JAMES LEASOR
Wheels to Fortune
A brief account of the Life and Times of
WILLIAM MORRIS, VISCOUNT NUFFIELD
INDUSTRIALIST & PHILANTHROPIST
Published by
James Leasor Ltd at Smashwords
81 Dovercourt Road, London SE22 8UW
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN
978-1-908291-25-7
First
published 1954
This edition published 2011
© James
Leasor 1954, Estate of James Leasor 2011
For
JOAN
"To any man worth his salt, the desire for personal gain is not his chief reason for working. It is that desire to achieve, to be a success, to make his job something worthy of his mettle and self-respect. Money plays an important part in this - it is stupid to deny it - but it is the part of air to living things..."
Lord Nuffield as W R Morris, 1927
"Inter miracula ipse praecipuum miraculum, inter moventia primum mobile" - "Among miracles, he is himself the chief miracle; among movement he is the source of motion..."
Public Orator, of Lord Nuffield as Sir
William Morris, at Oxford, 1931,
when he was receiving the degree of
DCL from the University.
Contents
1. The Start of the Matter
2. To Cowley, and to War
3. The Car you Buy to Keep
4. Expansion
5. A Car for £100
6. Safety Fast!
7. £26,000,000 Given Away
8. The Man with the Red Wig
9. War in Three Cities
10. Interim Assessment
Editor’s Postscript
CHAPTER ONE
The Start of the Matter
I began with nothing. I hadn't even a five-pound note. But although I was only seventeen I felt that W R Morris would pay me a higher salary than anybody else. So I started to work for W R...
Lord Nuffield, quoted in an article, 1926
It was past noon when the hammering ceased.
The young man stood back for a moment, filled his pipe carefully, and lit it, watching the car critically through eyes half closed, as an artist scrutinizes a picture. An unusual car, this, a very special one, with a greenish-grey body, large brass acetylene lamps and a Cape cart hood of scrubbed canvas.
There would never be another car like it, although thousands, even millions of others would bear its name. This one was especially his; he had made it himself.
On this spot in Longwall Street, Oxford, where William Richard Morris planned his first car, garages still stand - a branch of one of his enterprises called, appropriately, The Morris Garages. Some motorists pass by and know nothing about this first car, or what happened before and afterwards. To them, this is just another garage in a narrow, winding road; a place for petrol and nothing more. And if they were told that here a major industry began, and one that changed the face of England, they would probably not believe it.
"Really?" they would say, polite with disbelief. "Fancy that, now." Then they'd pocket their change, and drive off again, as like as not in a direct descendant of that first Morris car, and by the time they reach the main road, most of them have probably forgotten all about the garage and are only intent on passing the car ahead.
But the people who live nearby do not all forget so easily. Many remember quieter days, when a car in the streets of Oxford, lifting the dust and making the horses shy in the shafts, was something to talk about.
They remember young William Morris working there, sleeves rolled up, first repairing motor cycles, and then building his own; and then repairing cars and finally building those, too. The site of the garages has long been connected with wheeled vehicles. Before the coming of cars, coaches were kept in sheds there, and Morris used some of these sheds and stables as workshops, and the rest as garages which he let out to local motorists. In place of the mild, friendly sound of horses other, stranger, noises arrived: a sudden cacophony of sound as an engine started, or the sharp, unexpected bang of a backfire that would frighten the tame deer in the grounds of Magdalen College across the road.
These were new noises that had come to stay; and new smells ousted the mellow tang of leather harness: the smell of petrol and oil, and blue exhaust smoke.
From this small start an organization has grown and multiplied and advanced, so that today, instead of a handful of men working together on an idea in which they all believed, there are thousands; and instead of a garage off the High Street, with a tree growing up in the yard and sticking its branches through the upper windows, the factories producing the cars that bear the founder's name, and other makes besides, cover more than one million square yards.
The enterprise and perseverance of that one man has changed the face of Oxford and transformed it from a quiet University city to one of the country's most important industrial areas, yet he still smokes cigarettes he has rolled himself, and has not let success change him very much.
