The mysterious Morgan-ERA: a long-lost special?

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Bourne in Lincolnshire can hardly be called a tourist attraction. It offers more takeaways than restaurants and more charity shops than antique shops, while the surrounding countryside is all flat, wide open spaces. You and I, however, will probably always remember it as the home of Raymond Mays and the workshops of English Racing Automobiles (ERA) and later British Racing Motors (BRM).

Not many pictures of the ERA works in Bourne seem to have made it into the public domain, so this one is perhaps a bit of a rarity. Oddly, it shows a Morgan three-wheeler rather than an ERA racer, and it has an unusual engine set-up, too. That’s certainly not the usual JAP, Matchless or Anzani V-twin is it? Could it be the result of a collaboration between the two manufacturers, perhaps?

It turns out that respected motoring author Doug Nye did find out about how ERA teamed up with another motor manufacturer in the 1930s with the idea to market road-going sports cars as a means of financing its racing car programme. It wasn’t Morgan, though, but the Standard Motor Company of Coventry. There are a few links to Morgan, though, as he wrote in The Automobile magazine a few years ago after discovering ‘a stock of letters left by Raymond Mays in his old house at Bourne.’

ERA and Standard had been collaborating, and four or five Four-Litre cars even made it to or just beyond the prototype stage. Nye tells us that there was an objection from William Lyons of SS Cars, as Standard had already agreed to supply him with engines for his own sporting grand tourers. We quote from his article: ‘As the Standard book points out, a number of supply agreements existed between The Standard Motor Company and AC, Railton and Morgan around the same time without incurring any similar allegations of breach of the contract with SS.” And “The smaller ERA-Standard would have been in the same market as the Morgan, smaller MGs and Singers and again would not be a direct competitor to anything in the 1938 or later SS range.”

Nye also quotes from a book about Morgan; more specifically, one about a woman named Prudence Fawcett and her plan to drive a Coventry Climax-engined Morgan 4/4 at Le Mans: ‘Despite little competitive motoring experience, she set her sights on competing at Le Mans. She was acquainted with Rivers Fletcher, the racing driver involved with Mays and activities at Bourne who pointed her in the direction of Prideaux Brune and the Winter Garden Garage.” This garage became a Morgan concessionaire in 1938. And that really does make us wonder if there is a link to the picture seen here. If anyone can identify the man behind the wheel, that would be a good start. And what about that V-twin engine. Do you recognize that?

Words: Jeroen Booij; picture: archive
 

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