^{The Love Affair}
                      Morgan,  who, on the latter years of Queen Victoria's reign, was the Reverend Prebendary of Stoke Lacy in the County of Hereford, was a clergyman who saw the value of worldly knowledge. A forward- thinking man, Morgan had little interest in the archaic traditions of what English society called "muscular Christianity". There was a whole new world of recently revealed science and technology to understand,  master and apply to the greater glory of G_d.

So when the Reverend Morgan's son, Harry, became unhappy with his private schooling, his father sent him to study at the Crystal Palace Engineering School. The lad flourished, and his father encouraged Harry to continue his studies at the pioneering firm of the Great Western Railway. He worked as a draftsman in their drawing office for seven years and finally left in 1906 to set up a motor repair business near his home in Malvern in the West of England.

To imagine the Malvern Hills as they were then,  go and see them today. Things have not changed much. From the bare summit of the tree-clad hills  atop Worcester Beacon, you can see the patchwork of 12 counties on a clear summer day. It was here, in the summer sunlight, that composer Edward Elgar pedaled his bicycle  along the winding paths and lanes that cobweb the slopes, and it was under the shady branches of the tree-lined trails that he wrote some of the most sublime music of this century.

HFS ~ from this time forward young Henry was known only by his initials ~ was a keen cyclist, and it wasn't long before he decided to build a motorcar of sorts. He obtained a small, seven horsepower Peugeot engine and sat down to draft a design. Visualizing a modem, minimalist vehicle, Harry, decided that his car should have the minimum number of wheels for support ~ three. Between the two front wheels sat the engine, which drove the single rear wheel with a motorcycle chain and sprockets.

Harry decided that each of the three wheels should have independent suspension, so he devised a sliding-pillar design inspired by Sizzaire in France and tested by Lancia in Italy. Beyond the aforementioned rudiments, Harry decided that his cyclecar should have nothing else much.

By 1909 HFS had a three-wheeled prototype. It did not have a lot of power, but it didn't have much weight either and on the hilly terrain around Malvern, Harry's car left bigger and more elaborate cars gasping in its wake.

With firm support from his father and his wife, Ruth, HFS promptly set up as a cyclecar manufacturer. In 1910 he displayed a Morgan at the London Motor show and received very good press. He next appointed a select few dealers, the most memorable being Harrods, the great London specialty store, and by 1911, orders were flooding in for Morgan cyclecars.

Although Harrods can no longer sell you a Morgan, Morgan Motor Co. Ltd., still as ever of Pickersleigh Road, Malvern Link, Worcestershire,  can. Or at least they can take your order. You can select the color of the paint, choose the Connolly- cured hides for the upholstery, and decide if you want something so effete as door handles, but it will be six years before the company can actually supply you with your car. Only about a dozen cars a week are produced at the factory.

Despite the wait, however, the demand for Morgans is as strong, passionate, unswerving, and uncritical as ever before, and they remain reasonably priced from $30,000  to $45,000 (British pounds), depending upon model  and options. What's more, Morgans are famous for their  "zero depreciation"; they are so scarce that buyers are willing to pay a premium for a secondhand car rather than wait six years for a new one.

Today's Morgans have four wheels, but three wheels were enough to earn the firm a sporting reputation. In 1912, young HFS watched by his father in a clerical top hat and gaiters, set a speed record of 60 miles in one hour at the International Cyclecar Race at Brooklands in a slender single-seater Morgan. In 1913, a Morgan won the French Cyclecar Grand Prix. In addition, the car won many British tough-country,  reliability  trials, notably the Shelshy Walsh Hill climb, where it zipped up the steep, rain-swept dirt track at a remarkable 22 miles per hour.

Throughout Morgan's early evolution, small cars, especially in Britain, were becoming better, more efficient, and less costly machines. Three wheeled cyclecars enjoyed tax advantages over four-wheelers (so long as they weighed less than 896 pounds and had no reverse gear), but tax considerations notwithstanding the public began to value the more versatile four-wheelers over the three-wheeler.

When the elder Morgan died in 1937, HFS had been producing four-wheeled Morgans for two years, and thus, the Reverend went on to his final reward satisfied that Harry had established  himself as a proper car manufacturer.

