AN MG RARITY

The MkIII and MkIV Magnettes have forever lived in the shadow of their illustrious forebear, the Z-Type Magnette. Sales were never strong and scrappage rates were high, but fans are now seeking out and cherishing the few that remain.

- ANDREW ROBERTS

Some interesting cars are misunderstood for too many years, and the MG Magnette MkIII and MkIV definitely fall into this category. Had the British Motor Corporation made the wise decision to use another model name, the Octagon-badged 1½-litre 'Farina' would have stood a far greater chance of establishing a niche. Such Magnettes are now amongst the rarest post-war cars to bear the MG name, and Jon Langford, the owner of this immaculate 1964 example, regularly encounters people who are unaware that there was ever such a car. In fact, he reports that many only seem to have heard of the Austin or the Morris, and that plenty don’t know of the Riley or Wolseley variants either.

Back in the mid-1950s Leonard Lord, the then head of BMC, commissioned Battista 'Pinin' Farina to style the new generation of medium-sized and large saloons. According to Martyn Nutland’s fascinating book Brick by Brick: The Biography of the Man Who Really Made the Mini – Leonard Lord, the chairman had been mulling over European stylistic ideas for quite a while.

At the same time, the company also embarked on a programme of what became known as badge-engineering – a form of rationalization that was much derided in later years, but for which there were sound economic reasons because Austin and the Nuffield Group had merged in 1952, and Lord was faced with the potentially huge financial penalties from integrating and reforming 7000 outlets for the two historically bitter rivals in the UK alone. The solution was to use the various BMC marque names across one standard body, with minor engine and stylistic changes to differentiate between them. This was not an unknown practice in the UK – Morris and Wolseley had employed the same coachwork since the 1930s – but using five badges on the same design did mark new territory.