Penn meets a sweet little lamb in a wolf’s costume

Ray Murphy is an architect — a creative trade — and it shows with this re-bodied early ’30s Morris 10/4. Now you’ll remember that MG stands for Morris Garages, a brand that ranks as one of the most admired and desired marques, and usually rated as collectibles. MG’s a brand that relies very much on its physical looks rather than its pulsating power. It made the definitive classic British sports car, especially if you were reared on PG Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster and his chums.

A great advantage of our early motor cars was that you could not only buy them ready to drive away, but you could also buy them in chassis form and have a body built to any style your pocket could run to.

Our subject car was originally a very staid four-door sedan, typical of the conservative and often very under-performing products of Great Britain at a time when it was usually hard to justify the honorific ‘Great’ as part of the whole title.

Ray had had MGs over the years — Midgets — as well as a Triumph Stag and a Sunbeam Alpine, but had always been consistently into Model As. However, having just sold the 1930 Town Sedan he’d owned for the last 30 years he didn’t want to restore another model A. I think that he was probably grieving.

A Major Project

He ran across this Morris at Ray Singleton’s Te Puke Motor Museum. He was looking for a new interest to get immersed in, as blokes do. That was over five years ago, and he thought maybe an Austin 7 Special would hold his attention. His first car had been a 1936 Ruby and he had a hankering for something similar, hence his visit to Ray Singleton.

He’d also spoken to Ryan MacDonald — who is the local Austin 7 expert — at Mac’s Garage, but he didn’t know of any currently available. Ray Murphy’s kids live in Tauranga, so on one of his visits there he went to Ray Singleton looking for any old Austin 7 bits. The nearest that Ray had was this Morris. It was sitting in the grass out the back, clearly a major project although all that was missing was the radiator cap.

We owe Ray Singleton a debt of gratitude, because he must have saved a hell of a lot of cars over the years! This one cost the new owner the huge sum of $100, so vendor Ray was hardly in it for the money, but it was a special price because they shared the same first name?

I first saw this creation in Supertrim in Glenfield, where it had sorted out a couple of issues with the recently added soft-top. For me it was love at first sight similar to the initial impact on me of both my wives — not to mention several other contenders who did not get the nod to proceed on to wifedom status. Such a powerful effect was partly because the design is classically sporting British, and because Ray has created a very evocative ‘special’.

He based his design on the photograph of a Midget replica somebody built on a Morris Minor chassis and featured in the book — The MG Collection. Personally, I’m impressed with the creative vision that could look past that very sad four-door Morris sedan and see the potential.

Ray comments that he’s always been handy with wood — hopeless with metal he says — and so could design and build this boat-tailed body in bendy plywood on a simple yet strong wooden frame and covered with vinyl. Any of the professionals I know would be proud to say it was their work.

Custom Designed

He believes there are maybe half-a-dozen similar cars in the country, including one unrestored example in Howick, another in Thames and a couple in Gore.

After he gave up his hundred bucks he set about building up a stock of parts — they weren’t easy to find, especially for the motor; there are very few around and nobody has any stockpiles of bits as a consequence. The bloke in Howick with the unrestored car gave Ray some wheels. The wire wheels currently fitted were pretty well knackered, and couldn’t really be fixed unless you were desperate, so it was decided to go for these 19-inch wheels, which also needed restoration. I won’t tell you what each wheel ended up owing, but it was the kind of bottom line that made ‘desperate’ look acceptable.

But the good news, I think, is that going up in size enhances the style, and of course they’re totally true to the period and, better still, each of the four of them comes complete with a hydraulic brake factory-fitted.

The body was next on his agenda. When first designed and built it had aero screens. However, on his travels Ray came across a full-sized Morris windscreen, foldable forwards and attachable to a soft-top, and so was able to build the console to fit the screen and ponder on a top design.

The custom designed soft-top frame was designed and made by Ted and Steve Irwin at Taupaki, who also made the front guards more in keeping with the concept. They also repaired the bonnet and the original rear guards.

The original Morris 10 components are all incorporated, and that chassis and suspension is the foundation for everything. Of course the radiator and shell are fundamentals, contributing to the identity of this distinctly period ‘sporty Morris’.

Like the Model A, this Morris has the accelerator between the brake and the clutch — which is a bit of a driving challenge in its own right. A look under the bonnet shows a small cast iron block with what looks like an ohv tappet cover, but in fact it’s an air cleaner. The motor is the stock side valve — fully overhauled by Dion Coleman, and in fact not even run in yet, showing only around 90 miles (145km) since re-installed a couple of years ago.

The four-speed gearbox is controlled by a cork clutch in an oil bath, called a ‘wet clutch.’ Ray had some trouble getting the cork clutch working and had to pull it down about three or four times before he discovered the secret. Basically it’s two rings — running in oil — with holes into which you insert wine corks trimmed back.

One of Ray’s nice touches is the aluminium dashboard, another example of the ingenious approach of this architect. All the turning was done by hand using a four-inch nail with a cork on the end, a cork with a ring holding emery paper over a 10-cent coin. All of this inserted into a brace and bit so that you could carry out six turns to the right and three turns to the left (that clears the emery paper) in a jig that gave assurance of consistency. It looks so much like the genuine thing that I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d reinvented the original technique.

The dashboard is perfect and so deserves a full array of period gauges — it’s festooned with temperature, oil and oil pressure, fuel, speedometer, tachometer and an original wind-up clock. It shows what can be produced by a creative man who is not going to let himself be limited by conventional restoration. This isn’t a restoration, it’s a creation.

Registration time was interesting because the car had long since fallen off the register. Ray had to prove that the numbers — engine, chassis and body — matched the year; whereas with Model As he’d only ever had to produce the engine number because that’s all that there was! The Morris Register was hugely helpful, having all the information in an authoritative form, and once he had that info there was no problem.

On The Road

It’s an astonishingly good little car. The two occupants are shoe-horned into the snug little cockpit, each with a form-fitting bucket seat (the original seats by the by), confronting an array of instruments that heightens the sensation of being in a vintage aircraft cockpit and looking through the aero-screens and the main screen, if you’ve left it upright.

The little motor runs very sweetly, pulls strongly and cackles robustly for all the world like a seriously sporting performer in some ’30s event. With the top down you get all the sensations you expect. I noticed that Ray had the expression of a man enjoying some secret little pleasure, and I couldn’t help but think that not only was he enjoying the drive, but it was considerably enhanced by the satisfaction of personal creativity. I was looking at somebody who had made a very desirable little sports car out of what had been discarded many years ago.

In practical terms it handles, brakes and rides exactly as you would think, and a lot better than you might have expected of beam axles and half elliptic springs restrained by early friction shocks. All in all it goes like a bought one.

My only complaint is all too common for me these days, the problem of climbing in and out, which does need a supple set of bends in a man — ah well!

Words and Photos: Penn McKay