Since my short report from the mini-motor show at Saint Tropez inspired a wave of nostalgia, let a wider audience take a peek at the past as it has been described elsewhere.
Bill Taylor drew Salut! readers' attention to a piece of his about a car-owning history that began with jalopies including a 1957 Austin A30 and push-start-only Anglia van and was recently updated with the purchase, after a chance encounter in Argentina, of a 2008 Mercedes C300.
It is a characteristically entertaining read and, since it appeared in the Toronto Star, the bit about a wider audience was cheating.
I am surprised that two sub-editors who commented on the St Trop report did not spot, as I did when first reading Bill's account, that no one at the Star had bothered to act on his italics command, so that a reference to the man from whom Bill bought the Merc still appears as: "He (ITAL)knew(ENDITAL) it was a really good car and fairly priced
The first photo is of Bill with a 1974 Plymouth Duster, the first car he bought after crossing the Atlantic. And here is an extract that will probably send you to the Star website to enjoy his article in full:
A far cry from my salad days in England when I once bought a 1961 Ford Anglia van that needed a push to get it going. Or it would have done if the vendor hadn’t parked it on a slope so he could let it roll and then bump-start it.
That also lessened the chance that the teeth missing from the starter ring would jam the starter motor which, once the van was mine (and no returns), used to happen with horrible regularity.
To this day, I could probably remove an Anglia van starter motor, free it and put it back inside of half an hour. In the dark. In the rain. With a disgruntled girlfriend (note to my wife: I include this purely for demonstration purposes) whining at me from the shotgun seat and my chances of inveigling her onto the mattress in the back steadily being washed away.
But that was how it was for me and all my friends. We’d go from clunker to clunker, hoping to get six months out of them before unloading them onto someone even harder up and less-discriminating than we were.
And if it tempts you to explore Bill's adventures in Argentina, you can go all the way back to Toronto to read about them here. This is the Merc that he bought after seeing a similar model while waiting for a ferry in Buenos Aires (it made a far better tale when I thought he'd actually bought it there - see Comments - but sometimes you do have to let the facts get in the way of a good story) ...
All more than enough to send me back to where I, too, started my car-owning career, the North East of England.
Bill, I can confirm, was a bit of a motoring know-all even then, though it was usually enough in those days to possess a moderately reliable set of wheels to earn that reputation.
Whereas my bangers were invariably off the road, awaiting repairs pay day could not quite accommodate, Bill was always mobile. That was useful since there was Crook and Willington Urban District Council to cover for our respective local papers and he was an obliging colleague.
But these echoes of the past reminded me that I'd also written about that period, at poor old neglected Salut! North.
Re-reading that item now, I see that I had my ownership career in slightly wrong order yesterday, since the Thames van preceded the Beetle. And though I drive the Clio in France, I still have that old BMW back in Britain.
Forget the 180,000 miles on the clock, I wrote at Salut! North, it runs like a dream. And that, allowing for the absence of air conditioning (hardly necessary in the UK) remains the case.
It's an odd thing that while the car, now edging towards the 200,000-mile mark, still serves as a dependable workhorse, any serious repair job - rare, I am glad to say - now costs more than it would ever fetch on the open market.
* With due thanks to Bill for use of the photos.
Recent Comments