“Horn” of Plenty

 

The setting is Oxford, 1936. A gently smiling man is pouring a veritable cornucopia of gold into the academic caps of ecstatic scientists and medical researchers, equivalent to about 50 million dollars in today’s money. This is flashy philanthropy, big time, in a reserved and proper England far closer to the times and attitudes of Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs than to our own. The horn of plenty is the cartoon’s visual joke: it’s a squeeze-bulb horn, the kind we use on bicycles, but back then it was an old-fashioned symbol of early motoring. For the square-jawed, middle-aged benefactor is multimillionaire British auto tycoon William Morris, soon to be ennobled as Lord Nuffield. Morris was no aristocrat. A former mechanic who founded an industrial empire, he didn’t inherit that money. He earned every shilling of it.

Let’s get something out of the way first. Nuffield was not the much more famous William Morris who was one of the most influential designers of the 19th century. Nor was he the William Morris better known in America, naming one of the most powerful talent agencies in Hollywood history. No, this William Morris started out, as many auto pioneers did, in the bicycle trade, after the turn of the twentieth century.

Like hundreds of other ambitious young entrepreneurs in Britain, France, Germany and the USA, Morris started a business in a garage, and like the others, he started as a mere assembler of parts that other companies made. Henry Ford bought engines from the Dodge brothers. Buick built their own engines, but bought their bodies from the Fisher brothers. General Motors bought their electrical systems from the Dayton Electric Company, Delco.

Maybe you’ve already thought of a similar story from our own times, another world conquering new industry born in garages that spread out to hustling enterprise. In my city alone (and I bet, in yours as well), there were suddenly dozens of small, often family run shops making and selling no-name or minimally branded “clones”, legal copies of IBM/MS-DOS PCs. All the little Mom-and-Pop shops did was assemble off-the-shelf components bought from wholesalers. They thrived for a while. Eventually only the biggest of the big survived, as back room fabricators ready to pick up the slack for someone else. So it was, 80 years earlier for cars.

Like Steve Jobs, William Morris had no degree or training in industrial management, but he had good instincts. Morris car manufacturing was centered in Oxford, not close to the UK’s traditional industrial center, Birmingham, and subsidiary Morris plants were scattered all over England, formed by acquisition, like General Motors. (When the real General Motors came to Britain, it did so fairly modestly at first, buying and strengthening Vauxhall, a smaller local brand.) As Morris’s relentless price pressure pushed his suppliers and competitors under, he bought them up for pennies on the dollar, or in this case, pence on the pound. One such acquisition became Morris Garages, MG, the sports car maker. Others were storied British marques like Riley and Wolseley.

Morris’s archrival was an older man, Herbert Austin, whose pioneering automobile company was already England’s largest, back when Morris was still patching tires. After World War I, Austin’s company was overtaken in the marketplace, by the less traditional, almost “American” William Morris. Austin Motors was Britain’s other middle-class car giant, with a different philosophy and style. Austin’s growth had been less impromptu, less haphazard and opportunistic than Morris’s. Herbert Austin liked doing things Henry Ford’s way: keep as much production as possible in one central plant. Don’t scatter the damn factories all over the blessed sceptered isles, for God’s sake. Austin, whose main talent was sales and marketing, was no born aristocrat either, but he was less prone to rock the boat and he tended to condescend to Morris, which the younger man resented.

William Morris was energetic and good at spotting opportunities in problems. When he was over-supplied with factories possessing steel pressing capacity, he kept them at work by making refrigerators and porcelain-coated steel bathtubs. This stood him well during the inevitable dips in the car market. He investigated the use of his manufacturing empire to make iron lungs, requiring similar metal-bending skills, and gave away thousands of them, free. Morris became the leading private sponsor of medical research in Britain. A self-made financial titan was relatively rarer in the UK than in America. It was once said that the Americans were secretly ashamed of merely inherited wealth, and the British were secretly ashamed of merely earned wealth. An exaggeration, of course.

After the second world war, in which the Morris and Austin companies served their nation well, British industries of all kinds were forced to learn how to export to survive. Competitive pressures at the lower end of Britain’s car market forced the two companies into a reluctant marriage of convenience. They’d maintain their separate character through the mid-Fifties, then become mere brand names in a faceless conglomerate.

