MG TD – The right car, a year too late
The MG TD arrived after an extended period of procrastination caused by the politics of the Nuffield Group, so it was already starting to look out of date on the day it was launched. It was obvious by 1950 that separate headlights either side of the grille, with flowing wings and running boards down the side of the vehicle was not the direction in which car styling was heading. Cars with ‘single piece’ fronts were the future, except at Morgan…
The mould-breaking 1946 Cisitalia 202 marked the start of the styling revolution and is now seen as the car that established Pinin Farina (later the company became Pininfarina) as one of the greatest stylists ever. However, it divided opinion at the time.
In the UK, the 1948 Jaguar XK120, and its styling inspiration, the 1936 BMW 328, had shown that, while the world may not quite have been ready for a totally flat front panel, the public were ready to embrace the front wings, bonnet and lights integrated into one cohesive shape, with the old separate panels being hinted at merely by the curves in the sheet metal.
The XK120 would go on to have an even more profound but indirect effect on MG because some of the body tooling’s curves were plotted by a young body engineer at Pressed Steel called Don Hayter, who would eventually rise to the position of Chief Engineer at Abingdon, and was often called the father of the MGB. He would later acknowledge the influence of his time spent turning William Lyons’ exquisite design into body tooling on his own designs, which included the Aston Martin DB2/4 MkIII and, of course, the MGB.
Bradford-based Jowett produced the clever Jupiter which appealed to engineering minded customers with its horizontally opposed engine, Eberan von Eberhorst-designed chassis and torsion bar suspension.
Gerald Palmer’s clever 1.5-litre Jowet Jupiter, which debuted at the New York Motor Show in April 1950, continued that trend but in a smaller car more akin to the MG in performance. It was more expensive then the TD at £1,086.86, though, compared to the MG’s price of £569.36 – both prices include tax.
The 1936 BMW 328 was a turning point in sports car styling.
Pic: BMW AG
Other cars launched in 1950 showed that a car could be one cohesive whole, with their headlights at the corners rather than nestled either side of the radiator grille as had been conventional since the early 20thcentury, most notably Frank Feely’s understated yet beautifully elegant Aston Martin DB2, and Alfa Romeo’s 1900, which was their first monocoque mass production saloon.
The Aston Martin DB2 was a masterwork by former Lagonda stylist Frank Feeley.
Pic: Aston Martin
Alfa Romeo’s 1950 1900cc was designed and engineered by Orazio Satta Puliga. The 4-door saloon was bang up to date when announced, in both style and engineering and was a watershed moment for the company as they entered the quality volume market for the first time, having made their reputation building racing and sports cars. Alfa Romeo won the first F1 driver’s championship in 1950 with Farina and the 1951 Championship with Fangio. They were never to win it again as the volume market move proved to be a difficult area to operate in profitably…
Pic: Alfa Romeo.
Even rival Austin’s Jensen-built A40 Sports looked substantially more modern although, despite its name, it was distinctly less sporting than the TD, and at £818 considerably more expensive.
The Austin A40 Sports was based on the A40 Devon saloon and was a joint venture with Jensen Motors so it’s no surprise it resembled the contemporary Jensen Interceptor, a car which used many Austin components including its 4-litre straight-6 engine. They were both designed by Eric Neale, who had joined Jensen in 1946 after working at Wolseley. A40 Sports bodies were built by Jensen and transported to Austin’s Longbridge plant for final assembly. Only 4,011 were made. The brochure picture here clearly shows the market area Austin were aiming at.
MG knew their market though as Autocar’s Technical Editor, Montague Tombs, proved in this extract from the magazine’s test on the car shortly after its launch. Note that at that time, Autocar were trying to popularise ‘Midge’, instead of Midget as the car’s colloquial name. ‘The Series TD may be new, but it still looks like a Midge and has not ‘gone all futuristic’ – for which many thanks, people will say. A sports car ought to look like a sports car, and its innards ought to be accessible so that fans can personally keep it in tune; they should not be hidden beneath billows of bent tin.’
He was obviously not a man keen on these ‘new-fangled’ one-piece designs and, it appears, was equally enthusiastic about transmitting that dislike…
An advert for the TD that was released by MG in August 1953, only weeks before the TF was announced. This advert was far more about building the company’s image by showing their customers to be active chaps who live a life where driving a car into an aeroplane is a normal occurrence than selling TDs directly.
TD Success!
MG ramped up TD production to meet demand quickly, and was swept up in the general UK automotive export drive. This was aided by a devaluation of sterling, which made British-made goods more attractively priced in foreign markets, especially in North America. In the TD’s first year of production, 1950, UK car production exceeded half a million for the first time and nearly 400,000 of those went for export. Abingdon built only 10,430 of those cars and 4,767 of them were MG TDs, as they were also assembling Riley RMs and the MG Y-Types. MG were, thus, a minnow riding on the shoulders of giants, just as they always had been, and they would remain so until Longbridge closed in 2005. Importantly, however, they were profitable minnows, and that wasn’t always the case in other areas of the post-war British motor industry. The TD reached its production peak in 1952 when 10,838 were produced and by the time chassis 29915 rolled off the production line on the 17th of August, 1953, a total of 29,664 had been built, an impressive statistic considering the cramped nature of the Abingdon factory and MG’s earlier production volumes.
The TD was, then, a huge success for MG, because it was the right car at the right time, despite all the circumstances prior to its introduction that could well have led to its failure and to it subsequently being seen as a valiant but out of date attempt that came just too late. The fact is post-war America already loved MGs and wanted more of the same, only just a bit better, and the TD was just that! It was seen as the quintessential British roadster by a massive customer base in the USA, not least those in Hollywood. From the birth of the film industry in tinsel town, there was a real Anglophilia among the movie star glitterati and their acolytes. Movie stars, directors and moguls built Tudor-style mansions, wore tweed jackets, went to country clubs to play tennis and croquet, then drove home in British-made open top sports cars. The TD MG was a very popular choice among the anglophile elite of Hollywood so its no accident that Quentin Tarantino gave a MG TD a starring role in his 2019 film, ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’, a tragi-comic satire on Hollywood life in the late 1960s.
The delivery figures for the USA bear this out. MG delivered 2,825 examples of the TD in 1950, 5,757 in 1951, then 9,901 in 1952. That’s the kind of figures MG needed to generate enough cash to force BMC’s management to recognise it was worth investing in designing a new car, which would eventually become the MGA. Just like its forebear, however, the MGA was delayed by politics, this time the growing pains of the newly created British Motor Corporation (BMC), the merger of Britain’s two largest car manufacturers, Austin and the Nuffield Group, which officially came into being on the 31st of March 1952. Some might say, unkindly, that it would have been more appropriate for BMC’s story to have started the day after…
BMC’s political machinations and hesitation over MG’s relationship to Longbridge’s newly created Austin-Healey marque, gave the TD one last short-lived hurrah, as it was hurriedly facelifted into the achingly pretty MG TF, which is very much a story for another day.
The stop-gap MG TF is often often regarded as the prettiest of the T Series MGs. Ironically it was never ‘styled’ on a drawing board, instead Abingdon’s engineers and crafstmen literally took a TD and gradually modfied it, by hand, into what they thought looked ‘right.’ The drawing office then got their slide rules out and carefully drew the hand-crafted car, plotting its curves, in order to create the press tools
Pic: John Lakey
