Marcus Chambers died in early August, shortly before his 99th birthday. He will perhaps be remembered mostly for his seven year stint as Competitions Manager and founder of the BMC team at Abingdon’s MG Car Company, but really there was so very much more behind this very talented gentleman. Born in 1910 from a very distinguished family – his father was an Admiral in the Royal Navy – he grew up in England, Australia, Canada and France where he learned to be fluent in French and also found his wide ranging interest in architecture, painting, photography and, of course, motor cars. He was a skilled mechanic and his stories of the twenties and thirties are full of the famous names of motoring history including Rolls Royce, Bentley, HRG, AC, Norton, AJS, Alfa Romeo and Maserati.



At the 1938 Le Mans 24 hour race, he showed he was also an accomplished driver by finishing tenth overall in an HRG, a team he later managed. Throughout his worldwide travels he kept notes of anything that interested him, as well as photographs and sketches, so that his books – “Seven Year Itch “and “Works Wonders” and give a wonderful and detailed account of motor sporting history, places visited and people he met. From an early age he processed all his own film and his vast portfolio of photographs was recently acquired by one of Motoring’s largest libraries and pictures are seen regularly in magazines giving a super view of the golden age of Motor Sport.

During World War Two he joined the Royal Navy and became skipper of one of the Coastal Defense Motor Launches before joining the post war Overseas Food Corporation in East Africa where he met his wife Pat. On returning to the UK, John Thornley – boss of the MG Car Company, asked him to start the Competitions Department using a wide range of the Austin and Morris products. While these were mostly pretty average motor cars, and his team of drivers was almost all gifted amateurs who could afford to race and rally, he turned the Abingdon team into one of the most talented and determined in the Industry. MG, Riley, Wolseley, Austin, Morris, and Austin Healeys were rallied as the various divisional directors forced their cars onto the program. Class wins were the main target and Team prizes and Ladies awards also featured in the results but it was finally the department’s development of the Austin Healey 3000 which provided Marcus with the first outright wins in International events, Pat Moss and Anne Wisdom's terrific victory on the tough and rough Liege-Rome-Liege and Donald and Erle's perfect performances on the Alpine Rally. In 1959 Marcus drove the first Mini himself on the Norwegian Viking Rally and finished to show that he had lost none of his driving skills. When he decided to leave and join his friend ex-rally driver Ian Appleyard’s Jaguar business, he recommended Stuart Turner as his replacement, a brilliant decision for Stuart brought the Healey and the Mini Cooper S to further fame and glory.

Soon becoming bored with the humdrum life of the motor trade, Marcus took the job of competitions manager at Rootes (later to become Chrysler) and in spite of a management with little money and an indifferent attitude to motor sport, Marcus achieved some surprising successes including victory in the first post war marathon event from London to Sydney with a Hillman Hunter. Disillusioned with his bosses’ attitude, he resigned at the age of sixty and came to work with me, setting up and running the new car storage and preparation facility in Brackley Town’s old railway station near the famous Silverstone race track until his retirement in nineteen seventy six. He continued restoring classic cars for many years and also enjoyed painting watercolors, photography and the restoration of two lovely old houses in Northamptonshire.

I first got to know Marcus in 1957 when he invited me to join the team with my own Austin A 35 on the trip to the Sestriere Rally. The Suez crises had left much of Europe devoid of petrol, so we had to pick a rather odd route through the French and German border region in order to find fuel. This included much of the area I knew as a rep for a decal printing business, supplying many of the small breweries with ceramics for their publicity beer glasses so my choice of restaurants and hotels luckily agreed with his gourmet food tastes and also with those of his mostly wealthy drivers, which certainly got me into his good books. A subsequent visit to Abingdon for lunch with George Hulbert, Speedwell’s engineering genius showed another side of Marcus, as he and George spent most of the time talking guns, ammunition and bullet weights rather than the modified A35’s we were there to discuss!

Marcus had become one of my very best friends over the past half century and I spent many weekends at his home. He also found my first cottage close by, and later discovered a six hundred year old Priory farmhouse which became my permanent home. It became a regular date to spend Christmas Dinners with Marcus, Pat and their children – Nicholas: now a respected barrister, Sarah: a talented educator, Hugh: formerly a director of the ProDrive Subaru Rally team company, BAR Formula One team, and now of the British London Olympic organization, and Erika who later lived in the shadowy world of International Intelligence.

Although we have lost a very special character, he has left us his autobiography “With a little bit of Luck” published by Mercian Manuals which gives us a detailed account of an amazing life lived to the full.