When British motor sport awoke from its long enforced slumber during World War 2, most parts of the UK were involved and the Wessex region was no exception, the Marwyn being one of the designs of the new 500 single-seater category. It was one of many attempts to bring professional-level single-seater car racing to impecunious young (and frequently not so young) drivers.

   '500' refers not to the purchase price (although the Marwyn was well within that bracket) but to the engine size - cars powered by unsupercharged engines up to 500cc.

   The Marwyn followed the pattern set by the Cooper, which remained the most successful marque throughout the life of the class: motor cycle engine behind the driver, powering the rear wheels via a motor cycle gearbox and with chain transmission to gearbox and back wheels. Very few 500s had any other layout.

           
            Marwyn 500cc racer (courtesy of Irene Pulliblank).

   The Marwyn was different from most (which used tubular chassis frames) in having a chassis of steel channelling. Lord Strathcarron, who became the best-known Marwyn driver, says this material was re-cycled from wartime Morrison shelters. For those too young to know, these were steel tables designed to replace the conventional dining room table within a house. The 'table top' was a massive steel plate about half-an-inch thick and it was almost certainly the table 'legs', of much thinner steel channelling, from which the Marwyn chassis was constructed.

   When the sirens sounded their warning of an impending air raid, people in houses with Morrison shelters could sleep at home beneath their 'table', rather than evacuating to a public air raid shelter (typically, the platforms of London Underground stations) or the other 'home' alternative - a corrugated steel Anderson shelter in the garden, which sat in a hole dug in the ground, using the excavated earth to cover the steel structure, giving extra protection. That the Morrison shelter was strong can be gauged from the fact that the author's aunt emerged relatively unscathed when, in 1944, a German bomb exploded nearby, causing her East London house to collapse over the 'dining room table', below which she had been trying to sleep.

   The Marwyn first saw action in 1947, too late for most of the small number of events for the class that year, when the British motor racing scene was still re-emerging shakily from six long years of war.

   It made its debut in September '47 at Brighton Speed Trials, which was destined to become one of Britain's most popular sprint events, held on a virtually straight kilometre-long course on the Madeira Drive seafront road. A single brake drum combined with a differential was used at the rear, so it seems to have had no way of equalising the braking effort to the rear wheels.

   Despite such a layout (in any case, braking performance was of little consequence at this Brighton event), Samuelson took the Triumph twin-cylinder 'Tiger 100' engined Marwyn to third place in its class. Soon after, a Marwyn in chassis form (the same car as at Brighton Speed Trials?) took part in the Shelsley Walsh hillclimb. It was powered by a Speedway-type JAP engine and was driven by B E Martin. He was the company's proprietor (the 'Mar' of 'Marwyn'? But who was the 'wyn'? - Gear Wheels has been unable to find out).

   By December '47, the Marwyn company, then based at 55, Old Christchurch Road, Bournemouth (now a Clinton Cards shop in a pedestrian precinct which is one of the town's main shopping areas) was offering cars at £445, including JAP engine and Burman motorcycle gearbox. By then, the front suspension was independent, with the upper mountings being a pair of transverse quarter-elliptic springs, while the lower mountings were tubular steel wishbones. Rear braking had been changed to separate drums at each wheel and the rear axle was 'solid' (i.e., no differential). Rear suspension retained the original longitudinal quarter-elliptic layout. However, the brakes were cable operated and shock absorbers were of the Hartford friction type whereas, by then, many other 500s had hydraulic brakes and telescopic hydraulic dampers.

   Customers didn't have to buy a complete car. Assembled (but without engine or gearbox), it was available for £245 or, in kit form, £200. Several owners took advantage of the 'kit' alternatives. Denis Flather fitted a Scott twin-cylinder water-cooled two-stroke engine in a car he called the Marott (it is still being used in competition, now called 'Blue Flash' and with a Vincent engine), another was raced in Scotland, powered by a Triumph twin engine and called an 'MHW', while J M Sparrowe's 'SMS' was a Marwyn with a Rudge engine, but more about that in the next edition.    To be concluded.

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