Mallard (eBook)

Split screen, the indicators poking up like perspex orange fingers, the notoriously rust-prone floors, the pootling exhaust note... just some of the much-loved characteristics of the Morris Minor or Morris 1000. Designed by Sir Alec Issigonis back in 1948, in a sense it was Britain's answer to the Beetle - a bulbous little creation that was also Britain's first mass-appeal car. Between then and 1972 when production belatedly ceased some 1.6 million were built. There were variants like the Morris Traveller (timber-framed estate car) and the Morris Million (painted pink), while the convertible was another popular choice. For thousands of 'newly-marrieds', or penurious students, it was their first car. It was also the kind of car in which the district nurse did her rounds. In 2008, it is 60 years old, and Martin Wainwright (who proposed to his wife over the gear stick of a Morris Minor) gives us a quirky and fascinating history of this quintessentially British car. You'll find everything from the post-70s vogue for restoring and rebuilding Morris Minors (several garages still exist to do just that, to the alarming habit of their bonnets to open at speed and entirely obscure your vision, their unreliable trunnions, and not to mention the esoteric photo exhibition some years ago devoted to abandoned Morris Minors on the West Coast of Ireland.

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It ought to be a film, of course, pitched somewhere between The Right Stuff and Chariots of Fire. Meanwhile, Don Hales well-ordered, compelling book will do nicely Andrew Martin, Daily Express Seventy years ago, on 3 July 1938, on the East Coast main line, the streamlined A4 Pacific locomotive Mallard reached a top speed of 126mph - a world record for steam locomotives which still stands. Since then, millions have seen this famous locomotive, resplendent in her blue livery, on display at the National Railway Museum in York. Don Hale tells the full story of how the record was broken, from the nineteenth century rivalry to be fastest between London and Scotland, and, surprisingly, traces Mallards futuristic design to the Bugatti car and Germanys nascent Third Reich, which elevated the train into an instrument of national prestige. And he celebrates the singular figure of Mallards designer, Sir Nigel Gresley, one of Britains most gifted engineers. Mallard is a wonderfully nostalgic evocation of one of British technologys finest hours.