Dear Listers: Before my memory becomes corrupted with the passing of years
let me pass on a purportedly true story about automotive pioneer and
philanthropist William Morris (Lord Nuffield) 1877-1963, who founded the motor
car company that produced millions of cars that bear his name. This story was
told to me in 1984 by a retired merchant marine from Australia who was sitting
next to me on a transatlantic flight. Since he was from a country where the
Morris Minor was common I mentioned that I owned one.
The veteran sailor said that he had met and spoken to the respected founder of
Morris Motors in person while serving as a crewman on a merchant vessel
travelling the Indian Ocean on which William Morris and his valet were
passengers. I believe this occured sometime in the early 1950's. During the
voyage between many ports of call the crewman had several occasions to
converse with the famous man. Because of the warm weather the rich man's
shirts needed to be laundered frequently, creating a shortage of clean dry
shirts for him to wear, so at a port somewhere in or around India, William
Morris and his valet went ashore and purchased several white silk shirts at an
open air market near the wharf. After they returned to the ship the vessel
cast off and sailed toward the next exotic port on the itinerary. William
Morris wore one of his newly purchased shirts the next day and told the
crewman that it seemed to be of high quality and he had found a real bargain
and paid only a fraction of what a similar shirt would cost back in London.
Later that week with the passage of many hundred leagues the crewman saw the
famous man looking somewhat distraught holding a pile of white fabric scraps.
"Do you know what this is ?" the patriarch of MG's Austins and Minors asked
the crewman showing him the sorry wad of fabric scraps. "This is what is left
of my white silk shirts that I bought at the last stop." The shirt cloth
pieces apparrenty were not stitched with strong thread but instead were held
together merely with water soluble glue which promptly gave way during the
first laundering. One of the richest men in the world seemed genuinely upset
to have been successfully swindled out of a few rupees or shillings by a
nameless merchant in a far away port that he would never have occasion to
return to.
Please feel free to pass this story on to others. I only ask that it it be
repeated in its entirety. Although I cannot independently verify the facts I
feel that it has a ring of truth. ---William Langdell, Sunnyvale California
('57 Morris Minor Convertable)
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