His title is now Lord Nuffield but he remains Will Morris in outlook.
Nowadays, he drives an eight horsepower Wolseley instead of riding a bicycle, but the change is only from two wheels to four, and, anyway, his factory made the car just as he had made the cycle...
His hair is nearly white, like silver wire, but brushed straight back from his forehead as it always was. His eyes are pale blue with large, dark intense pupils; he is not a man people can easily look at and lie to. Physically, he is no more impressive than he was as a lad, but he is as tough as a steel spring.
On the mantelpiece in his office at Cowley is a model ship's wheel, won within the last few months at deck tennis on an ocean liner. This success pleases him far more than talk of all the money he has made - although he has given away more than £26,000,000. He has only a very small fraction of this amount left to his name now, but he is not worried; he goes on giving, for his philosophy is simple and entirely genuine.
"What does a great deal of money mean to anyone, anyway? It's only a worry," he says, and he speaks from his own experience; the millions he made all weighed heavily on him.
"I started, earning five shillings a week," he is fond of saying. "I could go back to the beginning again tomorrow - and I might be happier if I did..."
He did not set out to make money, and he has often been surprised at his own success. It has brought many problems, most of them undreamed of when he made that first Morris car. For instance, he is continually being pestered and worried by the writers of begging letters; by people who want him to finance schemes of all kinds, from extracting gold from sea-water to mounting expeditions to search for the treasure lost in sunken Spanish galleons, and by many others all after his money.
"Why should you keep on worrying?" he asks other men of means. "The best thing you can do with money is to give it away. Rich men don't give nearly enough money away..."
"Well, why keep it?" Lord Nuffield persists, for it is a favourite theme of his. "What can you do with it? You can only wear one suit at a time. You can only eat one meal at a time. You lose even the pleasure of wishing for things.
"If you have so much money that you can buy anything you want, you find you don't want anything.
"Nothing gives you any satisfaction unless you have to struggle a bit to get it, and then, when you've got it, you don't want it...
"Look at me. People say to me, 'What can I give you for your birthday?' meaning the question in a kindly way.
"But what can I reply that is truthful? There's nothing I want.. If I wanted anything, then obviously I would have bought it. I can afford to.
"I have fewer clothes in my wardrobe than most men. Some of my suits are ten years old.
"There's nothing at all that I want - anywhere."
This is one measure of the triumph that a life of hard work and calculated risks, larded with a genius for making a right decision, has brought to William Richard Morris: the position of being able to afford anything he wants, only to discover that nothing he still desires can be bought with money.
In the last twenty years, honours and awards have been heaped upon him, but it is doubtful whether he really wanted any of them, for he is still, and always has been, a simple man of quiet tastes: the questing mechanic in search of the perfect machine.
Nevertheless, the honours have arrived, unasked and unsought. Before the war, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society; and, after it, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. He is an honorary Master of Arts and a Doctor of Civil Law of Oxford University; an honorary Doctor of Law of the Universities of Sydney and Birmingham, of Melbourne and Belfast; a Doctor of Science of New South Wales University of Technology; and an honorary Freeman of five cities.
Lord Nuffield is also an honorary member of the British Medical Association, of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, of the British Orthopaedic Association, and the Faculty of Anaesthetists. He is an honorary Fellow of Pembroke and Worcester Colleges; President of Guy's Hospital, a life governor or president of hospitals in other parts of the country, and the holder of many more titles than these. Yet he has never attended any university as a student, and he received all his schooling at the village school in Cowley, within shouting distance of the great factory where his cars are now made.
"The only road to success is hard work and, of course, foresight," he says now, looking back on his life. "It's not always the men who've had an expensive education who do things," he will add, almost defensively; and indeed he is one man whose whole life has proved this point.
