Background
The Morris Minor is the quintessential British car, and the Traveller, or ‘Woodie’ as it is fondly known, is the quintessential British estate. These are cars forever gently evocative of church fetes, country lanes with high hedgerows, village cricket, buck-toothed vicars, cucumber sandwiches and pubs where the locals just stare at you until you leave. It’s a uniquely British thing.
Designed, like the original 1948 Minor saloon, by Alec Issigonis, the highly practical Traveller, with its folding back seat and rear doors that could be left open for carrying long loads, was one of the last cars to use a structural wood frame. Launched in 1953, it was deliberately distinguished from the Minor van by being given quality features such as stainless steel door window frames on the longer doors of the two-door saloon – the van using short doors shared with the four-door. It also used the two-door saloon platform rather than the chassis-cab layout of the pick-up and van. The steel roof stopped at the back of the doors, where it was joined to an aluminium rear roof mounted on the structural wood frame, which was bolted to the floorplan and B-posts – inset panels were aluminium too, though the rear wings were still steel.
A particularly clever feature – typical of Issigonis – was that the spare wheel and tools were stored in a separate compartment under the boot floor, revealed on opening the rear doors – so there was no need to disturb luggage in order to change a wheel.
Progressive development saw the Minor engine grow to 1098cc in 1963, with higher gearing that made the car much more capable on the faster roads of today than earlier models. When The Motor tested a 1098cc Traveller just like this in 1965, it concluded it was an ideal vehicle “for the family man with a small business or the businessman with a small family”. The Traveller proved the most enduring version of the Minor, continuing in production for six months after the last saloon was made – the final Traveller being completed in April 1971.
