Hugh Marriage completed the Cape to Cape Rally with his brother Miachael (a Leighton Park Scholar) and fellow Sidcotians Richard and David Gibbs to raise money for an Old Sidcotians Charity, Macmillan Cancer Support. Read on for a full account of their Morris Minor based adventures, written for us by Hugh's son Oliver. 

The 14th – and possibly final – running of the Cape to Cape rally set off from Cape Cornwall early one April morning. It would end up back in the same spot 15 days and over 3000 competitive miles later having toured the most distant spots of the British Isles and Ireland.

The event, which has been running in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support since 2003, featured 34 cars. The regulations are lenient: entries must be pre-1986, and ‘interesting’. This year’s line up – the first since 2019 due to the Covid pandemic – featured two Minors amongst a wide array of sportier metal, with Jaguars and MGs well represented.

With organiser extraordinaire Dennis Greenslade hanging up his route book, 2022s running may well be the last, but it had a bold target in mind. Having raised over £900,000 for Macmillan, the aim was to tip the needle beyond the magic £1 million mark. The winner of the event therefore, is not crowned for their timekeeping or navigation, but for their fund-raising ability.

All entries pay their own way and attempt to attract sponsorship in advance. However that’s not the sum total of the donations: penalties accrued are converted into fines owed, which accumulated over the two weeks. Bear that in mind for later…

I’ve owned my Morris Minor since 1998. It was originally modified for the 2000 London-Beijing rally, with most of the work carried out by Charles Ware in Bath. That included a 1275 engine upgrade, twin fuel tanks, big capacity radiator, a roll cage and rally seats. It was built strong. The only major mod since then was the addition of a 5-speed Sierra gearbox.

The Morrie may not have been the fastest car on the Cape-to-Cape (60-65mph on one of the infrequent motorway sections just got us past lorries), but was one of the most robust. Just as well since this was the longest rally it had tackled since Beijing. Strangely the only issue we had occurred early on: The front wheels got hot because the grease was old. Luckily we had some grease with us so it was just a matter of taking the hub off and replacing new with old. A tap with a hammer woke the starter motor on the single occasion that failed to rouse the engine.

Past rallies have visited far flung corners of Europe – the link is always that they begin and end at a cape - but this year Dennis and his team of route planners and organisers completely excelled themselves. Not only did we visit the furthest flung corners, but the roads that got us there were alternately varied, remote, narrow, winding and almost always absolutely spectacular. Most of the time we were able to pace ourselves and enjoy the experience, but there was the small matter of 62 check controls, 19 secret checks and assorted regularities, tests and navigation challenges along the way.

And what a way we went. All the way from Cape Cornwall next to Lands End, wending our way up through the Lakes, past Loch Lomond to Cape Wrath at the far north west tip of Scotland. From there it was back down through Scotland, across to Northern Ireland, heading west then south to Cape Clear via the dazzling Healy Pass, completing our anti-clockwise lap of Ireland in Dublin, then back down through Wales and England to once again come to rest at Cape Cornwall.

This year my younger brother, Michael, joined me, and he proved an accomplished navigator. We’d checked the trip meter accuracy with GPS before we set off and reckoned it was about bang-on, but there was a section in Ireland where the route book said ‘turn left in 42 miles’ and we undershot by about a mile and a half and missed a time control. From that point on we added about four per cent.

We did gather other penalties. On the way back through Cornwall we visited a hillclimb, and the start was on a steep hairpin. The Minor doesn’t have a great handbrake and rolling back was a 10-point penalty (the exchange rate is £1 per point). In fact on the first day of the rally we’d been at the Cornish showground and raced around a marked course. We knew the Morrie wasn’t going to be a match for the E-types and MGBs so I cut the corners. But we hadn’t read the rules about penalty points for going on the grass, so it cost us £40. But we were one of the fastest cars!

By the end of the rally we’d attracted £250 in excess fines to go to Macmillan, on top of the £12,845 we’d managed to raise in sponsorship. An amount that made the Morris Minor the overall winner of this year’s rally and contributed to the £148,222 raised this year for Macmillan, taking the final tally raised by the 14 editions of the Cape-to-Cape well past the £1 million mark. Thanks to everyone who supported Hugh's adventure.