On Tue, 27 Jun 1995, Denise Thorpe wrote:
> Sometime in '79 or '80, Donald Healy spoke at a brunch for the San Diego MG
> Club and the Triumph Sports Car Club of San Diego. He said that:
>
> Cecil Kimber, the father of MG, was an octagon freak (probably not his exact
> words). Everything he owned that could possibly be octagon shaped was;
>tables,
> plates, clocks, what-have-you. When he died, his only daughter inherited
> everthing. It turned out that he was a packrat and a doodler and had kept
> every piece of paper on which he'd ever scribbled. Included in his estate
> were endless sheets of paper with octagons drawn on them with every possible
> combination of letters drawn in the octagons. "M" and "G" don't stand for
> anything, they were just the only letters that fit well inside an octagon.
Donald Healy's credibilty in your mind notwithstanding, the company _was_
named Morris Garages (plural intended), and it was named that long before
Morris hired Kimber to be its manager. (long boring lecture on the
history of the Nuffield Organisation supplied on request). True, Kimber
was obsessed with octagons, but the initials he put inside the octagon to
create the M.G. Car Company logo were the initials of the Morris Garages,
the predecessor of the M.G. Car Company. Now, whether he would have
named the company something else if the initials "MG" _didn't_ look good
inside an octagon is another matter...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Chip Old 1948 M.G. TC TC6710 NEMGTR #2271
Cub Hill, Maryland 1962 Triumph TR4 CT3154LO (daily driver)
fold@mail.bcpl.lib.md.us
If cars had evolved as fast as computers have, by now they'd cost a
quarter, run for a year on a half-gallon of gas, and explode once a day.
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