Today, Morris as a car company is scarcely known by younger people in Britain, who know no more about it than your kids know about Nash or Hudson, or Plymouth or Oldsmobile. But the name Nuffield is still known. It is part of the name of many British hospitals, clinics and research facilities, much as Kaiser Permanente is known to millions of Americans who have no idea who Henry Kaiser was. If, as Adam Smith suggested, market capitalism acts as an invisible guiding hand, it should be noted that it also sometimes holds a Horn of Plenty, dispensing funds that will benefit future generations who’ll never know the rugged old guy pouring out the dough.

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  1. Judge Mental Member
    Judge Mental
    @JudgeMental

    Good stuff, Gary.  Lots of examples of these kinds of guys here.  Libraries, universities, hospitals… everywhere you go you find the evils of capitalism.

    • #1
  2. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Thanks for your kind words, Judge.

    It’s not surprising that we wouldn’t grow up knowing who Nuffield was, but it’s a damn shame that I’d bet very few British schoolchildren will learn about him either. He was a genuine, honest-to-God shop man, of whom it was said, with only mild exaggeration, that his trouser cuffs were still full of metal shavings from his years supervising factories. He was an imperialist in a literal sense, choosing to spend much of his later years on steamships to South Africa, the Middle East, and above all Australia, a long sea voyage indeed in the pre-jet age. He felt the world wanted industry and he was ready to supply it. 

    • #2
  3. She Member
    She
    @She

    Wonderful post, Gary.  And a nice trip down memory lane for this Brit, who fondly remembers being driven about in several car models from both Morris and Austin.

    Gary McVey: If, as Adam Smith suggested, market capitalism acts as an invisible guiding hand, it should be noted that it also sometimes holds a Horn of Plenty, dispensing funds that will benefit future generations who’ll never know the rugged old guy pouring out the dough.

    So very true. And a message that’s often overlooked these days when the faults of exceptional men of their own time are placed under the microscope, magnified, and exactingly judged by the standards of ours.

     

    • #3
  4. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    I saw a troupe of protesters protesting capitalism from the steps of a Carnegie library. They might be bright enough to perceive irony, but not educated enough to detect it.

    Good one, Gary.

    • #4
  5. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    Percival (View Comment):

    I saw a troupe of protesters protesting capitalism from the steps of a Carnegie library. They might be bright enough to perceive irony, but not educated enough to detect it.

    Good one, Gary.

    My thoughts too.  But that’s also the great ingratitude of it all too – those benefitting from the largesse, the phones in their pockets that they use to coordinate and document their “peaceful” “protests”, the hospitals and clinics they use to patch themselves up (or to which they send the police) – they think they somehow are owed, and deserve all the plenty, even as they try to burn down, subvert, or corrupt the sources of that plenty.  They’re pissing in their own wells.

    And that’s something too of the tragedy of British motor industry – it was all ground down into that monstrosity British Leyland in fits of nationalizing and consolidation, all because somehow a bunch of pencil pushers thought all that hard work was somehow owed to the nation.

    Ingrates, the lot of ’em.

    • #5
  6. Al French of Damascus Moderator
    Al French of Damascus
    @AlFrench

    Gary McVey: Today, Morris as a car company is scarcely known by younger people in Britain, who know no more about it than your kids know about Nash or Hudson, or Plymouth or Oldsmobile.

    British Motor Corporation (the name of the merged Morris and Austin outfits) was the creator of the famed Mini Cooper, which some youngsters may have heard of. The vehicle pioneered a transverse mounted engine with front wheel drive, which had a big influence on car design.

    • #6
  7. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    What a great story, Gary! A brilliant, generous and creative man who made a lasting contribution. Love it!

    • #7
  8. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Al French of Damascus (View Comment):

    Gary McVey: Today, Morris as a car company is scarcely known by younger people in Britain, who know no more about it than your kids know about Nash or Hudson, or Plymouth or Oldsmobile.

    British Motor Corporation (the name of the merged Morris and Austin outfits) was the creator of the famed Mini Cooper, which some youngsters may have heard of. The vehicle pioneered a transverse mounted engine with front wheel drive, which had a big influence on car design.

    Morris was also famed for the Morris Minor, Britain’s most successful small car of the Fifties. Designed during the war, postwar Britain was slow in being able to regain its industrial and economic muscle. The Minor was successful overseas as well, but by then other European cars like the Volkswagen were tough competition. 

    William Morris never liked the Minor, which he complained “Looked like a poached egg”. 

