Morris Minor

At its launch in 1948 the Morris Minor was an exciting and fresh concept, with radical engineering and daring ¿American¿ styling.Morris Motors had given a young engineer named Alec Issigonis his first chance to head up a design team and, though he would become most famous for the Mini ten years later, the Morris Minor was just as innovative in its time. Manufactured for twenty-three years, some 1.6 million would be made before production ended in 1972. Behind the Minor¿s success as the first British car to reach 1 million sold, however, there was a fierce battle to get it into production in the face of opposition from the company¿s founder and chairman, Lord Nuffield.Sold as an estate car, a convertible and a van, and used in motor racing and rallying, the versatile Morris Minor was much loved as a production car and has retained its popularity as a classic, with many clubs devoted to keeping it on the road. Using period illustrations from the BMC archive, Gillian Bardsley tells the st