The new four-wheeled, four-cylinder Morgan ~ called the Four Four to emphasize the change ~ had a good little Coventry-Climax engine and a proprietary rear axle. It was, however, still a two-seater, still quick, still very low-slung, and still bluntly good looking ~ in short, still a Morgan.

And today, Morgans are still Morgans. The characteristics that matter ~ the sliding-pillar, front suspension, the unmistakable hood and radiator,  the severe simplicity of  everything ~ remain.

Everything material, however, has changed, perhaps several times over. But what does that matter? Different engines, for example, have never made any difference to Morgans. Since the earliest three-wheeler days, the factory has considered motors of no abiding significance and has treated them as callously as Don Juan at his most arrogant treated his conquests like light bulbs, screw one out, screw another one in. Rover has been delivering a steady trickle of aluminum V8's (derived, not entirely for the better from a design that Oldsmobile abandoned) for the last 30 years, but other engines have been inserted from time to time.

Not as a matter of course but as a matter of necessity, Morgans have changed. There arc safety laws to meet as well as emission requirements to consider. Headlamps are regulated to a degree of candlepower once considered obscene, and rearview mirrors must obey specifications dictated by faceless regulators. 'Modern' Morgans even have adjustable seats. Yet there is still very little room for the feet around those unfashionably upright pedals, still a certain coziness with the proximity of the steering wheel, and still that uncanny intimacy with the road that comes from sitting directly on a floorboard that is less than a hand's span above the ground.

In the past, some Morgans were even lower. Nearly half a century ago I had one,  my 1927 three-wheeled Aero was the first car I ever felt confident about driving absolutely flat-out on cursive roads from the very first rime I sat in it. Its body work could not adequately be described as slender.  "It fits snugly about the hips" was how I described it at the time, and I can do no better now.

For that momentous and memorable first trip in my Aero, I took my brother as passenger and I still recall his look of amused astonishment after be shook his pipe out over the side of that narrow cockpit and brought back only the pipe's stem, the bowl had shattered on the road whizzing by close below.

I could put my knuckles on the road while sitting in that Moggie of  mine, and in other, more sporting versions, I could even flatten the palm of my hand on the ground. Do not suppose that those sweeping running boards extending behind the front Wings of the current cars are merely for styling ~ they are there to save pipe-smokers from doing needless damage to their pipes.

The style of those wings and of  the entire body is that of the original 1933 car, the one they called the Four Four. When it acquired a bigger engine a few  years after the war, it became the Plus Four. In 1963 there was even a Plus Four Plus, a car with an entirely up-to-date and efficiently streamlined coupe body that  improved  its  performance significantly. Morganatics (Morgan  fanatics) were aghast when the aerodynamic Four Plus Four was introduced. They saw no virtue in splitting the wind instead of barging it aside, and they saw no sense in changing any element of the recipe that produced the staunchly traditional, fresh-air Morgan. Morganatics also deemed it folly to spend time developing and improving the fabric roof and side curtains, since no decent, upstanding fellow would ever dream of raising them.

When the Plus Eight came along in 1968 with the lustiest engine ever, there was a real need for performance-capable tires, as the car could not tolerate the shortcomings of  wire-spoked wheels. Morgan customers accepted cast, light- alloy substitutes but only for a while,  as the clientele changed imperceptibly from sportsmen in pursuit of trophies to romantics in pursuit of the past, Morgan had to return to making old fashioned wheels again and procure tires that were compatible.

HFS did not live to see Morgan's transgression against nostalgia ~ he died in 1959 at the age of  77. His son, Peter ~ called PHG ~ joined the firm in 1947 and took charge. PHG continued to run the company much  the way his father had but with a keener appreciation of the gulf existing between the desire for competence in an age of reason and the yearning for an ideal from an earlier age of gold.

PNG knew when it was necessary to update the engineering of the Morgan and when it was proper ignore the latest visual style. It was fine to offer customers an open cockpit with cutaway sides and a flat glass windscreen, but if they were presented with the newest automotive trends, such as skinny, 19-inch tires and a crash gearbox, they would go away sad and embarrassed. On the contrary, customers came and enthused. PHG bought himself a Ferrari and no doubt laughed all the way to the bank.