He was born in Worcester on 10 October 1877, to Emily, wife of Frederick Morris, and christened William Richard a few days later. That year work actually started on a tunnel under the channel to link England with France, a project that has still not been completed. W G Grace was at his peak; Blondin, "The Hero of Niagara", was appearing nightly on a high wire to audiences of thousands at the Crystal Palace, and what was called "a serious, not to say alarming, state of insecurity" existed in Clapham, where gangs of burglars were using builders' ladders to climb up to the bedrooms of the big houses. At St Austell, in Cornwall, experiments were being made with a telephone in a tin mine which, said one expert, "showed that it may do better service than in being the medium for the conveyance of songs and jokes from a distance".
Looking back now, this prophecy seems a very easy one to have made, but at the time there were not many who believed that it would eventually be possible to speak to people in distant towns and countries. There would have been far, far fewer who could ever think that the son and heir of Frederick Morris would become a man famous and wealthy, or - had anyone prophesied this - that his name would be driven round the world.
As with nearly all men who have achieved outstanding success, little is known about the early life of Lord Nuffield. When he was a boy, there was no reason to suppose that his life would be much different from that of any of the neighbours' children. When it became vastly different, then people were quick to recall how they had "always thought he would do well". Had Morris failed wretchedly in his first venture on his own, these same people, of course, would have been quick to call witness to his folly.
One of the most common myths about the background of Lord Nuffield is that he was born and reared in poverty. This is quite untrue; both his parents were educated middle-class people. His father, Frederick Morris, was an accountant; his mother, the daughter of an Oxfordshire farmer.
The Morris line is a long one, and can be traced back nearly seven hundred years. The first William Morice held land in Swarford "of the manor of Hook Norton" in 1278. Three generations later the name was written as it is today, and with each generation there was a son called Richard or one called William; but never one to equal the last of the line, who bore both these Christian names.
The family were tenants, not land-owners; but middle-class farmers, who were churchwardens in their local churches. All of them, on both sides of the family, were born and died within the county boundaries of Oxfordshire.
Frederick Morris was an adventurous man, although he has suffered, as do all fathers of the famous, in being remembered not so much for what he did himself, but for what his son has done. As a young man he went to America, and later drove a mail coach across the prairies in Canada before the days of the railroad. He had travelled widely, and was actually made a "blood-brother" in a Red Indian tribe. When he was twenty-seven, he came home to marry Miss Emily Ann Pether, of Wood Farm, Headington.
She had been born in Cowley, in those days a small village only a few fields away from Headington, and this is the first time that Cowley appears in connection with the Morris family. Later, of course, Morris and Cowley were to be associated in the name of Morris-Cowley, one of the most popular British cars of all time; but this was not yet. There were no blast furnaces in Cowley then, no assembly plants or paint shops: there were instead, a smithy and an inn, a church, a vicarage and a handful of houses. There were no cars along the Cowley Road, either, for in those days there were no cars anywhere, only ideas in the minds of a few dreamers that some day, somehow, carriages would move without horses.
When William Morris was still a very small boy of three or four, his family moved from Worcester back to Headington, and there he grew up. Headington has changed from a village of character into a straggling and rather undistinguished suburb of small semi-detached houses outside Oxford on the London road. Many of the people who live there work in one or other of the Nuffield factories, and the town grew without much planning in the twenties and the thirties as the Morris works spread. When Morris was a boy, though, most of the people in Headington were farming folk, and young William would walk across fields, by footpaths, when he went to school at Cowley.
Many people who have discovered where he was educated have tried hard to turn this knowledge to their own advantage.
"You'll remember that I was in your class at school in the old days," they write, but Lord Nuffield remembers no such thing. "If all those who claim they went to school with me at the church school were put together they would need the largest classroom ever built," he says. "There were only six in my form."
He has a long memory for his boyhood, for he is a great sentimentalist. His office, indeed, was once the parlour of the headmaster of Hurst's Grammar School, where his father had been a pupil, and this old school is still a part of the Morris buildings. The chapel remains, and so do the dormitories, and when the works were being constructed he gave orders that as much as possible of the original stonework should be left undisturbed.
