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Overseas Director

Hello MG enthusiasts,

At our recent October 2024 Council and Annual General Meeting, decision-making forums which determine our policies, rules, and voting for Directors I was again voted in as your Overseas Director. This will be my final year and I will step down next October having enjoyed being involved with you, attending your events and reading your magazines and newsletters. My role for the coming year will be as it has been previously – representing Kimber House to all parts of the globe from the Antipodes to Europe, and from Japan to North America and nations in between.

If you visit the U.K. and Kimber House you will get a welcome and if you wish and provided there is notice I can take you on my Morris/MG tour of Oxford – where the MG story started. Many of you have been in contact with me in the past using what should be known as my personal or private email address – but is actually so well known that’s it’s pretty public! In future it would help if my Kimber House address is used:

Peter.cook@mgcc.co.uk

Finally, we have recently started a special offer for overseas MG enthusiasts who are members of a club affiliated to the U.K. club. It is a digital offering at half the U.K. digital price of £50. For £25 you get access digitally to Safety Fast! and to our Registers of your choice. Our website has details of the offer.The Registers are an invaluable source of technical and other advice and in some cases sources of otherwise difficult to obtain parts.

Thanks, and all the best,

Peter

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MGCC UK: Special Offer to Affiliates

Join The Mother Club!

The UK MG Car Club has long had strong connections with affiliated MG clubs throughout the world. Members of these affiliated clubs have always been free to join the UK club if they wished, and many have done so. Many others have not, probably because they did not want to pay two subscriptions just for a English magazine they did not read.

The UK club has always offered membership to non-UK owners at UK rates, even though mailing costs are considerably higher than for UK members, and this has reached the point where we have had no choice but to substantially increase subscription rates for non-UK members.

We are aware that this may discourage owners from joining the UK club and have given a lot of thought to this. We recognize that the facilities available to UK members are not so easy to provide for those outside the UK. Mostly, these facilities are provided by your local MG club. At the same time, many of you wish to maintain contact with us, especially with the Registers, but can only do so by joining the UK club.

To address this, we last year introduced a new form of membership for those wishing to join the UK club who were also members of local affiliated clubs. The offer is that affiliated members can join the UK Club at 50% of the normal UK subscription (currently £60, so 50% is £30), but will not receive the magazine as hard copy, but can read it online, i.e. “digitally”. For those who wish to pay in Euros the paper magazine will cost p.a. €98 and Digital membership €35 (€40 joint) if a member of an affiliated club.

This offer is ONLY available to members both of clubs affiliated to the UK MG Car Club and who are happy to have “digital” membership. Those who want to join the UK club, but not their local club, can only join the UK at the new rates just announced, i.e. £50p.a. for digital membership, or £85p.a. if they wish to receive the UK magazine mailed to them.

This offer represents a substantial saving, therefore, and recognizes that the facilities available to you from the UK club are limited, but at the same time grants you full membership, so that you can enjoy receiving our support, for example, from the Registers for the MG models you own.

If you wish to take up this offer, please apply for membership by providing details of your membership of your local club, which we will be confirming with them.

If you are not a member of a local MG club that is affiliated with the UK club, or you are a member but wish to continue to receive the UK magazine Safety Fast! each month, do not apply by this means, but join or renew membership through the UK website https://www.mgcc.co.uk/membership/. Due to fast rising shipping costs we are unable to offer the paper version of Safety Fast! at a discount.

Please contact us if you are unclear:

LizAllsworth@mgcc.co.uk

PeterCookdr@btinternet.com

Come and join us!

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New Zealand Centenary event, 2024

The message below is from the New Zealand clubs. They want to encourage UK and other European MGCC members to visit NZ and to attend their 2024 rally which culminates in Napier – location of the world-renowned two-yearly Art Deco event. Attendees bring their cars from all over the world to attend the parades. MG will have a special place in the 2024 event. Don’t worry about getting your own MG to NZ, the New Zealand clubs will provide cars and rides for UK, European and other oversea MG attendees.

