Our talk for February had to be re-arranged at short notice due to the unavailability of our planned speaker. Instead, members of the Vale of Evesham Historical Society were treated that evening to a very interesting talk from motoring enthusiast Max Hunt about Lord Nuffield, the founder of Morris Motors and renowned philanthropist.

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William Morris, Lord Nuffield, was born in fairly humble circumstances in the St Johns area of Worcester in October 1877.  His entry in the baptismal register of Hallows Church gives his father’s occupation as clothier, though he was in fact clerk to a local firm.  While William was still a child, the family moved to the Oxford area when his father took up the position of farm bailiff to his father-in-law at Brasenose Farm (now looking sadly derelict).

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William was a keen cyclist in his teens, and after a short period apprenticed to a local cycle manufacturer, he began to construct bicycles himself. By 1896 he had premises at 16, James Street, Oxford and was taking commissions.  By 1902 he had built his first motorcycle.  Max was at pains to stress throughout his talk that William was always an assembler of parts manufactured by other people; this was a strength initially, but became a grave disadvantage in his later years.

 

In 1903, William married Lizzie Anstey. He was by this time operating from premises in Oxford High Street.  He began to branch out into motor cars when he decided that wealthy undergraduates who had cars needed somewhere to keep them and to have them repaired and maintained. From premises in Longwall Street he also hired out cars and ran a taxi service.  Max showed photographs of the Morris garage in Longwall St in 1913.  He and his wife were then living quite modestly at No 280, Iffley Road (the Morrises had only one servant in the 1911 census).

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In 1913, William was able to rent, for a modest sum, the premises of the old Oxford Military College at Cowley; as part of the deal, he also rented, and began to live in, Temple Cowley Manor House.  His first car, the Morris Oxford, was produced in 1913 using an engine bought in from White and Poppe in Coventry.  A light 10 hp vehicle, it retailed at £175. He then looked to the example of Henry Ford in the USA to see how to build bigger, more powerful machines, in 1913-1914 ordering 5,000 engines from Continental Motors in Detroit.  In 1920 he built the Cowley works on the old parade ground of the military college.

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Max traced William’s career as he went from strength to strength, building bigger and more powerful cars.  He seems to have been a ruthless businessman, forcing down prices from his suppliers till they could no longer operate successfully, then buying them up. In the end he had nearly 40 factories scattered all over the country making different parts for his motor cars.

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1927 saw the introduction of the Morris Minor, 1929 the first MG Midget.   When other producers made more expensive cars, he pushed his prices down, to the extent that in 1931 he produced the first £100 car.

 

He was always good at spotting talent in others: in 1933 he brought in Leonard Lord, who revolutionised production at Cowley by introducing the first American style production line.  Lord introduced the Morris 8 – and by 1936 they had sold 100,000.  (Another talent Morris made use of was Alec Issigonis – designer of the Morris Minor and later of the Mini.)

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In 1952 the Morris and Austin businesses merged to form the British Motor Corporation. Leonard Lord, who had fallen out with Morris, ran the company from the site of the Austin factory at Longbridge, and Morris (now Lord Nuffield) was sidelined.

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Max completed his account by mentioning some of the many charitable works for which Lord Nuffield is now mainly remembered.   He built a new church at Cowley, a new wing at Guy’s Hospital, paid for every hospital in the country to have an iron lung (manufactured at Cowley) and, in 1949, established Nuffield College in Oxford, by which time, according to Max, he was a twentieth century Bill Gates having given away £20 million. He died in August 1963.

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Our Chairman thanked Max for stepping so heroically into the breach, and members (many of whom had experience of Morris motors) joined in enthusiastic motoring chat.