    The Minor and the Mini were both designed by Alec Issigonis, eccentric genius, fanatical royalist, gin-swilling conservative, and blatant homosexual. 

    • #8
  9. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    SkipSul (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    I saw a troupe of protesters protesting capitalism from the steps of a Carnegie library. They might be bright enough to perceive irony, but not educated enough to detect it.

    Good one, Gary.

    My thoughts too. But that’s also the great ingratitude of it all too – those benefitting from the largesse, the phones in their pockets that they use to coordinate and document their “peaceful” “protests”, the hospitals and clinics they use to patch themselves up (or to which they send the police) – they think they somehow are owed, and deserve all the plenty, even as they try to burn down, subvert, or corrupt the sources of that plenty. They’re pissing in their own wells.

    And that’s something too of the tragedy of British motor industry – it was all ground down into that monstrosity British Leyland in fits of nationalizing and consolidation, all because somehow a bunch of pencil pushers thought all that hard work was somehow owed to the nation.

    Ingrates, the lot of ’em.

    This ahistorical passion of rioters reminds me a tart criticism of Mad Men: “On this show, the past is another country. One that deserves to be bombed”. Their total lack of empathy for our predecessors doesn’t mean we should have kneejerk approval of everything they said and did in the past, but it does mean we ought to have a little humility before we consider ourselves so morally superior. 

     

    • #9
  10. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    She (View Comment):

    Wonderful post, Gary. And a nice trip down memory lane for this Brit, who fondly remembers being driven about in several car models from both Morris and Austin.

    Gary McVey: If, as Adam Smith suggested, market capitalism acts as an invisible guiding hand, it should be noted that it also sometimes holds a Horn of Plenty, dispensing funds that will benefit future generations who’ll never know the rugged old guy pouring out the dough.

    So very true. And a message that’s often overlooked these days when the faults of exceptional men of their own time are placed under the microscope, magnified, and exactingly judged by the standards of ours.

    I used to present all night movie marathons at the film festival. I’d introduce each one with the gentle warning that although the Fifties looks funny, with the high heels, push-up bras, constant smoking and tailfinned cars, we should keep in mind how poignant and funny we will look some thirty or forty years hence. The audience would nod, but I could tell they didn’t really believe it. “Us, funny looking? The Eighties? How is that even possible?”

    • #10
  11. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    She (View Comment):

    Wonderful post, Gary. And a nice trip down memory lane for this Brit, who fondly remembers being driven about in several car models from both Morris and Austin.

    Gary McVey: If, as Adam Smith suggested, market capitalism acts as an invisible guiding hand, it should be noted that it also sometimes holds a Horn of Plenty, dispensing funds that will benefit future generations who’ll never know the rugged old guy pouring out the dough.

    So very true. And a message that’s often overlooked these days when the faults of exceptional men of their own time are placed under the microscope, magnified, and exactingly judged by the standards of ours.

    I used to present all night movie marathons at the film festival. I’d introduce each one with the gentle warning that although the Fifties looks funny, with the high heels, push-up bras, constant smoking and tailfinned cars, we should keep in mind how poignant and funny we will look some thirty or forty years hence. The audience would nod, but I could tell they didn’t really believe it. “Us, funny looking? The Eighties? How is that even possible?”

    I look at the 80s with unabashed fondness myself.  It really was a golden age here.

    • #11
  12. She Member
    She
    @She

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    The Minor and the Mini were both designed by Alec Issigonis, eccentric genius, fanatical royalist, gin-swilling conservative, and blatant homosexual. 

    OMG.  A name from the past that hasn’t entered my consciousness for decades.  My brother’s name is Alec.  A name my parents both liked (and preferred to Alexander) but which my mother chose because of Alec Rose, who, at the time of Al’s birth, was sailing single-handed around the world in his yacht, Lively Lady.  They made a list of people they could think of named “Alec” to see if there was anyone with unsavory implications involved. (At the risk of invoking Godwin’s law, this is probably why they never considered “Adolf” as a possibility.)  They decided not.  That’s how I first learned about Alec Issigonis.

    • #12
  13. RushBabe49 Thatcher
    RushBabe49
    @RushBabe49

    I drove my cousin’s Morris Minor a few times, when I was just learning to drive a stick shift.

