Cars part 1
The title refers to my major interests over the years. Rather than tell an absolutely chronological story, I thought to frame it around various strands which may intersect as they unfold, and enable me to add or clarify as I go.
I was born at 23 Maidstone Road, Rainham in 1951, when cars were not that common. However my mother always said that I stood up in my pram (one of those proper Silver Cross types) and pointing to one, said my first word “Car” - much to her annoyance, “Mum” being far and away the preferred utterance. The “Austin of England” badge on the side of an A70 Hereford usually parked in the then dead-end of Thames Avenue sticks in my memory as we played around it, me in my red pedal car.
My sister and I walked up the Maidstone Road to school at the top of Bettescombe Road in an old army camp of wooden huts that I now know had been an anti-aircraft battery. Me fascinated by any cars that we found on the way, a black Ford Mk1 Consul sticks in my mind as well as the Headmaster’s Jowett Javelin.
I started to acquire a modest collection of Dinky toys. An early memory is listening to “The Yellow Rose of Texas” on the radio and wondering where these rows of yellow taxis were. My Dinky taxi (Austin FX3?) was yellow, which attracted me to the song, as I only ever saw black ones. I was given this toy to play with when my Aunt visited with her own elderly Aunt in an Austin 10 all the way from Cornwall. The old lady was blind and did not spend any money on the car which was a dull matt green by now and the rear doors were tied together with rope. My 4foot 10.5 tall Aunt had blocks on the pedals.
We moved to Hartlip Hill, on the corner of Breach Lane and the A2, opposite The Tuck Inn transport cafe on April 1st 1958 it was total chaos as befits the date. Who these days would send their children to the new house by bus with the budgie in its cage covered in a cloth?
I now went to school in Sittingbourne. One term at Ufton Lane school, very frustrating because, as was the custom I was put into the middle ability class where I was so far ahead of the rest, never mind the previous basic surroundings, my old teachers had really done well. I quickly started making the 4 mile bus journey alone and noticed a strange car while waiting for the bus home. It was often there, I looked it up, a Facel-Vega, very rare, I was seriously hooked.
Barrow Grove school followed, the Headmistress at the time, Miss Findlay(?) drove a white Morris 1000. An American Nash station wagon driven by the parents of a girl younger than me (they were from Washington D.C.) certainly caught my attention, it had indicators, but white at the front and red at the rear not orange as ours. They did the school run, most unusual then, especially as she lived right next to Gore Court Cricket ground, where the road now runs, and the bus journey was simple.
My father was a lorry driver for NAAFI. His driving licence (the old red one) simply said “All Groups”. He never took a test, learning to drive my grandfather’s Bull Nose Morris Oxford in an orchard when 16 years old. Among other things, he had been a delivery driver pre-war (for International Stores), I still have the instruction book for the Model T van. Although 30years old when war broke out he was called up into the Royal Signals and spent time as a driver for a senior officer for part of the war and at some point had done a PSV course which included taking a double decker bus out onto a skid pan, to his great delight.
I often went with Dad on a Saturday, his half day, being picked up about 5am at the top of Berengrave Lane. If I was canny there would be samples of the cream cakes from the trays in the lorry from the nice ladies at our various stops. There were many, probably on different routes but I mostly remember the coast runs, Dunkirk’s aerials, Canterbury at sunrise, passing Manston watching for planes, Old Park and Connaught Barracks, Walmer and the toll bridge at Sandwich. I remember having to stay in the cab on many occasions, watching a pipe band rehearse somewhere, looking at rows of sand coloured vehicles (ready for Suez?) and most importantly, us driving into Dover Castle through the main gate.
We stopped early one morning and looked in the showroom in Canterbury displaying the latest MG record holder. The difference between petrol and diesel engines was explained to me, and demonstrated by driving through large puddles on the road above Dover cliffs while my father sang “Great Balls of Fire”. Highlight of the drive home would be a stop at the Welcome Cafe as we left Thanet, it even had a pinball machine.
Etched into my memory is coming down the hill from Judd’s Folly near Ospringe on the A2 on the way home, passing the Doddington turn, and Dad getting quite excited as a little red car came towards us. Our first encounter with a Mini.
However a lorry driver’s wage did not finance a car so he remained a motor bike rider, and when we moved had descended to a Norman Nippy as cheap transport to work. This Ashford built device was to counter the Honda 50s but failed. One of the sit-up-and-beg Fords would occasionally be hired from Greens Garage. They had two, both that washed-out green colour, and consecutive registration numbers. The fading memory is WKT 652 and WKT 653. My sister and I would try and guess which one we would get.
Luckily, my grandfather, with whom we lived, felt that he needed better regular transport than the number 26 bus could provide and bought a car, Dad to be the driver. This was a brand new 1959 Humber Hawk,617 FKP, and when first bought I was small enough that I could sit in the middle of the bench front seat with my feet on the transmission tunnel, a column change kept the gear lever out of my way. My mother called it “Harry” from the character in the song Widdecombe Fair.
Dad subscribed to “Practical Motorist” and did all his own servicing, with my help, of course. I still have, and use, his ramps and Wanner grease gun.
