A car lover's British pilgrimage

Author: By Paul Langner, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, October 6, 1996

Page: M18

Section: Travel

That is the brotherhood of Morgan drivers whose devotion to the elegant but uncomfortable British sports car baffles most people, but it unites them in a sort of freemasonry of the road, in a feeling of belonging to a cult with spartan values.

Others might say they are masochists and should have their heads examined. No matter.

They grimly love the light, bouncy car with the louvered hood that seems a mile long when you sit in the driver's seat, with the stiff brake and clutch pedals that cannot be operated by anyone weighing less than 150 pounds, with the unsynchronized transmission that requires double-clutching to downshift, and with the body support structure made of solid ash.

Hundreds of Morgan drivers make the pilgrimage every year to the set of brick factory buildings just off the main drag of Malvern Link to see how those remarkable throwbacks to a simpler automotive age are made.

My wife and I did so last month during a driving tour of Britain and Ireland. After all, we do own a 1965 Morgan Plus 4, with a TR3 Engine.

After a dash across the English Midlands -- a dash if you don't count the massive traffic jams outside Birmingham, Stoke on Trent, and Worcester -- we checked into the Cottage in the Woods hotel in Malvern Wells on the opposite side of Great Malvern from Malvern Link.

The hotel's name is deceptive because it suggests a rustic, primitive hideaway. It's a hideaway, yes, reached by a steep road after a sharp backward turn off the two-lane public road, but there's nothing primitive about it. It is a first-rate hotel with elegant Georgian dining room and lounge and with large rooms each with bath -- en suite, as it's now called. The bathtub comes with a rubber duckie, if that's your thing, and each room facing the Severn Valley has a pair of binoculars, the better to take in that grand view. The hotel also furnishes that quintessential British item of proper dress, the umbrella, to guests in outlying cottages so they may stay dry going to dinner or breakfast.

But back to the Morgan factory.

We arrived there unannounced. Earlier in the trip, we had learned that it is not necessary to call ahead when we met a man on the ramparts at Edinborough castle who wore his love of Morgans on his sleeve -- his jacket sleeve, that is, where he had sewn a cloth patch of the Morgan logo, the round medallion bearing the name and the type of model, flanked by a pair of wings. That man, a Californian, had drifted close to masochism, he confessed, by being the owner of a 1930s vintage three-wheel Morgan, a Plus 4, and a Plus 8.

That latter, powered by a V-8 engine, is probably the world's fastest accelerating production sports car. It is said that with the four-liter engine hitched to a car made partially of wood it is possibly to make the car go airborne.

Morgans are now comparatively rare in the United States, mostly because the federal regulations keep changing and the exasperated manufacturer, although trying to keep up, seems at wit's end at times trying to make a car safe for grandmother. True believers even resent the lap belts as unsporting, and now the engineers at Morgan have contrived to anchor a shoulder belt.

When my wife and I showed up at the little front office one Friday morning, the harassed receptionist summoned a manager from a back room who supplied us with a glossy brochure, a price list of the three Morgan models and the options, and a plan of the factory.

We were on our own.

The workmen are amiable and will answer any question, gladly if the questions are intelligent and patiently if not. All the workers on the floors are men. No women can beseen putting the cars together.

Peter Morgan, the latest in a line of Morgans that began making cars in the teens of this century, does not make everything in his factory.

Two of the engines he uses are made by Rover and one by Ford. He also buys the fenders, which are called wings here, as well as brake assemblies, rear axles and the idiosyncratic sliding-post front-wheel suspension, not to mention rims and tires.

The 130 employees produce 10 cars a week in the 40-some-odd weeks a year that the factory is open.

Some years ago, a retired British chemical company executive who does business analyses on television did a report on the factory and concluded that Peter Morgan's management and production methods were antediluvian and in bad need of some modernizing.

The only thing the report left out is that the waiting time for a Morgan is now six years, up from five only five years ago.

There is no assembly line. Trucks deliver components to the various brick halls where workmen carefully assemble them. Some things are made on site, such as the wooden frames, many body panels, the bonnet and the splined hubs for the knock-off wheels.