    • #13
  14. GLDIII Temporarily Essential Reagan
    GLDIII Temporarily Essential
    @GLDIII

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Al French of Damascus (View Comment):

    Gary McVey: Today, Morris as a car company is scarcely known by younger people in Britain, who know no more about it than your kids know about Nash or Hudson, or Plymouth or Oldsmobile.

    British Motor Corporation (the name of the merged Morris and Austin outfits) was the creator of the famed Mini Cooper, which some youngsters may have heard of. The vehicle pioneered a transverse mounted engine with front wheel drive, which had a big influence on car design.

    Morris was also famed for the Morris Minor, Britain’s most successful small car of the Fifties. Designed during the war, postwar Britain was slow in being able to regain its industrial and economic muscle. The Minor was successful overseas as well, but by then other European cars like the Volkswagen were tough competition.

    William Morris never liked the Minor, which he complained “Looked like a poached egg”.

    The Minor and the Mini were both designed by Alec Issigonis, eccentric genius, fanatical royalist, gin-swilling conservative, and blatant homosexual.

    Somehow it seem a great irony that one of the engines of democracy that saved the UK, was those factories of Morris and Austin, and their lovely post war contribution “The Mini”. It was killed by 1970’s British Socialism along with all of the other wonderful english roadsters of my youth, and then only to be resurrected by the folks they fought bitterly against, the Germans.

    Not just any old GmbH, but by no less that the outfit that supplied the aircraft engines (The BMW 800 series engine in the FW 190) that terrorized the south English countryside during the summer of 1940.

    I guess one’s international enemies, as with one’s international friends never stays a constant.

    • #14
  15. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    RushBabe49 (View Comment):

    I drove my cousin’s Morris Minor a few times, when I was just learning to drive a stick shift.

    A neighbor around the block has one, a white convertible. I think it’s great, but my wife doesn’t. She dislikes the old fashioned, 30s-style separate fenders. Cars don’t tend to rust here. British car buffs call rust “the great tin-worm”, an example of the charming drollery of the Mother Country. 

    • #15
  16. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    GLDIII Temporarily Essential (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Al French of Damascus (View Comment):

    Gary McVey: Today, Morris as a car company is scarcely known by younger people in Britain, who know no more about it than your kids know about Nash or Hudson, or Plymouth or Oldsmobile.

    British Motor Corporation (the name of the merged Morris and Austin outfits) was the creator of the famed Mini Cooper, which some youngsters may have heard of. The vehicle pioneered a transverse mounted engine with front wheel drive, which had a big influence on car design.

    Morris was also famed for the Morris Minor, Britain’s most successful small car of the Fifties. Designed during the war, postwar Britain was slow in being able to regain its industrial and economic muscle. The Minor was successful overseas as well, but by then other European cars like the Volkswagen were tough competition.

    William Morris never liked the Minor, which he complained “Looked like a poached egg”.

    The Minor and the Mini were both designed by Alec Issigonis, eccentric genius, fanatical royalist, gin-swilling conservative, and blatant homosexual.

    Somehow it seem a great irony that one of the engines of democracy that saved the UK, was those factories of Morris and Austin, and their lovely post war contribution “The Mini”. It was killed by 1970’s British Socialism along with all of the other wonderful english roadsters of my youth, and then only to be resurrected by the folks they fought bitterly against, the Germans.

    Not just any old GmbH, but by no less that the outfit that supplied the aircraft engines (The BMW 800 series engine in the FW 190) that terrorized the south English countryside during the summer of 1940.

    I guess one’s international enemies, as with one’s international friends never stays a constant.

    BMW’s blue and white emblem is supposed to represent a propeller turning. 

    There’s another, less direct connection between Austin and WWII: The American Austin was so small as to be a novelty car here (one is used as a prop in 1933’s International House, where it drives down hotel corridors and up and down stairs). The company went bankrupt during the Depression and was re-launched as American Bantam. Bantam responded to a Federal request for proposals for a quarter-ton capacity four wheel drive scouting vehicle, and created the army Jeep. Willys merely improved the design, though they’d forever get credit for it (and most Jeeps were actually manufactured by Ford). 

    • #16
  17. Boss Mongo Member
    Boss Mongo
    @BossMongo

    Gary McVey: Today, Morris as a car company is scarcely known by younger people in Britain, who know no more about it than your kids know about Nash or Hudson, or Plymouth or Oldsmobile.

    My kids?  Me.  Thanks, Gary, for making me feel young(er, maybe, a little bit) and putting up such a great post.

