
Why would I, who doesn’t know his big end from his catalytic converter, be writing a book about a car, albeit the iconic Morgan Sports Car? Because I was asked would be the immediate, if flippant, answer. The invitation was delivered by an Old Malvernian, Nigel Bradford, who knew about my writing credentials and asked me to meet him at the Morgan café in Malvern Link one morning to discuss the project. Sipping my cappuccino, I prepared to let him down as gently as I could. I write cricket books, I said: I know nothing about cars. He pointed out that my books were not about cricket per se but about the characters who played the game. Plenty of books have been written about the Morgan Motor Car, he continued, but none about the people connected to the business, the owners, the engineers, the builders, the salesmen, the dealers, the great and the good – and the not-so-good – who drive these classic cars. Specifically, he said, I want you to write the story of one man, Derek Day, who worked there as man and boy for 50 years, and who rose from tea boy to become a member of the board as sales director. Nigel is a former airline pilot, as well as a Morgan owner;thus, you would expect him to know which buttons to press, so I agreed to meet this Derek Day, about whom he had much to say. Derek Day? Hmm… already the title, D Day at Morgan was swimming around in my mind.
Half-an-hour in Derek’s company convinced me that Nigel was right. Here was a story worth the telling. “Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel,” is the quotation from the King James Bible, a bushel being a basket or container to measure grain. If anybody hid his light under a bushel it was Derek Day. He was 90 years of age when I first met him, not in the best of health and pretty immobile, but without a semblance of ego. His memory was not a sharp as it once was (whose is at ninety?) but he was able to recall much of what had happened at Morgan Motors during his fifty years of service. The point is that he seemed to come alive when talking about the company. Memories stirred, interest was kindled, and a gleam came into his eyes. He was obviously excited about the venture. Mark Read, who worked as Derek’s assistant in the sales department and who kept a paternal eye on his old boss, said to me as we emerged from the Days’ bungalow, “You know, Andy, I think this project has given Derek a new lease of life.” If that was what it did, then that was good enough for me.
Slowly, haltingly, but with increasing confidence, the narrative of a small company in Malvern that built sports cars to become a much-loved and easily recognisable brand worldwide began to unfold… and I am bound to admit that I found the tale riveting. I even fell in love with the car itself. They say that if a machine looks right, it usually is. Sometimes its design not only looks right but transcends functionality; it becomes a thing of beauty. Take the Spitfire, possibly the most famous of all war planes, with its distinctive elliptical wings and streamlined shape, beautiful but deadly, literally spitting fire. Necks crane when one appears in the sky. It is the same with the Morgan Sports Car. Whenever you see one parked outside a pub, there is always a knot of admiring people walking around it and peering into its inside. Morgans turn heads. They always have.
As it happened, the first Morgan was built at Malvern College, where I taught for 30 years, in the school workshops, which we knew as the Woodwork Department. A three-wheeler – because three-wheelers were classified as cycle-cars and not subjected to the same tax as motor cars – it was an immediate success and soon its popularity demanded a move to custom-built workshops in Malvern Link, where the factory remains to this day. The development of new models, eventually superseded by the four-wheel versions with which we are now familiar, is a story of ingenuity, vision, enterprise, hard work… and a measure of good luck.
Two watershed moments in the success story that has been Morgan Motors stood out in Derek’s memory. The 1960s in Britain, when the country shook off the grey weariness and bleak conservatism of the post-war years and rejoiced in a world of colour, fashion, music and excitement, was a period of freedom, hope and promise, time to turn on, tune in and drop out, truly the era of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. The trouble was that the Morgan car, largely unchanged in design for many a year, was seen as rather old-fashioned, not at all in tune with the hip mood of the Swinging Sixties. Then something extraordinary happened. The 10th May 1967 was the date set for the trial at the Old Bailey of Mick Jagger on charges of drug possession. He arrived at court, accompanied by his girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, in a Morgan! By now Derek Day was the sole member of the one-man band that was the sales department at Morgan Motors, and he could not believe the evidence of his own eyes as he scanned the headlines of the newspapers the next day. “Splashed across the front page of all the dailies was a picture of a Morgan,” he told me, “Overnight, sales rocketed. Suddenly, a Morgan had become the must-have accessory of the rich and famous.”