The old headmaster would approve of Lord Nuffield's office, could he return to see it. As the office of the Honorary President, which is his title nowadays, it is in the tradition of scholarship rather than big business: a quiet room for a quiet man - a desk, a fireplace, a sofa and some chairs. On one wall, above his desk, is a large picture of Magdalen tower seen from the bridge. This is the first view Lord Nuffield had of Oxford, coming in from Cowley to start a business and to make his name.
Once, at a meeting of motor dealers, he surprised them by telling a story of his childhood. On his way to school, he had to walk round three sides of a private cricket field, and one day he climbed the railings that fenced this, and scampered across the grass.
"When I felt my feet upon that springy turf," he said, "I swore that one day I would own that field. Gentlemen - I do..."
Of course he does, for he is one of the few men of this century who has accomplished all the material things he set out to do when he was a young man, and much more besides.
He left school when he was sixteen, and because his parents were anxious for him to learn a trade, he was apprenticed to a cycle-maker and repairer near his home. Years later, when he gave £1,380,000 to Oxford University for medical research, he recalled that his own first ambition was to have been a surgeon.
"But there was no money to be a surgeon," he said simply, "so I had to take on the next best thing - mechanics. One thing I wanted to do was to use my hands..."
Many of those who grew up with him do not remember this early ambition. There was no hope of his achieving it, and so he did not speak about it outside his immediate family circle, but nursed it himself, a private, secret wish; one of the very few he would never be able to gratify, for by the time he had made enough money to pay for medical training, the impetus of his enterprise had carried him beyond the possibility of being a student. He fitted reverse gears to all his cars, but he could not go back a step himself.
Of all his contemporaries, though, William Morris probably used his hands to the best advantage. First, he used them to make things, and the things he made, in their turn, made money, and then with the money he helped others.
When he was a lad, cycling was the great craze of the day, rather like television is now; and, in 1893, cycle-making was considered a progressive business. Young Morris, who was being paid five shillings a week for his services, did not consider that it was progressive enough for him, however, and within nine months he had stopped working for others and was working for himself.
"Can I have a shilling a week rise?" he asked his employer. "No," replied that worthy, "I'm paying you what you're worth." Morris did not agree.
He had saved up about £4 in these months of apprenticeship, and with this capital he began in business on his own.
"I was with the bicycle-maker for nine months," he recalls, "and that was time enough to teach me that things were not difficult to do, if only one were determined to succeed."
This fierce determination stayed with him all his life, and it recalls the same driving force that consumed Cecil Rhodes.
Someone once asked Rhodes, as a young man, for his motto.
"Do or die," he replied promptly, and Morris felt the same way about life.
"If I go so far as to say 'Do it', and have the authority to say so, a thing must be done," he has always said. "Given the will, one can do almost anything.
"Sometimes people come to me and say they cannot do this or that. I tell them I have no use for those who cannot do something they are expected to do."
Such faint-hearts have never been welcome in any of his establishments, for he drives himself hard, spurred by an inner impetus, and he has always expected others in the team to be similarly inspired. If they are not, then they can go elsewhere.
"I work my full weight, and I expect my men to do the same," is how he puts it. Yet, for all the hard streak in his character, which he has needed time and again in near-defeat, he is by no means so hard a man as he has been made out, or as he likes to picture himself.
Lord Nuffield has the reputation of being ruthless with people who make mistakes, but this is not always so. He is much more ruthless with people who disagree with him, for although he can forgive mistakes, differences of opinion he finds it harder to accept. He feels that a man who has never made a mistake will probably never succeed, for everyone at some time or other has made mistakes that probably could have been avoided.
"I go on the theory," he told the Marquis of Donegall during the war, "that if I've got a good man, and the bloomer he makes costs me half-a-million pounds, it would be silly to sack him.
"I will probably get someone not as good who would repeat it. It is unlikely that the first chap will be fool enough to lose another half-million pounds in exactly the same way..."
It was probably his distaste for opposing opinion that led him to confess, at the same time, "I've never been able to work with a partner, because I've always found that first impressions are best, whereas partners so often do not agree and dissuade you from them."
