The circumstances that precipitated the sale of the A30 and the acquisition of the mighty Morris Isis had been in the making for some time. My maternal grandfather owned a 1959 Austin A95, bought at the behest of my father as we were in the BMC business at the time. When the grandfather passed away in 1968, my father's ride was a 1958 Morris Isis, bought from some bloke in Lithgow to whom he had sold it new all those years before. He'd had his eye on it for some time and when he finally sold out of the business in 1966 and no longer had access to a car off the used car lot, he bought the Isis. And now he'd bought the A95 out of grandfather's estate. So I sold the A30 and bought the Isis from him for only a little less than he'd paid for it. Tight old bastard.
The Isis soon became a cult car at school. The ignition switch was so worn that virtually any key - even off a Suzuki 90cc - would fit and I often came out at recess and the car would have been 'borrowed' to go to the shops. The Isis's main attributes were its immense size inside - many people would have memories of having been one of 7 or 8 to have been carried somewhere - and its torsion bar front suspension, which resulted in a soft ride but truly alarming amounts of lean during cornering.
This being back during the days of very detailed annual vehicle testing by the ACT government's own staff, the annual trip over the pits was dreaded by those owning older cars. One year I was sitting in the car while the tester poked and prodded at it from in the pit, testing for rust. All of a sudden this bloody great screwdriver came straight through the floor and appeared between my feet. This was fixed by the old man going to the dump and retrieving a refrigerator door, cutting out a piece the right size and welding it in.
Being a young bloke, inevitably I had to test how fast it would go so one day a good mate and I took it out on to the Federal Highway. We got an indicated 90 mph, shortly afterwards followed by a distinct unwillingness to go. At all. And a very hot smell from under the bonnet. We eventually got it home by driving very short distances until it stopped, waiting for it to cool and then doing it all again.
And that's how we learnt about Welsh plugs. After that it always had a knock as a result of a damaged ring land.
Eventually I decided I wanted something a bit more modern and traded the Isis on a 1964 Mini Cooper. The Isis was sold quite quickly to a young bloke who soon afterwards killed himself in it by running into a tree. My father had put seat belts in it but the steering column was rigid and extended way into the cabin - he had no chance. However the circumstances were quite odd, as it seemed his girlfriend was watching from the kerb at the time and the accident was reported on the front page of the Canberra Times.
The model is of a series 2 Isis rather than the series 1 that I owned. It's a handmade white metal model from Spa Croft in the UK as there aren't any made in the more usual (and cheaper) die cast style. Note the Morris Oxford on the Spa Croft page - essentially the same car but with a shorter wheelbase and bonnet to the Isis, and a 4 cylinder motor rather than the Isis's 6 cylinder C series that it shared with the Austin A90 and A95 and the Morris Marshall. In fact only 12,000 Ises were ever made.
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