Page 54 - Sample pages "Kim: A Biography of M.G. Founder Cecil Kimber" by Jon Pressnell

POSTSCRIPT: WHEN SHOULD THE M.G. CENTENARY BE CELEBRATED?
If you look at the golden side-stripes on the 1975 limited-edition ‘Jubilee’ MGB GT, it pronounces 1925 to be the year the M.G. marque was born. Indeed, a whole publicity campaign was
built around this date. According to the M.G. company, however, writing in pre-war times when memories were fresher, the first M.G. saw the light of day in 1923. Or 1924. Or indeed in 1925. It couldn’t make up its mind. If the manufacturer of the cars, during the lifetime of the man who created the make, couldn’t decide on a date, what hope do historians have, a century (or so) later?
The grenade thrown into the water is ‘Old Number One’. The moment you give a car such a name, it is automatically perceived as being the first of the line. Part of the problem is that for many years there were people at Abingdon who believed – heaven knows why – that the car had been built in 1923, and who went into print to this effect. Duly the tale spread to the press, who uncritically repeated it. But even when the factory dated construction of the car to its correct year of 1925, they continued to refer to it as ‘the first M.G. to be made’.
So on occasion did Cecil Kimber. ‘To Wilf, my first passenger in my first M.G,’ he inscribed a copy of Barré Lyndon’s Combat given as a present to his navigator in the car, Wilfrid Mathews. But then Kimber also wrote on another occasion that after winning his ‘Gold’ on the 1925 Land’s End Trial in ‘Old Number One’ he took a pair of cufflinks instead of the medal – whereas these cufflinks were in fact in lieu of the gold medal that he won on the 1923 event, in a Morris Garages Chummy1.
1 This was in the talk on racing that Kimber was scheduled to give on 16 February 1945 to a branch of the Institute of the Motor Trade; see Appendix 5. In the typescript Kimber wrote that ‘the first sporting event ever won by an M.G. was achieved when I won the gold cufflinks I am now wearing by successfully getting through the 1925 London-Land’s End without losing any marks, in the first M.G. I ever built’.
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Postscript: When Should the M.G. Centenary be Celebrated?
Proof that Kimber’s memory was playing him up, here is the gold match case – not a set of cufflinks – that he accepted instead
of a medal after winning a ‘Gold’ on the 1925 Land’s End Trial. This is an important detail in nailing the myths that continue to percolate around ‘Old Number One’.
© DALTON WATSON FINE B
© DALTON WATSON FINE BOOKS © DALTON WATSON FINE BOOKS DALTON WATSON FINE BOOKS TON WATSON FINE B