    • #17
  18. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    Gary McVey: Today, Morris as a car company is scarcely known by younger people in Britain, who know no more about it than your kids know about Nash or Hudson, or Plymouth or Oldsmobile.

    My kids? Me. Thanks, Gary, for making me feel young(er, maybe, a little bit) and putting up such a great post.

    Right back at ya, Boss. Thanks. 

    • #18
  19. Charlotte Member
    Charlotte
    @Charlotte

    Man do I love capitalism.

    Super post.

    • #19
  20. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Many appreciations, Charlotte! Britain’s problems with its car industry were heavily political, as is well known here. Some other factors that worked against them: their home country was mostly flat, with good, well paved roads and relatively moderate weather. Cars from the UK (other than specialties like Land Rover) were built for that market and didn’t hold up well on the rougher roads of Africa, Australia and South America. 

    Our American cars exported well, but in most markets they weren’t a perfect fit either. Our weather and our roads were more rugged than Britain’s, and our bigger cars were popular outside Europe. On the other hand, they were built with soft-if-sturdy US suspensions, and our big lazy six and eight cylinder engines drank a lot of fuel. 

    British Leyland was a state-forced shotgun marriage that, as Skipsul and GLD II note, did a lot of things wrong. One idea they held briefly was at least an interesting one. After a decade of treating Morris and Austin as interchangeable cars with different nameplates and hubcaps, they tried differentiating them. Austin was the “design car”, like Apple or Tesla, with one classic industrial design each decade. but lots of technical innovation, like front wheel drive.  Morris would be the flashier one, with frequent American style exterior changes but classic, proven rear wheel drivetrains. They’d be in a similar price range but would be aimed at two pretty distinct markets, like Target and Walmart. 

    • #20
  21. Boss Mongo Member
    Boss Mongo
    @BossMongo

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    British Leyland was a state-forced shotgun marriage that, as Skipsul and GLD II note, did a lot of things wrong.

    My Da was stationed in England ’78-’79-’80.  I did middle school there.  We lived on an Air Force base.  They had a gift shop that I would spend hours in–they had swords, man.  Broad swords, rapiers, dirks and daggers.  For me, better than pressing my nose up against the glass of a candy store.  The little old British lady that curated the gift shop gave me a lot of license, me just hanging out, buying nothing.  I don’t think I ever really even touched anything; the voice of Da reverberating in my head, “If you ain’t buying, you ain’t touching.”

    But, I’ll never forget that on one of the knick-knack shelves, there was a ceramic coffee mug, cast to look like a beat up, dented tin can, bearing the legend “Made by British Leyland.”

    • #21
  22. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    British Leyland was a state-forced shotgun marriage that, as Skipsul and GLD II note, did a lot of things wrong.

    My Da was stationed in England ’78-’79-’80. I did middle school there. We lived on an Air Force base. They had a gift shop that I would spend hours in–they had swords, man. Broad swords, rapiers, dirks and daggers. For me, better than pressing my nose up against the glass of a candy store. The little old British lady that curated the gift shop gave me a lot of license, me just hanging out, buying nothing. I don’t think I ever really even touched anything; the voice of Da reverberating in my head, “If you ain’t buying, you ain’t touching.”

    But, I’ll never forget that on one of the knick-knack shelves, there was a ceramic coffee mug, cast to look like a beat up, dented tin can, bearing the legend “Made by British Leyland.”

    That’s a great and telling story. Leyland didn’t start out to be a laughingstock. It was a very successful exporter, a truck and bus manufacturer in the UK’s equivalent of “flyover country”. Because they were so good at what they did, the Labor government was convinced they could cure the ills of the country’s car industry. But the two aren’t that similar. Leyland never sold direct to consumers before; they’d never had to deal with the constant shifts in public taste. Profit margins in cars were much thinner and based on volume. Also, once Leyland was running what was in all but name a public-owned enterprise, they were subject to much heavier political pressures about layoffs and plant locations. They’d liked the idea of having friends in high places. A few years later, it didn’t look like such a great idea. 

    • #22
  23. Boss Mongo Member
    Boss Mongo
    @BossMongo

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    Also, once Leyland was running what was in all but name a public-owned enterprise, they were subject to much heavier political pressures about layoffs and plant locations. They’d liked the idea of having friends in high places. A few years later, it didn’t look like such a great idea. 

    So, the whole scorpion and frog thing.  Got it.