Peter Cook

Hi Peter,
I thought I’d give you an update on the next MGCC NZ National Rally, which will be doubling as our celebration of 100 years of MG. I know there is a lot of debate about the actual start date of MG, however we’ve ended up with 2024 for a few reasons, mostly practical – it fits with our biannual National Rally cycle (we originally planned to start Dec 31 2023 and overlap into 2024, but that unfortunately proved logistically impossible – even 3 years out there is nowhere in NZ that is able to accommodate us over NYE). As you know, it also fits with the current official line from MG Motor and we are working closely with MG Motor NZ to tie in our celebrations with them.

This will be a bigger rally than our regular biannual event, over 8 nights, with stops in Auckland, Taupo and Napier. It is open to all MG models, and will have a range of events including;
social – gala opening night and vineyards tours, competitive – motorkhana/autotest, drag sprints and track sprints, touring – some great back road tours through fantastic NZ scenery
We are still in the planning stages and aiming to lock in sponsorship in the coming months, so registration fees have not yet been finalised. At this stage, we are looking for (non-binding) expressions of interest to go on our mailing list – this can be by emailing registrations@mgrally.nz or by filling in this form.
We will be sending out accommodation information in our next update.

For further information, please email info@mgrally.nz, or visit www.mgrally.nz

We are aiming for a range of cars available to borrow for overseas entrants, if you are interested in doing so please contact us at bobandlynne1950@googlemail.com

Octagonally
Andrew Walbranon behalf of the MG100 Organising Committee
Preview attachment MG100 New Zealand 2024 – flyer August 2022.pdfMG100 New Zealand 2024 – flyer August 2022.pdf571 KB

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MGCC Centenary

‘1923 and All That’: The MG Car Club’s position regarding the origins of the Marque.

Various individuals and some magazine editors have claimed that the MG Car Club is out of kilter with a general consensus that the first MG cars were sold in 1923. The claim, stated by those who have not taken the trouble to actually consult the MGCC and by others who refuse to correct their error, is that the MGCC believes the correct year is 1924. This assertion is simply untrue. The identity of what was possibly the first Morris Garages ‘Raworth (FC 5581) was stated in the February 2018 issue of Safety Fast! The same car was identified the previous month by a member of The Early MG Society in Enjoying MG, the MG Owner’s Club magazine.

In spite of this clear indication of where the MGCC stands on this matter there are some who, for reasons of their own, wish to claim otherwise.

“I don’t know if many of you have realised but we are getting very close to the centenary date of the foundation of the MG Car Company. There has been plenty of confusion as to when the MG Car Company was formed, either 1923 or 1924. The MG Car Club insist it was 1924, all the advertising advice it has given the Chinese and Indian MG companies …..”

“This is an interesting article written by Brian Rainbow, with the exception of the MGCC all other MG clubs believe that the centenary celebrations should be held in 2023”.

The errors in the above are threefold. If it is the centenary of the MG Car Company which is to be celebrated then we have nearly seven years to wait, for the Company was not registered until March 1928. Second, the MGCC has not given ‘advertising advice’ to the Chinese and Indian manufacturers, we have supplied material from our extensive archives, but as with BMC, British Leyland, Austin Rover, and Rover Group the context in which they place archive material is entirely their decision and independently of the MGCC.

Dealing with the major error, the position of the MGCC on 1923/4 has been consistent for decades, and possibly since the founding of the club in 1930. The first MGs were made and sold in 1923. The photo below from Thoroughbred & Classic Car of October 1985 states clearly in an advert composed and paid for by the MGCC that 1923 is for us the correct year.

A detailed account was published in the February 2018 edition of Safety Fast! of what is believed to be the first Morris Garages Sports Special registered on 1st June, 1923. This why we have chosen 1st June 2023 as the start of our year-long celebration of the MG centenary starting with a small display adjacent to the original showroom where the first MGs were sold by Cecil Kimber in Oxford. Three other MG clubs were invited to participate two years ago but have yet to respond. As a club with many international affiliates across the globe we decided that a full year would enable all our affiliates wherever they are to enjoy a summer event of their choosing. The culminating event for us will be in June 1924, in the meantime we hope that other MG clubs will come together for common purpose. Should other MG clubs feel that they don’t wish to celebrate with the MGCC, then for whatever their reasons, chronology cannot be one of them.

Peter Cook

MG Car Club, Vice-chairman and Overseas Director.

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