The word ‘rocketed’ is used loosely. With only nine cars a week being built, output scarcely increased but waiting time to take delivery of a car certainly did, stretching into months, even years. But that didn’t matter. The sales director clearly ‘got’ the strange hold that a long wait for a car of your dreams held over the British public. There is a maxim in business and commerce which states that the rarity of a commodity makes it more desirable. Only nine cars a week? That means a long time to wait. But I so want a Morgan I don’t care how long I have to wait. That is something that the entrepreneur and the presenter of the TV series, Troubleshooter, in the 1990s, Sir John Harvey-Jones, most certainly did not ‘get’. In what became a notorious episode called Swimming against the Tide,Sir John visited Morgan Motors and gave a withering account of their outdated practices and slow production lines, confidently predicting that the company would fold unless they modernised and changed. Make more cars, increase turnover, boost sales and make more money to invest was his advice. Derek Day begged to differ. “He just didn’t understand,” he told me, “We knew what we were doing. We knew our customer base. We were a tight-knit group of dedicated workers, one big family really, all fully committed to the business of building and selling the Morgan Sports Car.” He then went on to describe Harvey-Jones as “the rudest man I have ever met. He called me the ‘non sales director’, the ‘rationer of cars’. Huh! What did he know? Why change what was obviously working?” The proof of the pudding was very much in the eating. Morgan Motors is still going strong when Troubleshooter has long since been canned and now occupies some dusty shelf in the BBC archives. Today, Swimming against the Tide is held up in the business world as a “failed assessment of a business culture”. Not that Sir John Hardly-Knows would have cared. And yes, that is what Derekand the workforce called him.
If I had to compile a list of the top one hundred networkers in Worcestershire, Derek Day would have come a long way down on my list, that is if he ever made that long list. That is strange, you might think, for a sales director. “I never sought people out,” he said, “They came to me.” Indeed, they did, in their droves, for the simple reason they wanted to buy a Morgan. The names he rattled off, always with an interesting or amusing anecdote attached, took my breath away. Royalty – Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Michael of Kent, Duke of Gloucester, King Hussan of Morocco, King Hussein of Jordan. Famous celebrities – Norman Wisdom, Adam Faith, Peter Sellers, Sheila Hancock, Yasmin Smart (daughter of Billy Smart), Malcolm McDowell, Roy Orbison, Stirling Moss and others too numerous to mention. Two disappointed buyers were the Welsh rugby player, Sam Warburton, and the Australian cricketer, Tom Moody. Why? “They were too tall,” Derek explained, “Tom Moody said, ‘Look mate, my head would be sticking out over the windscreen, and I’d be swallowing flies all day!’” My favourite was Sir Rex Hunt, the Governor-General of the Falkland Islands, who famously donned full ceremonial dress to demand the surrender of the invading Argentinian troops. They laughed in his face and bundled him roughly into captivity. Later, when the British took back control of the islands, Hunt insisted on riding in state in a Morgan on the one road on the island, now pitted with shell holes, dressed once more in his full ceremonial garb. Who paid for that? Derek smiled. “You and me,” he answered.
The original intention was to get the book finished and published by the date of Derek’s 90th birthday, the 4th July (Independence Day). I knew the deadline was tight and that Derek’s health was declining alarmingly quickly. Alas, we did not quite manage it in time before he died but I content myself with the thought that his last weeks and months had given him a purpose to get up in the morning and to put his brain in gear. I reflect that it had been a pleasure and a privilege to have shared the story – a remarkable one, by any standard – of his life. The number of people at his funeral was testament to the regard and affection in which he was held, both professionally and privately. My only hope is that the book does the old boy– and the car - justice.
D Day at Morgan may be purchased at the book launch, to be held at the Morgan factory in Malvern Link at 10.00am on Sat 9th November.
Thereafter, copies can be obtained via the Morgan Shop, https://shop.morgan-motor.com
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