The car was never used to ferry children about unless part of a family group, going to church on Sunday or to the coast. I was in the church choir, but choir practice and Scouts were either by bus or bike, a mile on the A2, pre M2, in the dark in winter. Should have been scary, but I enjoyed it, practising car recognition by lamp configuration, both from oncoming and as they passed me.
Because my father became unwell, he could no longer manage either a Thames Trader lorry, or the Humber so Granddad bought a Hillman Imp in 1963. It was very much the untested mark one with a notoriously weak clutch, hydraulic throttle linkage that would often mean pumping the throttle pedal and an automatic choke that stuck. His did not suffer from the intermixing of oil and water that many did, thankfully. These early ones had a Knock-kneed appearance from the front, as the front wheels were wider apart at the top than the bottom – positive camber. Allegedly this was because the headlamps were too low (there is a legal minimum) and jacking up the suspension gave the small difference needed.
My elder sister had followed her maths degree with a career in early computing, then got married when I was nine. She had dabbled with a scooter but after marriage they bought an early 50’s Hillman Minx. Just to be different, it was left hand drive, reimported from Belgium. Her husband spent many hours under it, even fitting a heater!! I enjoyed this car, because I could sit in the right hand front seat, and wave at other motorists, who saw an 11 year old without his hands on a steering wheel – huge fun to watch their reactions.
The younger of my two sisters started work for the school meals service as a trainee cook when she was 16. When she was 18 or 19 she bought an Austin A40 Somerset. Being in pale blue, it was christened Bluebell. I was allowed to shunt the Somerset to and fro on the drive and generally help with its upkeep. Her then boy friend had a Mini, which she eventually bought from him, and the prospective purchasers of the Somerset turned up earlier than arranged. So I sold them the car, for £25, Di had thought to only get £15, she was so pleased that we split the extra £10.
I had finally got properly mobile a couple of months after my 16th birthday with the purchase of an Ariel Arrow SS 250cc motor bike. My mother was suitably horrified but my father just jumped on it and disappeared for half an hour. Unfortunately, in the middle of my O-Levels, I hit the rear of a Mini that pulled out of Church Lane in Newington right in front of me, and then stuttered almost to halt. I hit it square on and poked my helmeted head through the rear window, much to the surprise of the driver’s mother in law who was seated in the back. He got prosecuted for Due care and Attention, and I got a full pay out on the bike, and kept the wreck. An Ariel Leader was found in Upchurch with a duff engine, and the two became one over the summer, a very ugly, half painted, hybrid. I built it in the shed, but then needed two burly guys to help me get it out on its rear wheel, as it had gone in in bits and the trellis stopped it being wheeled out.
During that summer I worked on the pumps at Farthing Corner services. This was attendant service, so Sunday evening shift London bound there would be a dozen people serving and two supervisors taking turns on the till. Needing a light job Dad was working as a supervisor, and we occasionally worked together. What was most fun were the variety of cars and drivers. A quiet Sunday morning might bring the usual pre-war Bentley, whose driver dipped the tank with a carefully calibrated broom handle, then it would get busy with day trippers. You got very canny about Jaguars, those engines got seriously hot, and having “check oil daily” burned into your hand from the dipstick was not a good look, besides being painful. A Morris Isis stands out, a 6cylinder engine stuffed into a 1950’s Oxford, rare then, probably for the best,if the weight of that engine had the expected effect on the already soggy handling.
Hidden petrol fillers were popular, the spring loaded numberplate on a Mark2 Ford Consul being surely designed to remove fingers...
One quiet sunny midweek day, a little white convertible car pulled up, I went to serve it and saw large “NSU” labels on the doors. While I was filling the tank the driver popped the front bonnet to retrieve his coat and wallet, then opened the rear “engine cover” only for it to also be a boot. Hang on, I thought, where is the engine? So I asked, and it was under the rear luggage area, it was an experimental twin rotor Wankel engine, dwarfed by the usual ancillaries of dynamo, starter, carburettor etc. It was installed into the NSU Prinz Spider as a real life test bed for the larger engine to be used in the Ro80 Saloon. He gave me a load of literature about the single rotor usually used in the car, I was fascinated.
At Christmas Dad died. Within a couple of weeks Granddad had sold the Imp, to Green’s Garage along the road. I had to fiddle the automatic choke to get it to go before they came, and we all thought that was the last we would see of 3146 KP. Not so, a few weeks later and it was parked outside my school, one of my teachers had bought it. That was bit painful at the time.
However shortly after this I passed my bike test in Maidstone, and only a week or so later was 17. I had my first driving lesson in the dark that early February evening, in a brand new Ford Escort, the first I had even seen, and five weeks and twelve lessons later, passed my test in Gillingham. The only traffic lights that I found in Gillingham at that time were at the junction outside the bus station, but they were still covered in sacking, and not yet working. The Canterbury Street/Watling Street junction was interesting, gave a whole new meaning to “the quick and the dead”!
Idly talking about it at school, I was offered an Austin Seven that the older brother of one of our class wanted to sell. £10 – how could I refuse? It was an open 2 seater “Special” looking a bit MGish, but it was a car – my car!