AN MG RARITY

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 rationalisation that was