The immediate closure of the Abingdon design office following the sale of MG to Morris Motors was a huge blow to Cecil Kimber and his team, with ever more interference coming from outside their small empire. In commercial terms that was probably no bad thing, and it also gave rise to models that have stood the test of time such as the legendary T-Type line and the sumptuous SVW cars.
Bigger storms were on the horizon though, and all car manufacturing came to a halt from 1939-1945. In that time MG made a massive contribution to the war effort, but Cecil Kimber was unfairly dismissed for procuring government contracts outside the Morris Group chain of command, and was tragically killed in February 1945 in a freak rail accident.
MG emerged from the war with its Abingdon factory intact, but like most British manufacturers faced huge hurdles in its bid to resume car production. Despite the wide range of different models that had been offered in the pre-war years, it now had to concentrate on building just a single model that would sell well, and going by the pre-war records, that meant a small, two-seater sports car.
The original T-Type of 1936, retrospectively called the TA, had been succeeded by the TB only a few months before the outbreak of war, so that model was dusted off, tweaked slightly to create the TC, and put back into limited production right away. A mere 81 had been built by the end of 1945, but no fewer than 1500 were dispatched the following year. All the time new export markets were being opened up, and in 1947
