MG TA Midget

The initials MG come from Morris Garages, the Oxford based dealership owned by William Morris and established to sell his range of motor cars. Cecil Kimber was sales, then general, manager, and by 1924 was selling the Chummy, a four-seater sports version of the Morris Cowley, on lowered chassis with a special body by Carbodies, of Coventry. The octagonal ‘MG’ badge was on the radiator.

Whilst the first MGs were sporting saloons, the first sports car to carry the badge was ‘Old Number One’ of 1925, a two-seater with 1.5-litre Hotchkiss engine in a custom-designed chassis, built specifically by Kimber for the Lands End Trial. It was the start of a glorious period of sporting history for the marque.

The first MG to bear the name Midget was the Abingdon-built M-type sports of 1928 that used an 847cc overhead camshaft engine from the Wolseley brand also owned by Morris. This was to be the forerunner of the P-series and J-series sports cars culminating in the J4 racer. Morris sold the MG Car Company to his own Morris Motors in 1935 and ordered cost cutting – including the abandonment of the well-regarded but expensive overhead camshaft engine.

Under direct Morris rule the first new MG was the TA Midget of 1936, with 1292cc overhead valve engine, operated by pushrods, from the Morris 10. Notwithstanding this ‘dumbing down’, the TA proved very successful with over 3,000 built. The TB series that followed was the first to use the improved XPAG 1250cc engine, but production was curtailed by the outbreak of war after 379 cars had been produced during 1939. Post war the T-series of Midgets would continue until 1955.

Cecil Kimber left MG in 1941, and was to die in a railway accident at Kings Cross station, London, in 1945.

About this vehicle

This is the car Richard Shuttleworth took to war. The Collection’s MG TA is a 1939 example, and was originally Richard’s own which he drove regularly whilst in the RAF.

Posted to No 10 Flying School at Tern Hill, Shropshire, in 1940, Pilot Officer Shuttleworth took the MG, towing a two-wheel trailer-workshop he had converted from a Morris Cowley van with him. With the ‘workshop’ parked outside the bedroom of his billet he was able to run an electric lead so that he could have power to work on repairing the Locomobile steam car boiler and work on his De Dion tricycle!

On Richard’s death in August 1940 – on a night time flying accident in a Fairey Battle from RAF Benson – the MG passed to Air Commodore Allen Wheeler, a friend of Richard and his family. After many years in the care of the Wheelers, latterly with the late Air Commodore’s wife, Mrs Barbara Wheeler, the car was donated to the Collection on Sunday 2nd May 2004, 65 years after its first registration.