Vintage MG SA bought for £30 fetches £60,000 at auction

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Vintage MG SA bought for £30 fetches £60,000 at auction

Easing me back in to the Eclectic Ephemera routine comes this story, of a type that is the welcome bread-and-butter of this blog but none the worse for that.  In fact this will be my third post to feature a restored MG sports car, following on from a jungle discovery two years ago and an under-shed restoration job back in May of 2012.  Now this latest classic MG to make the news features both echoes of the previous two stories as well as some unique coincidences of its own.

Beginning as a seemingly run-of-the-mill tale of vintage car rediscovery and renovation, the story of this particular MG took an interesting turn when it emerged that a remarkable series of circumstances had led to it returning to the same garage from which it had been bought as a second-hand runabout back in 1966.  It's often not unusual for a classic car to be returned to and resold by the same dealer, even over the course of several decades, but this is a rarer occurrence where the car has been sold on privately and made its way through different owners around the country before finding its way back to the 1960s dealer more by sheer happenstance.  That its return should have been noticed by the brother of the man who bought it in '66, and that that man has been reunited with - albeit briefly before it heads off to its new owner at Silverstone - is simply a splendid example of serendipity.

The car is now thought to be the only one of its type to be recently sold in the UK and one of only 90-odd known to still exist.  It is more this fact plus the excellent restoration that one of its later owners undertook on it that has caused it to sell for £60,000 (and I bet that the old owner is kicking himself for letting it go at £70 in 1970!) but this particular twist of fate certainly adds a noteworthy chapter to this car's history.  As mentioned at the beginning of this post it can sit comfortably with the similar MG discoveries featured on this blog, of which I am sure it will not be the last.