They say one man’s misfortune is another man’s opportunity, and so it proved with David Turnbull and his Morgan 4/4 four-seater.
Back in 1972, a Mr Richardson had ordered the car when he was young, free and single, but such was the Morgan waiting list, things had changed five years later when ‘his’ car was ready to go into production.
He now had a mortgage, and children, and no money to pay for the car of his dreams, despite having already reduced the spec of the Morgan in the preceding months.
Young, free and single
That’s when David, then 25 and young, free and single himself, stepped in, placing a £200 deposit on March 23, 1977 for the signal red 4/4, picking the car up from Malvern less than a month later.
Since then, the Morgan has carried him all over the UK, as well as a trip to Norway, and served as a wedding car on numerous occasions before its semi-retirement on the Norfolk coast.
Although David, now 70, had opportunities to sell the car more than once, over the years it became “like family”.
“I say hello to it every time I go into the garage, ‘hello Mog’, and tickle the sidelight,” he smiles. “I had the chance to sell it almost immediately after I’d got it, when I was working on a diving boat (as a geophysicist).
“I had left it in the yard in Yarmouth, and an ex Royal Marine diver and middleweight boxing champion said ‘I want to buy it’. You wouldn’t argue with him! He had one on order, but had to wait for three years, and he was going to give a good price. But I didn’t sell it to him.
“Two years later, someone else wanted to buy it, but no…”
Fascinated by cars
Born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1951, David’s parents moved to England soon after, and he became fascinated by cars as a boy.
“I remember the day of the Great Train Robbery – I was 12 and at one of these not-quite holiday camp things, and at morning prayers they told us this terrible thing had happened,” he remembers. “We thought it was brilliant, as we were told no-one was hurt.
“Anyway, one of the teachers said ‘I need somebody to help carry some stuff around’. No-one wanted to so I said ‘I’ll do it’. I went, and down behind a Morris Minor was a very early Lotus 7, with skinny tyres and no paint. The teacher found me hugging it, basically – “want!”
“That definitely kicked off something in me. Then in 1966, when I was still too young to drive, I saw an orange, original Porsche 911 on the Winchester bypass. Just the noise it made – ‘I will have one!’”
Soon after, David’s father (also David) – a ship’s captain for the British Antarctic Survey – had bought a rather special vehicle on one of his visits to the Falkland Islands, a 1934 Rolls-Royce 20/25 Park Ward previously owned by the Island’s senior medical officer Dr Robert Slessor.
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Bargain Rolls
“It was sitting sadly in an aircraft hangar at Port Stanley,” says David. “Pa said to Slessor, ‘you’re not using it, can I buy it?’ He said ‘what’s the largest note in your pocket?’ It was a $100 bill, so he gave him that.
“Pa left it in the Falklands, and used it occasionally when on the Islands until he returned from the Antarctic trip of 1968/69. It’s very convenient if you’re the captain of a ship, because you can put the car in the empty hold, and it came into Southampton in May 1969 (pictured).”
The Rolls, which spent some time in David’s garage, was finally sold by his father in 1996, by which time a multitude of cars had passed through his hands, only the Morgan surviving for any length of time.
The first was a Standard Flying 16 drophead, which David had seen “rusting quietly near my parents’ house while doing a Christmas post office job aged 14 or 15”.
“It wasn’t road legal, and my mother called it Black Death, but I had great fun because I could tinker around with it,” he remembers. “At night, I put on a hat and drove it up some private roads; there are lots of old Roman roads or medieval tracks around Winchester where we lived.”
Next came a former Mac Fisheries Morris Minor van, his first road legal vehicle that “lasted until I jumped it over a bridge”, followed by a Hamblin Cadet, a little-known fibreglass-bodied roadster based on a 1934 Austin 7 chassis.
“Absolute hoot”
“It was an absolute hoot,” he says, “a tiny engine with a two-bearing crankshaft. It blew the head gasket about every two weeks, but it was OK because a local garage had head gaskets.”
There followed a succession of Saab 96 two-strokes, a couple of 911s, a Triumph GT6, a Spitfire, and a Caterham, as well as the car first responsible for David’s passion for Morgans.
He was 21 and studying geology and physics at Southampton University when he bought a white, 1963 4/4 two-seater with a 1500cc Ford Classic Capri engine.
“I had a Saab 96 Sport at the time as well, but I sold that when I went to Durham to study a geophysics masters,” he says. “That went into a museum, but it meant I had a Morgan, in winter, in Durham.
“I’d been down home for something, went back up north and it started snowing. Then I realised I’d left the hood in Winchester, and I had two months where I had to just shovel the snow out and off you go. I didn’t even have a tonneau cover.”
On completion of his masters, David returned south to work for Burmah Oil, planning to use his New Zealand passport to secure work for the company in Perth, Australia.
Instead, on arriving at the company’s UK headquarters in Swindon, he was sent to work in London on North Sea oil projects. Not quite as seductive a proposition…
Globetrotting
While he was in London, the white Morgan was sold to a Colonel Schumacher and shipped to America, and it wasn’t long before David was also globetrotting, leaving Burmah Oil for Oceaneering, a Texas-based subsea engineering company.
