I happened to see a desiled amby which had foundry marks of MOWOG
Did a little study and thought of starting a new thread. Mods i did a search for existing thread for Mowog info , if one exists please do merge.
'MOWOG' was molded into many castings used in MG, Austin and Morris engines over many years.
Some say 'MOWOG' is the name of a god that has to be appeased with many offerings of fluids and expensive new parts, otherwise 'he' or 'she' will cause breakdowns at most inopportune moments.
Others say it was a joke by a foreman in the casting shop many years ago, knowing that it would plague owners’ minds for years to come.
The truth is a little more prosaic - it probably represents the merger of MG and Wolseley into Morris Motors and the use of common parts from that point on. Most agree that the 'Mo' stands for 'Morris' and the 'Wo' for 'Wolseley'. But that still leaves plenty of room for argument as to what the 'G' stands for.
The source of the greater part of this evidence is in David Knowles incredibly detailed book – “MG The Untold Story”. David relates how Wolseley and MG were owned personally by Lord Nuffield until he was convinced to merge it with Morris Motors in 1935. He also states that, once part of Morris Motors and all design was being carried out at Cowley, the chassis and engine number prefixes and suffixes for Wolseley variants were 'W' and for MG were 'G'. It doesn't take much of a leap of faith to assume that 'M' was already being used by Morris (hence the 'G' for MG since there wasn't much choice for anything else). It would have been extremely unlikely for someone to go to the bother of devising a 'logo' to mark the merger of Wolseley and Morris but to ignore MG which was merged at the same time. Finally, there never was a 'Morris Wolseley Group' as an organisation, just 'Morris Motors Ltd'.
The best educated guess is most likely to be – MOrris WOlseley Garages.
MOWOG pre-dates the BMC merger. The Morris Garages in Oxford was the birthplace of the "Morris Garages Special"
MOWOG :- The name of the shop later became Morris-Wolseley Garages. The name"Morris-Wolseley Garages Special" was too awkward of a handle, so was the version "MOWOG Special", so just the initials MG were kept and the word "Special" was dropped.
The foundry mark for Austins was the "flying A".
When the BMC merger took place, there was an effort to use the BMC rosette as the new "marque". It successfully replaced MOWOG on printed materials such as parts boxes, but it never really took hold as a foundry mark, and MOWOG remained the most common foundry mark on parts used for the Sprite series."
Info shared by David Doiron...ex BMC mechanic in the link
http://www.gerardsgarage.com/Garage/Tech/MOWOG.htm
4th September 2013, 15:48
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Thanks