As early as 1893 he made this discovery, and, as a result, he decided to go it alone. This was a big decision to take. A generation still separated him from the time in 1935 when he would offer shares in Morris Motors to his employees, with the words, "I was becoming tired of working for myself... now it is my great pleasure to work for others..."
This was one of the two major decisions in his life, although the second was probably the greater. In the slump of 1921, he drastically cut the price of his cars, because he could not sell them, and within weeks was selling thousands, proving again the lesson that Henry Ford had already learned with cars, Lipton with tea, and Woolworth with many things: cut your price and watch your business grow.
But all this was still ahead of him, and when he decided to work for himself, as many other lads have done before and since without notable success, he was taking the first step out of the ranks; the hired hand was no longer up for hire.
Morris was not yet seventeen, he had only served a part of his apprenticeship, and he had no one save his parents to guide him. Like Pitt, he was guilty of the crime of being a young man, and in the Oxford of the late nineties there was a far bigger gulf between Town and Gown that there has ever been since. He was a tradesman, and a newcomer at that. It was a worrying time for him. Probably there were many evenings when he felt so low in spirit that he could have been talked out of the whole undertaking, but he kept on. He always was a sticker.
His first workshop was a slate-roofed, brick lean-to at his home, 16 James Street, Oxford, where in the words of his advertisements all cycle repairs were "promptly attended to". So prompt, indeed, was his attention, that he had to work his own hours, which meant that he started early and finished late every evening. No matter. He was working for himself; he was content.
In Oxford, then as now, bicycles were very popular, for the countryside is flat and the going easy. W R M's repairs were good, and so was his workmanship, and cyclists recommended him to their friends: slowly, but steadily, his reputation grew, and with it, his business.
There was a slogan at the time in Oxford:
Hire a bike from Eyles and Eyles, And ride like - for miles and miles.
Eyles and Eyles have prospered, too, and now own one of the largest garages in the area; but that is another success story altogether.
The demand for their bicycles made Morris realize that he could do more business if he also had some cycles which he could hire out, and so he began by charging sixpence an hour, or five shillings a day for them.
A Scots hairdresser, Mr Austin Medcraft, who was in business in Oxford at this time, remembered for the rest of his life one thing above all else about Morris in these early days. "He was a terrible worker," he would say years afterwards. In Scotland, the word "terrible" has not always the same meaning as it has in England: here it meant "terribly hard".
In the evenings, Mrs Morris would come down the small garden to see her son. She was very proud of his independence, and he never forgot the encouragement that both his mother and father gave him in those early days when the neighbours, content to have their sons work for other men, thought he was foolish to start out on his own, and prophesied an early failure.
"I am always grateful for having had parents who encouraged me to carve out my own career. They didn't help me financially, but when my mother saw that I had a natural aptitude for engineering, she encouraged me," he says. "She used to come to my repair shop when I was only seventeen. She wanted to see for herself how I was getting on..."
In those days, manufacturers would supply wheels and frames for cycling enthusiasts, so that they could make their own machines instead of buying them ready-made and, incidentally, save money by so doing.
William Morris decided to build bicycles, too, as well as repairing and hiring them. He calculated that, with low overheads, and working his own hours, he could probably produce them at a competitive price, and he was quite right. There was no electric light at that time, but he had gas which he used for brazing the frame tubes of the cycles, and at night he worked on by its light. He didn't mind how long he worked: he was in business and determined to make it pay.
Soon the shed became too cramped for him, and he moved into Oxford, nearer his customers, renting a shop at 48 High Street, near the Queen's College and opposite the Examination Schools. Outside, he had a sign painted: "William Morris, Cycle-Maker and Repairer."
The move into Oxford was oddly symbolic. He was among all the colleges, within the University, but not of it; a position he has always maintained. Always he has been "Town" and not "Gown", and when he came to choose a badge for his car it was the crest of Oxford that he took - but the City, not the University.