Today PHG is still the boss, but the day-to-day rumor of the factory is handled by the next generation,  Charles "CPH" Morgan,  great-grandson of that forward- looking cleric who started the ball rolling nearly a century ago. CPH is very much of his father's mind and keeps the factory functioning in traditional style. Their let-it-be policy is especially important today when the sheer Britishness ~ dammit, Englishness of these cars is one of their most endearing features. Morgans reflect the Englishness of a post war era when Englishness was still recognized, and to recreate the era, the cars must be made in old English fashion. Can there be anywhere else in the world such a car factory as this?

The Morgan assembly plant is not just a factory;  it is a manufactory where everything possible is done by hand. In one shop, you will find carpenters shaping seasoned ash to form the framework of the carriage. Close by,  you will see fitters and mechanics painstakingly assembling each chassis as it grows along the shop floor from basic girders to an intricate composition.

When the chassis is complete, it wilI be rolled ~ pushed by hand ~ next door to have its wooden body frame added. The sheet-metal workers not just panel beaters but specialists in the use of that peculiarly English shaping tool, the planishing wheel, have a necessarily noisy place all to themselves where they
sculpt the aluminum paneling that clothes the frame. At Morgan,  you will find highly skilled craftsmen ~  among the most highly paid auto workers in the world ~ lovingly assembling  Morgans as though ambition held no attraction for them whatsoever.

Even the few attempts at modernization are old-fashioned. Scrutinizing the factory's efficiency and implementing changes is not yet a matter of  orthopedics and ergonomics. When Mr. Morgan decides to analyze the way that a worker engages in some aspect of assembly,  he simply watches the craftsman at work wielding a stopwatch and a note book. The same methods were used by HFS at the turn of the century, and there is no reason why they should not be as effective and successful now as they were then.

Who in the end wants the system to be modernized? When your long anticipated Morgan, carefully specified and individually tailored, finally rolls out of the factory and into your transfigured life,  it is unlikely to be something you really need, but you will swear that it is exactly what you want. Had it been made by another means, by any other men,  it could not be what it is.

Does it matter how long it takes a Morgan to get to 60 miles per hour, how many miles it gets to the gallon, or whether there be rain in the air? Either you enjoy driving a low-slung, old-fashioned, open-air two-seater or you do not. Either you like the Morgan for what it is or you suffer. The modern hot-foot car requires you to subjugate the road, while the cool-headed Morgan invites you to enjoy it. The Morgan is a simple apparatus designed by hand and eye,  manufactured by knife and fork, and as close to the basic notions of motoring as a spade is to digging. A power rotary cultivator may do more work, but can its operator feel the soil?

Those who do not understand the Morgan decry it.  Sir John Harvey-Jones, British industrialist and chairman of  the Economist, chose to be quite blunt a few years ago and said that Morgan was missing a "golden opportunity", to profit from the high demand for their product.  On a BBC television special, Sir John advised the company to double production, improve efficiency, and raise prices.

Mr. Morgan responded by calling  Sir John "a bit of a windbag" and explained that what makes demand for Morgans so strong are the very things Sir John criticized. Trade out humans for robots? Not any time soon. There is one computer at Morgan, and it is used by the bookkeeper.

Sir John and his kind might suspect the old Malvern firm of dimwitted archaism or charge it with exploiting its customers' sentimental romanticism, but to a Morganatic, discarding an old Morgan feature is as painful as losing a lover.

The masses may dismiss the Morgan as a stupid relic of Edwardian amateurism, but certain individuals still cherish it as a precious relic of the untrained purity and intelligent simplicity that once made engineering issues clearer than they have become since.  The world may have changed beyond recognition, but one can still play Mozart on a valveless horn.

There are things that still matter intensely, beyond measurement and beyond explanation, the action of  a Martini rifle, the docility of a  Cheviot tweed, the lucidity of Perpetua Italic type. These and their parallels are not to be evaluated but only appreciated. For all the multitudes of  mean and calculating pragmatists who are concerned enough to know what a car does, there remain some innocent aesthetics who care what a particular car is.  It is to these aesthetes that this company and its  craftsmen cater.

Old George, the ecclesiastical Morgan, would be delighted that all of his progeny have acquired the curacy of a parish that now extends worldwide.

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