    • #23
  24. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    You can find, bootlegged on Youtube, a show Jeremy Clarkson did about 20 years ago on the decline of the British car industry.  

    • #24
  25. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    A great find, Skip, thanks! I have a book called “The Leyland Papers” by Graham Turner that is one of a stack of tomes that came out of this unhappy slow motion crash. It’s pretty much the same story that everyone tells; since a lot of it took place in public meetings and in business correspondence, there’s less than average divergence about what really happened. But it was published in 1971, when it was already clear that this state-subsidized merger had been a mistake, but before the final graveyard spiral. 

    Funny thing, though: At the time, reviewers raved about its “shocking candor”, its “unvarnished, brutal language” for what today would be considered the mildest frankness, along the lines of “So I called Dickie at his suite at the Claridge. He said come round. We went down to the saloon bar and had a gin and french or two and I told him the Board wanted him out”. By the standards of British business journalism of a half century ago, this was evidently woo-hoo, talk about bare knuckled conflict.  

    • #25
  26. Clifford A. Brown Member
    Clifford A. Brown
    @CliffordBrown

    This conversation is indeed part of our Group Writing Series under the November 2020 Group Writing Theme: “Cornucopia of Thanks.” It is also one of a number of examples of quality writing found here, that you will be hard pressed to find in any other online or print forum.

    Whether your post is serious or frivolous, informative or mildly entertaining, Ricochet will thank you for signing up, thus avoiding disco and bears courtesy of yours truly.

    Interested in Group Writing topics that came before? See the handy compendium of monthly themes. Check out links in the Group Writing Group. You can also join the group to get a notification when a new monthly theme is posted.

    • #26
  27. Randy Weivoda Moderator
    Randy Weivoda
    @RandyWeivoda

    Well done, Gary.  I love your history lessons.

    • #27
  28. She Member
    She
    @She

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    Cars from the UK (other than specialties like Land Rover) were built for that market and didn’t hold up well on the rougher roads of Africa, Australia and South America.

    So true.  The first car I remember was the old green Ford Zephyr (our family car, as differentiated from the Land Rover).  Although it was never in an accident, a couple of years in driving in Nigeria and almost every bauble on the outside and inside, such as mirrors, “bonnet” ornaments, arm-rests, and door handles had rattled themselves off on the washboard-y. unpaved roads.

    The car’s most interesting add-on feature was the thick piece of rope Dad had added to go around each of the front doors (out through the front windows (which had to stay down), and back in through where the handles and elbow rests used to be), and which he tied in front of him in the driver’s seat in order to keep the doors somewhat closed.

    It’s a miracle we survived.

    I’ve wondered, now and then, how cars like that would fare on the roads in Pennsylvania (The Orange-Barrel State!), especially the western end where I am, and where the roads are frequently adjudged among the worst, if not the worst, in the country.   The joke is that a blind driver, travelling east from Ohio, would be able to tell when he crossed the state line, no sign needed.  I think that’s true.

    • #28
  29. Jim Beck Inactive
    Jim Beck
    @JimBeck

    Morning Gary,

    Mr. Morris died at “The” Nuffield Orthopedic Hospital in Oxford in 1963.  My wife and her friend Sue Green were nursing students at The Nuffield at that time and cared for Mr. Morris.  It just happened that Mr. Morris died while Sue was on duty and she had to provide the post death care of the body.  Although most rooms were not private, in the Mayfair ward where Mr. Morris was roomed,  many patients had private rooms.  The Mayfair ward was a ward where patients paid for their own care.  The Nuffield was considered one of the two best orthopedic hospitals in England.  

    • #29
  30. Boss Mongo Member
    Boss Mongo
    @BossMongo

    Jim Beck (View Comment):

    Morning Gary,

    Mr. Morris died at “The” Nuffield Orthopedic Hospital in Oxford in 1963. My wife and her friend Sue Green were nursing students at The Nuffield at that time and cared for Mr. Morris. It just happened that Mr. Morris died while Sue was on duty and she had to provide the post death care of the body. Although most rooms were not private, in the Mayfair ward where Mr. Morris was roomed, many patients had private rooms. The Mayfair ward was a ward where patients paid for their own care. The Nuffield was considered one of the two best orthopedic hospitals in England.

    Jim, that’s just awesome.  Nowhere but Ricochet would you find either post or comment like this.

    • #30
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