handlebars !

The cab looks like this one ::::

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=london+cabs+pre+war&rls=com.microsoft:en-GB:%7Breferrer:source%3F%7D&rlz=1I7ADFA_en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiCm5L2hc_MAhVhIcAKHY3zBRkQ_AUIBygB&;biw=1024&bih=726#imgrc=k3YXN49pIosooM%3A
That's they type Mikey, when you raised the bonnet, on the N/S there was a jacking pump with each wheel settings, far better than these rubbish Jacks in use in to days cars.
I can imagine the scene: bloke comes out of the foodstore to see Morris dancers skipping around his car with delight! o:)
for Break read brake above doh!
Mikey //Whats not to like !//

Well, the crash gearbox, the sloppy steering, the total lack of acceleration, the poor brakes, the noise, the poor fuel consumption, the poor suspension, rubbish road-holding, poor reliability (oil change, tappets & points every few thousand miles) etc. If you drove one now you'd hate it. They are nice to look at though and I'd like everybody but me to be compelled to have one and use it.
Incidentally, my first car was a 1953 Rover 75. At 90,000 miles it burnt a pint of oil every 50-60 miles (a gallon of oil would get me a 500-mile round trip to see my girlfriend) and had rust nearly everywhere at 10 years old. (Aluminium doors, bonnet and boot lid, so they were OK). My current 8-year old Volvo, with 150,000 miles on the clock has no rust and doesn't burn any oil, with services (and no breakdowns) every 20,000 miles.
My Dad used to have a Baby Austin mikey - do you remember those?
Question Author
bhg481....your opening comments could apply to just about any car made in 1939, could it not ?
Absolutely Mikey. I was just pointing out that we tend to look at the past with rose-tinted spectacles; if we were to go back to those cars we'd be very disappointed. A few years ago I had a chance to drive a car similar to my first one; I turned it down. I'd rather have the good memories than shatter my dreams. As I said in my earlier post, I just love looking at them (I've been to museums all over Europe) and everybody else ought to be made to drive one so that I can look at them.
Question Author
Yes, you are right bhg, but surely peoples expectations were very different back then, from what they are today.

In the 1950's, when I was born, cars were a relatively rare sighting. We lived in a small cul-de-sac of about 30 houses in North London, and only about a third of those houses seemed to possess a car. To have access to a car was a luxury indeed.

My father's first vehicle was a big ex-Army lorry, that he used to deliver fish to and from Billingsgate. His employer, my Uncle, allowed him to take this home in the evenings, so we had transport of a sort.

I can recall my Dad having to put a small greenhouse paraffin heater under the engine block, where he parked it our drive, in very cold weather, to stop the diesel from freezing in the winter. During that dreadful winter of 1962-1963, he wouldn't have got to work every morning, without the paraffin heater.

So, we had some transport that we could use, to go out into the countryside at weekends. The downside was that my brother and I were known as the kids that smelt of fish ! The lorry was so high off the ground, that he had to lift us up into the cab, but the view through the windscreen was bloody marvelous.

Happy days !

1 to 20 of 31rss feed

1 2 Next Last

Do you know the answer?

Morris Eight !

Answer Question >>

Related Questions