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Originally posted by Richard Hardy

Yes, it’s my neighbours old car. My father was an art teacher in the 1960s / 70 and re-enamelled the rad badge in the school kiln

The neighbour hacked the body around to fit his kids and a double bass in it. He and my dad use to go to gigs in it as they both played in the same jazz band. He fitted a Renault engine and rack and pinion steering. The neighbour worked for the gas board and the car was fitted everywhere with gas fittings! He also fitted hydraulic brakes and Singer / back axle, with skinny spoke wheels on the front. It still had the thinner cross section front axle beam and telescopic shocks.

The car was sold in around 1976 for £80, going back to a previous owner a Hull chemist (Mr Prince) who wanted it to retain the registration RH 4444. Prince lived in the same village on Longman’s Lane (Cottingham). The car sat in a rear garden in the open for the next 8 years. I regularly tried to purchase the car and use to regularly cycle to see the chap to try to persuade him to sell me it. He didn’t as he thought I was too young at 15 years old, and gave it to a telephone engineer who lived a mile away from Cottingham. I then bought my first J2 at the age of 16, the car having sat for 15 or so years in our school boathouse.

I spent 6 years trying to buy the D type from the new owner who was clueless and was also trying to restore the car with very limited budget. He fitted a new old stock Morris 8 auxhillary engine as installed in military tanks. He bought a bag of sticks J2 body kit from Llinares, and then skinned it with metal from a filing cabinet. It also had a TC tank, which I see from recent photos, is still on the car. Quasi C type scuttle top supplied by one of the Bones (note the scuttle side profile has the humps with a convex as opposed to concave profile ). He bought a replacement J2 back axle from the same source. I watched the progress over the years and saw what it was turning into, and what it could have been. It was the short chassis model, I wanted it to build a C type recreation and had collected all the vital C type mechanicals in anticipation for acquiring it.

He got the car through an MOT and as part of the original deal, handed back the RH 4444 registration to Mr Prince whereby he was for years trying to sell the number (my initials) on the Hull based Car Marks car registration dealer site.

The owner at that point (Tony Briggs) died. His son offered me the car for £8000. I offered £3250 and was turned turned down. It then sold on EBay for the price I offered but by that time I had lost interest and was concentrating on other MMM projects. It’s next owner I recall was in France and the car was finished, but so so much wrong with this car. I suspect its true value is around £14,000.

If it is now claimed the registration was not originally RH 4444 then there is possibly something fishy going on here as this is a Hull registered car. That said, AT is also a Hull registration prefix.

So, that’s the story from the 1970s to the 1990s

Rich

Vintage MG Parts

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Originally posted by Richard Hardy
The recent sale price is astounding, possibly suggesting the purchaser may not have been fully knowledgable about what they were buying, particularly from an investment perspective.

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