“At the time it was almost like an American cowboy outfit – they’d say go to Bahrain for a one-week job, and five months later…” he laughs.
“I’d travel out in light trousers and a shirt with a small bag of bits, and come back on Boxing Day, frozen.”
Returning to the UK from such a trip in March 1977, David hired a “wreck of a car, an old Coke bottle Cortina that didn’t run very well”, and travelled north to visit old friends.
These included Durham-based Morgan dealer John MacDonald, who had previously looked after David’s white 4/4.
“We had a chat and he said ‘would I like a cancelled order Morgan 4/4/4?’ I thought ‘well, I could buy another one’,” he says. “John said ‘well, we’ve got my father’s Plus 8, which is a honey of a car, for £6,800, or the brand new 4/4/4 for £4,100’.”
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Abandoned dream
The latter car was Mr Richardson’s abandoned dream.
“He had phoned up that morning, basically in tears,” adds David. “He had de-specced it to make it as cheap as possible to try to afford it, like no leather seats.
“The only extra was rear seat belts for the children, who were the reason he didn’t have any money left to buy it!
“I was 25 and single, and while we weren’t paid a lot of money, I didn’t have anything to spend it on while away for months in Bahrain and the Arabian Gulf.”
In an ideal world, David would have opted for black wings with a dark blue body to match his father’s Rolls-Royce, but the red requested by Mr Richardson was still wet from coming out of the paintshop that very morning.
On April 21, 1977, David’s mother gave him a lift to Malvern, where Peter Morgan handed over the keys to WPT 802R.
“My mother thought it silly that the car had no boot, why not have one like that blue car in the corner of the dispatch bay?” says David. “That was Peter Morgan’s 330 GT Ferrari! Peter did explain it to her gently.”
For three years, the Morgan was David’s only car, often travelling from Winchester to Aberdeen, always remembering to take the roof.
“It got a lot of use,” he says. “In three years it had done nearly half the mileage it’s showing now, up to 10,000 miles a year.”
Powered by Ford’s 1599cc Crossflow engine, for a couple of years David fitted twin Dellorto carburettors, which made a “lovely noise, but were an absolute pain when the engine was cold”.
“Like a fireworks show”
“Driving it at night used to be great though because, if you lifted off, you could see the backfires coming through the bonnet louvres, like a fireworks show going on,” he says, later reverting to the original Weber Downdraught 32/36.
David met his wife, Annie, in 1980, and the couple would drive from Norfolk or Suffolk to see her mother and sister in Peterborough, “usually with the roof off, which was great fun”.
In February of that year, David bought another Saab 96 for winter use, having had a few “interesting moments” on snow and ice, and the Morgan was used less frequently, left either in the work yard in Gorleston-on-Sea or at home.
“My friend Dick used the car for a bit, and has done on and off since 1979,” he says. “It’s that sort of car – it’s not perfect, and I’m happy for other people to drive it.
“Dick was driving in the summer of 1983 when he was meant to be taking Annie to a BBQ day at Melvyn Rutter’s new garage in Bishop’s Stortford. However, they didn’t get too far thanks to a minor engine fire caused by a small fuel leak on the carburettor. There was no really bad damage, thankfully.”
David was frequently working overseas, and in 1993 he took the Morgan over to Norway for a month or so in the summer.
“It was an absolute hoot in Norway, the children loved the ‘little red car’,” he says. “At one point I was stopped by the police and I thought ‘oh shit, I haven’t turned the headlights on’, but they said ‘can we have a go?’ So I drove their Volvo and they drove the Morgan.”
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Stunning scenery
Annie joined him in Norway for a long weekend, and the couple made the most of the stunning scenery around Stavanger.
“We went into a tunnel through a mountain and it was reasonably nice weather, but we came out at the top and it was sleet,” he says. “We had the roof off, of course…”
Weddings have featured heavily in the Morgan’s life story, including that of David’s nephew Adam in 2019, who has grown up with the car and is a potential future owner.
“He loves it and, in theory, he will have it one day – he thinks it’s a nice idea but is not really a car person as such,” says David.
“It’s done a lot of weddings, and it’s now doing the weddings for the children of the people who used it for their wedding, which is lovely.
“It’s a four-seater, but we did get five tall blokes in it for a wedding of some Australian friends in Somerleyton!”
The Morgan remains virtually untouched since a respray and a general tidy up in the early 1990s and, partly thanks to its bright red paint, attracts plenty of attention on the road.
“Puts a smile on your face”
“You come to a road junction and people let you out and actually smile at you – try that in an Audi,” he laughs. “When you stop, even now, you get ‘oh, I can remember when my grandfather had one’. It puts a smile on your face, and other people’s.”
David admits to occasions when he’s hankered after a more powerful Plus 8, but given the 4/4 is driven less frequently than in the past, “you think you don’t actually need it”.
“It can go two months and it hasn’t moved, but in the last two weeks it’s been out three times,” he says. “ If you do 70mph in the car with the roof off it is more than enough, and most of the time I just burble around.”
There is plenty more burbling to be done before the Morgan finds a new home.
