The early motoring world was one of characters and scoundrels. Harry J Lawson was both; he sought to monopolise motorcar manufacturing in Britain by buying up the patents to essentially all necessary components and designs. He would be stymied by the courts, but his year-old Great Horseless Carriage Company survived by reorganising in 1898 as the Motor Manufacturing Company. MMC, as it became more widely known, initially built automobiles of Daimler design—appropriate, as they shared Coventry’s famed Motor Mills with Daimler’s British arm.

MMC eventually evolved its models, relocated to another Coventry location, and continued in fits and starts until 1908, when a final move to London proved the company’s killing blow. MMC left behind a handful of well-built automobiles, solidly engineered in the tradition of its Daimler origins, and much-enjoyed by those fortunate enough to own them today.

The 8 HP MMC offered here has had its ownership history traced back to a W F Parr of The Broadway Garage in Harrow Weald, Middlesex, with whom it had apparently been stored since 1909, fitted with unusual later coachwork. It was subsequently sold to a Mr Broard, then by him in 1955 to Stanley Gilks, a motorcycle dealer in Ickenham, Middlesex, by which time it had been disassembled for restoration. Mr Gilks’s son, Geoffrey, undertook a restoration completed around 1960, after which the car was used in several events and supplied for the production of two films, the 1965 classic Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and 1967’s Half a Sixpence. While later restoration work was undertaken in the 1980s, the car was not widely used after its movies appearances, while remaining in the care of the Gilks family until its acquisition by the present owner in 2015. Long represented as a 1904, it is noted in the 2002 Veteran Car Club Members Handbook, in the Gilks’s ownership, as being a 1902.

A most charming Veteran motorcar of interesting, well-known history and solid, practical design, this MMC has much to recommend it to the connoisseur of the earliest era of motoring.