MG-Cars.info

Welcome to our Site for MG, Triumph and Austin-Healey Car Information.

Parts

MG parts spares and accessories are available for MG T Series (TA, MG TB, MG TC, MG TD, MG TF), Magnette, MGA, Twin cam, MGB, MGBGT, MGC, MGC GT, MG Midget, Sprite and other MG models from British car spares company LBCarCo.

MG TD TF 1500 - The MGTD/TF in America

http://www.mg-cars.org.uk/mgtd/mgtd_america.htm

I started this with Al Moss over 10 years ago but it sat as an outline until last year. Its almost a website by itself and I may have to break it into smaller parts if I get too many complaints. Give it a few minutes to load. Once its loaded it will be quicker to load after the pictures are cached etc. for future viewings.

There are instructions at the top that you can toggle on and off to help you. Its very interactive.

This is not supposed to be a book or even a complete story but think of it as a blog. This should keep you busy for quite some time as there are links to just about everything on the site and to parts unknown on the internet. The connections are amazing and that's why this sort of story needs the internet medium.

As usual if you have any comments, corrections of suggestion just email me.

Enjoy ...
Chris Couper

Good work there Chris, Keep one busy for quite a while :)
Full of interesting stuff.
Well done
Rod

R D Jones

Chris, WOW!!!

Mark
Mark Strang

The level of research done here is astounding! Excellent job Chris.

Frank
Frank Cronin

Wow! what a good bit of information. If anyone ever comes up with any information on J. S. Inskip in new. York City, or m&V motors in Mineola. New York I'd love to see it. I am really interested in a dealer emblem for M&V motors.
Is there a reason the New England MGT Register was left off the car club information page?
I can give you information for the NEMGTR if you want to include it.
Well done, and thank you,
-David.
D. Sander

David: I kept it in the 50's but did drift slightly into the very early 60's in a few cases when describing some of the race car drivers and raceways that had a significant roll earlier. I wanted the story to be about the movement that the TD and TF helped spark. Most of us were either not born or too young to remember what the 50's were really like and what a significant impact MG TD's and TF's had on not only sports cars and sports car racing, but society itself.

The NEMGTR register started in 1964. By that time the world and sports cars were very different than they were in the early to mid 50's. The NEMGTR was mostly focused on survival of the T cars versus the genesis of an movement.

Its also interesting to discover, although I did not write about it, that many of the clubs that started in the early 50's disappeared by the 1960's. That's probably one of the reasons the NEMGTR did so well. But that's another story told by someone else ...
Chris Couper

Wow indeed.

BTW: you list Mr. S. Moss as one off the MG personalities. His first name in Stirling, not Sterling.
Willem van der Veer

That is just brilliant!

Matthew.
M Magilton

Fantastic, Chris. I have 100 pages of printout sitting in front of me. That'll keep me busy for a while. Just may have to get that laptop one of these days. Thanks for all of your work on this. Bud
Bud Krueger

Wow! Great work.
Love the race track section.
Thanks
Len
Len Fanelli

Chris, what an excellent piece of work! That is quite a report! Needless to say I'm book marking it. Thanks for all your work on creating this. PJ
Paul S Jennings

Excellent work Chris..we all owe you a huge debt.
MG LaVerne

Thanks, Chris!

Don't know if this is of any help, but in looking at the dealers I noticed one was in Winston-Salem, NC (but not one in Charlotte, oddly enough). I used to live in W-S so that's why it caught my eye.

Anyway, I googled to see what the building is these days. I couldn't find the address (maybe they renamed part of the street) but I did find this:

STEVENS MOTOR CO, Wm H Stevens Pres. B
C Cormany V-Pres, Mrs Florence J Ste-
vens Sec. C T Sherer Treas. Studebaker
Sales and Service 100 Burke, Tel 4312 (See
page 17 Buyers' Guide)

Hill's Winston-Salem (Forsyth County, N.C.) City Directory [1951] (1951)
http://archive.org/stream/hillswinstonsale1951hill/hillswinstonsale1951hill_djvu.txt
Rob Edwards

Their ad:


Rob Edwards

Likewise Kudos to you Chris you're officially (if not already recognized as such) in the MG Hall of Fame!
Awesome documentation of our car's history. Love the old pictures, especially those rare color ones!
I'm sure one could slice and dice the content into various tiered web pages but you would most likely get six different layout suggestions from size different people (or six from one person!).
AWESOME!
Randy
R Biallas

Chris, nicely done! Regards, Tom
tm peterson

Rob: Stevens Motor Co (Studebaker) is the same company. It was not unusual for a car dealer to stock 1 MG in the hopes that somebody would come by and want one. See the picture of BillCo Motors at the top of the Noteable Dealer section. That was typical, especially outside of Chicago, NY and LA cities. In many cases they did not stock any and you had to order one and just wait a month or more. Also think about the service that was going to be performed on your car by someone who might not have even have had a service manual :-)

This is one reason that the larger cities had all of these specialty service companies showing up. It was mostly enthusiasts like Al Moss who drove the parts and service of the cars in the early days, not the dealers. Later BMC and then BL took control and you started seeing branded dealerships with trained and certified mechanics etc. In the early days it was a free for all.

As you noted if you Google Streetview (you can spend hours doing this - I know because I did) the locations I provided in a few cases the buildings are still there and have not changed much (check out Bell Auto Parts for an example). But in most cases they have been wiped away and replaced with a freeway, big box stores and Starbucks. The ones in more industrial areas seem to be more intact. Oddly a number of 'dealers' in the Midwest and Eastern US were houses. You know that they were that way in the early 1950's because the houses are older than that. I guess you just went over to somebodies house and ordered an MG and then it was shipped there. Its amazing.
Chris Couper

>Stevens Motor Co (Studebaker) is the same company.

Yes, I know -- that's why I provided the info! I seem to recall reading or hearing somewhere that Stude and MG often ended up together.

In W-S there appears to no longer be a 100 block of Burke St. The closest I could find was an 800 block of Burke ST NW. For all I know that's an entirely different street (here in Raleigh there are 3 non-contiguous Wake Forest Roads.) Anyway, this is all tangential to the purpose of the thread....

Thanks again!
Rob Edwards

I want to give a shout out to Bud Krueger who helped me clean up these pages. Bud makes a great editor and now many of the items are grammatically correct.
Chris Couper

Glad to have been of help. You've got quite a document there. Bud
Bud Krueger

This thread was discussed between 01/03/2014 and 02/03/2014

MG TD TF 1500 index

This thread is from the archives. Join this live forum now