MG Car Club of South Australia
MGC NEWS
MGC conversations by Richard Mixture, March 2019
Echoes from the Shop Floor
H
ello, it’s Richard here again. My
daughter gave me a wonderful
little book for Christmas, it’s called “MG,
Made in Abingdon: Echoes from the
Shop Floor.” The 160 pages was written
by Bob Frampton and it was published
in May, 2018.
I was having a chat over a glass of Old
Speckled Hen when my younger friend
started complaining about BookFace.
He told me that his friends kept on send-
ing him photos of a cup of coffee or their
lunch that they had just received or a
picture of their front gate or a …
While I had no idea of what he was talk-
ing about, I immediately thought of this
book. It’s a collection of mindless boring
titbits taken from interviews from work-
ers at the Abingdon Factory. Of course,
I don’t need to tell you that it’s where
MGs were made from 1929 to 1980.
Basically, it’s a collection of recollections
by a bunch of old men plus a few ladies
as well. By about half way through the
book, a picture was building giving a
wonderful reference of what it was like
to work at MG on the ‘line’ or in ‘stores’,
rather than a manager’s point of view or
in fact a racing or rally driver’s perspec-
tive.
Many of the worker’s tell their short sto-
ries of where they went to school and
how they started at MG at 14 or 15
years as a teaboy or a message boy
and some progressed to an apprentice-
ship and studied at the College on Con-
duit Road.
mentioned. The MG models started with
‘MGA’ then ‘MGB’ then ‘MGBV8’ and
then ‘MG Maestro’ but no MGC. Then
on page 47, the author wrote about
Steve Palmer’s recollections, “He was
one of the few ‘outsiders’ working on
contract at the MG factory in 1967, the
time when the Austin-Healey ‘badged’
MGC was being developed. This project
may have eventually failed because its
performance was heavily criticised by
the press, in particular the fact that it
was ‘nose-heavy’, but also there was a
good deal of competition from the Tri-
umph TR6 at the same time. Steve
says he was one of the few non-MG
people who actually saw the car during
its early development.
It happened like this: Steve, at the time
(1967), was an apprentice at his family’s
firm, Palmer’s the plumbers. The firm
was working to install an overhead gas
supply at the Abingdon MG Works on
behalf of Southern Gas.
Their supervisor, Tony Bell, drove Steve
their to help with the work. Knowing of
Steve’s interest in cars generally, Tony
mentioned that there were some MGBs
there with bulges in the bonnets. These
were parked in a group around the back,
near where the installation work was
being carried out. The cars were soon
to be announced as the new MGC.
They pulled up behind a silver GT. It
was badged not as an MGC but, as
Steve recalls it, an Austin-Healey 3000.
This was the Austin-Healey version of
the MGC range that was cancelled at a
late stage of development. It appears
that Donald Healey declined to lend his
One of the first things I looked at was
name to it due to its handling character-
the index to see if our beloved MGC is
istics. It had a heavy six-cylinder engine
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