30 cars - 50 years

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I sold it two years later for £10, the rebuild having cost £25. My only memory of the registration was the letters VNW, which today, would have been an ideal initialised plate for myself and wife. C'est la vie.

‘Whoopee‘ was bought subsequent to my disastrous failure at my first driving test, so that I could get in much more sorely needed practice before the re-take.

Six point turn
The first test had followed a fivers-worth of six, 30 minute driving lessons, and comprised a 15 minute tootle along the back streets around Headingley Cricket Ground before ending rather prematurely and ignominiously halfway through what was shaping up to be a six point turn. It seemed that an elderly, bulbous, sluggish, dual-controlled Morris Oxford fuelled on kangaroo juice was not a suitable car in which to learn to drive, or indeed, hope to pass a driving test.

The qualified driver who later accompanied me on my practice runs in ‘Whoopee‘ was a neighbourly bus driver, a jovial chap whose 6' 3", 18 stone body made a dramatic contrast to that of myself as a 5' 6" stripling of 10 stone, as we sat side by side in a rakishly lopsided 2 seat Minor, evoking memories of Laurel and Hardy motoring classics.

Incongruous it may have been, but it gave me the road sense and practice I needed as we chugged around the pre-motorway roads of West Yorkshire, hood down, myself frantically hand-signalling at every junction, and rarely putting in a burst of speed up to 45 mph…only providing it was downhill with a following wind.
Other fond memories of 'Whoopee' include the over-ambitious drive from Leeds to Edinburgh for my annual RAF Reserve training course, undertaken the day after I had (only just) passed my driving test in Huddersfield.

The adventure ended a few days later when I had to abandon the car on a weekend run to Loch Lomond, by whose bonnie bonnie banks ‘Whoopee‘ just whimpered and gave up the ghost with a smoking, red-hot differential casing. How was I to know that I should pump grease into the back axle every 1000 miles? She was towed into Helensburgh on the Clyde, repaired and collected by myself two weeks later for £27.00…plus bus fare from Leeds of 30 shillings.

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