Part of the joy – and occasional heartbreak – of vintage British cars is how they turn any trip into an adventure. Not only do you get a truly mechanical experience, full of the scents of leather and hot oil, but you also need to be involved. Old British cars work best when you’re not afraid of rolling up your sleeves and turning a spanner or two. Mend and make do. Mustn’t complain. That said, it does raise one’s eyebrows to come across a group of MGs on a proper adventure, having just driven all the way across Canada. And does that one say Uzbekistan on it?
Meet a group of peripatetic MGB GT enthusiasts who have wandered far from their native home of Australia. You might expect this sort of walkabout behaviour from Aussies, but mostly of the backpacking-through-Europe kind, not so much loading up a bunch of 50-year-old MGs and driving eight thousand miles through Canada’s six time zones.
Starting in Halifax, they drove north, taking the ferry to Labrador and into Newfoundland. From there, the long road west, taking the backroads through Quebec and Ontario, out into the prairies, and finally up and over the Rockies and into British Columbia.
This is not a first foray for the group. In fact, this pan-Canadian excursion is a replacement trip, as the original plan was to leave from the UK and drive to the east, through Eastern Europe and into Mongolia. The outbreak of war made this impossible, and so the thought was to ship the cars to Halifax, drive to Vancouver, and have them shipped home to Australia.
All five of the couples on the trip hail from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia’s largest city. The Victoria MG Club is quite a large and active community, and its members take great delight in doing some seriously long-distance adventures. Four of the five MGBs here ended up in the UK as the end point of an epic drive in 2017, following the Silk Road route from Bangkok to London, with a last stop at MG’s ancestral home of Abingdon.
This isn’t the first time Australian MGs have travelled the Silk Road, either. In fact, it’s part of a recurring theme. A handful of club members go out on an adventure, other Australian MG owners eagerly follow along through regular trip reports, and soon the latter have signed up for whatever the next trip is. It’s infectious. Likely patient zero is Dave Godwin, a longtime MG enthusiast and racer who owned a classic car repair shop. In 2010, about five years after the MG brand was bought by the Nanjing Automotive Corporation, Godwin decided that it would be an excellent idea to drive his 1961 MGA from Beijing to Abingdon, a trip from MG’s new home to its birthplace.
Godwin set out to gather together some like-minded MG owners, and soon had a team of six cars, the other five all MGBs. One owner put a Mandarin translation of MG’s history on his car’s bonnet, and the expedition drew crowds wherever it went.
Next up was a drive from Cape Town to Cairo and on to the UK, completed in 2012. Godwin followed this up in 2015 with a drive along the full length of the Pan-American highway, beginning in Ushuaia, Argentina, and ending in Vancouver. They took 121 days to travel almost 20,000 miles, but Godwin wanted to go just that little bit further. He was joined by Michael and Kay Herlihy and their 1968 MGB GT, and the duo headed for Alaska to cross into the Arctic Circle. The Herlihys, who are both longtime members of the Victoria MG club, then drove back down to Los Angeles, just for the joy of it.
“We always say that we’ve discovered that there are good people everywhere in the world,” Michael says.
I caught up with the Herlihys and their fellow touring MGB GT owners on the penultimate day of the trip, with the cars to be shipped off to Melbourne the very next day. All ten were hard at work cleaning away the grime of 80 days travel, with the cars needing to pass inspection to be admitted back into Australia.
Each of the MGB GTs had been given names: “Shiraz” for the Herlihy’s ’68; “Duchess” for a blue 1971 in a nod to Henk and Maja Zwarteveen’s Nederland roots; “Shamrock” to Peter and Paula Rose’s green 1969; “Ginger” for Pat and David Mottram’s ’70; and “Inca” for David and Kerri Halliday’s rubber-bumper 1979 GT. The Hallidays are returning to Australia after living in the UK for many years, and David will be joining an Austin-Healey specialist when he gets there.
“We’ve been meeting MG clubs all the way along,” Halliday says, “but it’s surprising to see how much attention the cars get.”
It’s true that an MGB is not quite an unusual or particularly special British classic. If a Lotus Elan is a Supermarine Spitfire, then an MGB is a Hawker Hurricane. It’s a bit of a workhorse, mechanically simple, slightly over half-a-million built over nearly three decades (four, if you count the RV8). The GT does get a few extra style points for being a Pininfarina design, but the ’B is not a Bentley.
But an MGB GT with the amount of stories Shiraz comes with is a rarity of a different kind. It’s not a concours exotic – it’s a faithful world traveller, an adventurer with a photo album full of wild places.
Because these cars are mechanically simple, and the five MGB GTs are all mechanically similar to each other, it’s possible to carry all the spares you might possibly need. Further, Halliday adds that MG enthusiasts all across Canada were only too happy to lend workshop space or a spare part that might be missing from the contingency list. He notes that all five cars were very reliable, the only casualties a starter motor, alternator, and some hydraulic issues well past the halfway mark.
Halliday kept a running trip log of the tour on his personal Facebook page, and will tidy it up and post a version of it on MG enthusiast sites, now that the trip is done. You have to expect that, on reading it, some other Australian MG owner will think, “Well, why exactly have I been putting this off?” and there’ll be some future expedition in the works.
And perhaps even better is the inspiration the five MGB GTs ladled out as they met with British car fans of all kinds all across Canada. Summer’s not quite at an end yet, and there are many driving days left. The Aussies came a long way to see this country. What might you discover if you fire up your own MG and point its nose to somewhere as yet unexplored in your own backyard? It’s sure to be an adventure.