The latter are turned on turret lathes that are so old that spare parts must be manufactured for them. The maker has long gone out of business.

As the cars are assembled, men push them to the next shed, on dollies at first and then on the cars' own wheels.

Each car, from the time the frame is laid onto blocks, is accompanied by a build ticket. The ticket lists the prospective owner and his or her dealer, the country of destination, whether right- or left-hand drive, what sort of engine, whether roll bars are to be installed, whether the dash is to be walnut, mahogany or cherry, what size steering wheel, traditional roller gas pedal or organ-style pedal, whether two- or four-seater, what color, whether radio is to be installed (American-destined cars mostly), whether regular seats or specially soft ones (again mostly on American cars).

Purists please take note: Morgans no longer come with the wooden platform covered by inflatable cushions for seats. Now they have steel-framed bucket seats with springs.

Also, and I am almost reluctant to report this, Morgans now have outside door handles! It's true. And the five-speed manual transmission is synchronized, making it possiblefor the mechanically challenged to drive one. Also, and again it pains me to report this, brakes are now power assisted.

Similarly, the dashboards are now padded around the rim, and cars destined for the United States may not have any wood dash at all. And there are no more toggle switches. They are rocker switches you may find in any Volvo.

And the outside mirrors are now mounted on the doors, easily reachable. No longer are they mounted way out front atop the front wings.

Purists will also be aghast to learn that all screws now have metric threads instead of the hoary Whitworth threads. If Sir Joseph Whitworth were alive today, he would be turning in his grave. There goes another pillar of the empire.

Still, when one stands in the so-called dispatch room, where the nearly finished Morgans are stored while a few finishing touches are added, it is akin to standing in the Louvre.

Each car is unique and each is beautiful. Even the deplorable color choice of some prospective owners does not detract from the car's beauty, evolved over nearly a century of breeding done more carefully than that of the finest thoroughbred.

Even with all that Big Brother insists on to protect us from our bad judgment and low skill, Americans are luckier than prospective Morgan owners elsewhere. The two dealers, one in Virginia and one in California, have a deal with Peter Morgan so the American waiting list is only 18 months long. They each get two cars a month. Just as soon as Big Brother approves the air bags and crash tests.

Morgans don't come cheap. The cheapest model, the so-called Four-Four, with a four-cylinder Ford engine, lists at a base price of 15,995 pounds sterling, which is about $25,000. The Plus 8, with a 3.9 liter Rover engine, the one you can get airborne if you really try, starts at the equivalent of about $38,000.

Europeans must also pay the value-added tax, or VAT, but Americans don't.

But each extra costs plenty, and the list of temptations is 34 lines long and can add several thousand dollars.

The factory assures us that just as soon as Big Brother gives the go-ahead, more Americans may once again become Morgan fanatics.

Among those already in the grips of this is Justice Mel Greenberg of the Massachusetts Appeals Court. This eminent jurist was driving his Morgan one day on his way home to Worcester from a Red Sox game when he was pulled over by a state trooper and clapped into irons.

It seems the trooper had been flashing his roof lights at him to pull over and explain why he had no license plate. The plate had fallen off, and Justice Greenberg had propped it into the rear window of this rag top, but it had fallen down.

With the trooper so close, the judge could not see the flashing lights because they were literally over his head. And when the trooper turned on the siren, the judge could not hear them. You can't hear yourself think when you are going 55 miles an hour in a Morgan.

So the trooper pulled alongside and pointed with his finger for Justice Greenberg to pull over. He did and was handcuffed for failure to obey an officer.

The judge declined to pull rank and was held overnight and the car kept in the towing lot. He was acquitted eventually by a jury that could sympathize. But while the case was pending, other Morgan owners offered to surround the courthouse in their Morgans, which the judge rejected as amounting to intimidation of the judiciary.

I advised the judge to plead that owning a Morgan is already cruel and unusual punishment and anything the court would dish out would be piddling by comparison. He declined.

He also declined my advice to bungle his defense and then appeal it to a single justice of the Appeals Court, making sure it was his turn to hear single-justice appeals. He said something about it not being in keeping with the best traditions, etc.