Love the gold and black colors. How old is British Racing Green? I think a BRG and cream would be nice on one of these. Sexy.
Did you know that British Racing Green is actually Irish? British racing green, referred to as: BRG, is a colour similar to Brunswick green, hunter green, forest green or moss green. It takes its name from the green international motor racing colour of the United Kingdom. This originated with the 1903 Gordon Bennett Cup, held in Ireland (then still part of the UK), as motor-racing was illegal in England. As a mark of respect, the British cars were painted shamrock green.
This is a great education. Years ago, my 1973 MGB was a color called "Mallard Green" (underneath layers of a weird Triumph brown). It was a deep almost metallic green. Man, I miss that car.
Today the starting handle to crank the engine over is seen as as a source of amusement, but anyone who can do their own servicing and repairs, know that turning the engine by hand is still the easiest way of locating, top dead centre.
Wow! Moe, Larry, Curly, and Shemp in the same photo!
If you're referring to the gents in the photo you posted above, fair enough. But if you're referring to The Boys, Shemp, Moe, and Curly, were brothers.Those are cousins!
- he took great delight in shaming guys in flashy Minis and things who'd pull up beside him at lights, yell 'Tin Lizzy' and things, only for it to take off and leave them for dust. Invariably after that they'd just pull in behind him at the next set of lights...Wow! Moe, Larry, Curly, and Shemp in the same photo!
Weeelllll..... Officially, on the British side at least, the 26 Counties became the Irish Free State in 1922. Sort of a 'devo-max' arrangement, where they had their own flag, currency, and army, and total control of domestic policy, but they also had to accept three 'Treaty Ports' giving a continued British military presence in the form of Royal Navy ships docked there. The Free State was not to be fully independent, buwith oversight) Dominion of the British Crown. Dail Deputies (TDs - Dail Eireann's equivalent of MPs in the House of Commons) were required to sign an Oath of Allegiance to the British Crown, which continue to be head of state, represented on the ground by a Governor General. Britain did not recognise the 26 counties of Ireland as a fully independent republic until the passage of the Republic of Ireland Act in December 1948.
On the Irish side, things are rather more complex. The State, as most people nowadays, dates its foundation to Padraig Pearse's Proclamation of the Irish Republic, with which the Easter Rising of 1916 began. Undoubtedly, that was the first step in the radical changes in the way in which Ireland was governed began. There is still some dispute over how many Dails there have been; some count the first Dail as that which met unofficially in January 1919, constituting those Sinn Fein MPs who took most of the Irish Parliamentary seats by a landslide in the 1918 general election, but sought to set themselves up as the legitimated government of Ireland based on that electoral mandate, and abstained from taking their seats in Westminster. (This is why everyone today thinks of Lady Astor as the first elected woman MP; Constance Markievicz actually beat her to that post, but never took her seat because of the SF abstentionist policy.) Then there are those who date the first Dail (as, from memory, officialdom does now) as the one that first met in 1922 (composed on the same basis) after being officially recognised by the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Then there are those who fought on in the extreme Republican side, long after the bitter and bloody Civil War of 1922-23: that IRA considered themselves to be the legitimate government of all-Ireland, and only ended their war on the Irish state in 1948, with the passage of the Ireland Act. The Dail, of course, had behaved as de facto an independent republic long before that, with the role that is now known as Taoiseach (pronounced 'tea-shuck', loosely) referred to as 'President of the Dail', and the creation of the modern written constitution of Ireland dating to 1937.
Typically Irish, nothing is ever quite simple. (I often wonder if, had it been, we'd have avoided an awful lot of bloodshed on our island in these last eight hundred years or so!).
However, I digress.... I find this stuff endlessly fascinating, but...
Never seen one of those before, that is interesting. That first post-war decade was an interesting period for the British car industry trying to get on its feet again, where you had cars being produced with little change since the pre-war designs, either looking the same but with upgraded mechnics (Morgan spring to mind here: for all their mechanical upgrades over the years, aesthetically they seem to have stopped the clock not long after the decision to add a fourth wheel... see also the RM Riley series, or the Sunbeam Talbots of the late 50s). From theose, at least, this puts me in mind not so much of an MG Magnette as a Rover P5B - which, of course, it predates by some four years or so.
The car that first brought motoring within the grasp of the middle classes... long before the mid-Sixties affordable car revolution, which I would argue did more to kill the British motorcycle industry than the oft-blamed Japanese.
Here's a thing.... when they first started shipping them like that to the UK for assembly, the wood from the packing crate was designed to be enough to form the floor and frame - nothing wasted. Genius of efficiency.
Why, thank-you!
I call fake Shemp!
woodie!
View attachment 158253
As the automobile matured, so did steel-stamping techniques. Over the decades, steel replaced hardwood in many applications, including frames, fenders, and hoods. Yet manufacturers and custom-body builders still used wood for major sections from the windshield back for station wagons, sedans, convertibles, and trucks. The 1929 Model A was the first of what we've come to know as a mass-produced woodie.