One of his earliest customers was F E Smith, then an undergraduate at Wadham, and later Lord Birkenhead. When Morris was made a peer himself he was disappointed that he could not call himself Lord Morris: that title was already held by a Canadian peer.
"I'm sorry I'll lose my name," he said, "and I don't want to choose a new lengthy title, but anyway, I hope my friends will still call me ‘W R’ in the same way that Lord Birkenhead's friends always spoke of him as 'F E.' " They did. Always to his intimates he has been "W R" or "W R M"; to others, Will or William; but never Bill or Billy.
Looking back on that first move, now, he recalls: "I built push-bikes and sold them to my acquaintances. In the first year, I turned out and sold fifty - and good cycles they were, too."
It was not a very rewarding job financially. Lord Nuffield calls it "a bare living" nowadays, but he was young then, and single, and ambitious. Nothing was too hard for him.
"I felt I could succeed as my own boss," he says, and so he did, splendidly and magnificently, although success did not come easily, or early. This is something that is often forgotten when Lord Nuffield's career is discussed. People assume that he became rich when he was still a young man, which is not so at all. He was not fully out of the financial wood of debts and overdrafts and worries until he was forty-five. His intense faith in himself, even though others called him pig-headed, carried him through nearly twenty years before his ideas were all vindicated and he became rich.
The first customer Morris had for one of his cycles was the Rev. Francis Pilcher, Rector of St Clement's for thirty-five years from 1878. He bought a bicycle for "about £10".
Mr Pilcher was 6 feet 3 inches tall. "He must have been the tallest man in Oxford," Lord Nuffield recalls. "In those days we measured people for their cycles. His machine had a 27-inch frame and 28-inch wheels - the largest cycle I ever built for a customer."
Years later, Lord Nuffield met Mr Pilcher's son, then Bishop of Sydney, on one of his trips abroad. He told him that he had bought back his father's cycle.
"A clergyman came to see me one day, and said that one of my machines was being sold in a rummage sale, so I bought it back for £10," he explains. "It was the first one I'd ever made."
He still has it in his offices at Cowley; a tall, black-painted machine with caliper brakes.
"You could ride it now," Lord Nuffield tells visitors when he shows it to them, "except that the tyres are perished..."
The remark recalls a similar saying of Henry Ford, who, when he became a millionaire, still kept his first tiny Ford car under the bench of his own private workshop as a kind of token, and a reminder of how it all began.
"It would still work now, if they hadn't taken bits off for souvenirs," he would say when people prevailed on him to show it to them.
Shortly after W R M set up in business in Oxford, the local postmaster, Mr Enos Hughes, agreed that he should have the contract to repair the cycles used by the local telegraph boys.
"I admired his good work and affability," he explained afterwards, when someone asked why such a newcomer should have this in preference to firms that had been established longer.
Lord Nuffield loathes personal publicity of any kind, but he has always had an astonishing flair for advertising his product; whether it was equipping the then Prince of Wales on his shooting trip to Africa with Wolseleys in the early thirties, or backing MG's in their record-breaking racing efforts later on.
When he was building cycles, then, he built two kinds: one to sell and one to race He knew that if his cycles won races they would be discussed and become popular with enthusiasts. This fact was remembered years later when he marketed the MG sports cars. They won race after race until their reputation for speed and reliability made them the most sought-after small sports car of the day - although, oddly, he never had the same interest in car racing that he used to have for racing cycles, and was inclined to listen indulgently to those who would make MG a name famous on the race tracks of the world.
As a cycle maker, Morris rode his own machines to championship meetings in the county, and also in Buckinghamshire and Berkshire. Most cyclists are good for one distance only, for long or short races; Morris was astonishing in that he was champion at all the distances, from half a mile to fifty miles. His energy was tremendous. All day he would work, from seven in the morning until any hour at night. At the weekends he would cycle to the race, and then proceed to win it.
In 1900 he held all seven speed championships for cycle racing in the three counties of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire.
He has always kept this first enthusiasm for cycling, and when he opened the Bicycle and Motor Cycle Show at Olympia in 1936, he astonished those present by taking a cycle from one of the stands, borrowing a pair of trouser clips, and riding off round the hall.
Nowadays the medallions he won in his teens and twenties hang in a special frame in his office. There are many of them: each one engraved with a date and a place, and each a testimony to his immense drive and enthusiasm, and also to his courage and endurance.
In 1902, when cycle racing was threatened by commercialism, Morris stopped entering for the races. After all, he had proved his point: Morris cycles were as good as the best. QED.
By this time he was selling cycles as fast as he could make them; but cycles were already becoming too slow for him. He was way ahead, living in the future, impatient with the present. Motorcycles were just becoming popular, and although they were unreliable, with slipping belts, cycle-type brakes and spluttering, tiny engines, which on hills demanded what their makers called "LPA" - light pedal assistance - they were the advance guard of a whole age of motoring.
"Nineteen-hundred brought a big step forward for me," he recalls. "I designed, built and sold the first Morris motorcycle. I had saved up £2,000 from my earnings on push-bikes. It seemed a time to go forward..."
A few private motor cars were on the roads, for the Act that made it compulsory for a man carrying a red flag to walk in front of every mechanically-propelled vehicle had been repealed in 1896, but the cost of the cars kept them out of the reach of all but wealthy owners, who could afford to have chauffeurs to maintain them.
Motorcycles, on the other hand, were relatively cheap to buy and run, and so consequently more people used them. Morris felt that they would become even more popular with the years, and so he turned his attention to them.
Morris motorcycles, like most other contemporary machines, were of very simple design; basically just a strengthened cycle frame with stronger wheels to take the jerky thrust of the engine. He built the engine himself because, as he explained afterwards, by making it he felt he would learn everything there was to know about engine construction. At this time he had never received any engineering training, nor had he read any complete textbook on the subject. He simply bought some castings and bored out the cylinder on a small treadle-lathe - an extraordinary achievement.
"I'm just a born engineer, and I can't help it," he explains to people who ask him how he was able to do this. "Once I see a thing made, then I can make it, but I dislike learning from books. I have to do the job and learn from experience."
He had a new sign painted: "Morris Cycle Works - Cycles and Motors Repaired." The business prospered.
Years later, in 1931, Dr Norman Joy, an ex-medical officer of Bradfield College, Berks, told a public meeting that in 1902 he was probably the first doctor in England to use a motorcycle regularly, and when it broke down he could find no one near at hand who was able to put it right. He took it in to Oxford, and there he was told that if anyone could repair it, then that man was William Morris - Sir William by 1931. W R M repaired the machine immediately, and the doctor rode it home.
He found Morris a slim, wiry man, his hair brushed straight back from his forehead without any parting, his eyes light blue, with unusually dark and intense pupils. He had a wry, almost quizzical expression, and talked in staccato bursts, throwing the words out of the side of his mouth as though he were too intent on the job in hand to have time to spare for speech. Morris liked doing things; talking he could safely leave to others.
He entered one of his motorcycles, with chain drive and a three-speed gearbox, for the 1904 motorcycle show, which was being held in the Agricultural Hall at Islington. Something went wrong at the last moment, and it was thought that he would not be able to complete the machine in time for the show. He knew differently. For four days and nights he worked without any proper sleep, and when the show opened his motorcycle was there on the stand. Mr Morris very nearly was not there with it, however. He was so tired when he reached London that as soon as he sat down in the warmth of the Underground, he fell asleep, and went round and round the Inner Circle line until a friendly porter woke him up.
This year was also important for another reason. It was the year of his marriage to Miss Elizabeth Anstey, an Oxford girl and the daughter of a local businessman.
No one in public life and affairs has kept more in the background. His wife is rarely photographed, and only sometimes does she go out shopping in Oxford, or else slips into the local repertory theatre unrecognized and leaves before the lights go up. She has travelled widely with her husband, but they do little entertaining, and they have never lived on a high level in the past.