30 cars - 50 years

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Granfer
Licking our wounds we next fell for an even older 1934 Morris 10/4 in a fetching green/black duotone for £45. It was a special bodied 4 door saloon with custom built aluminium coachwork, leather seats and a horizontally split, opening windscreen - a very distinguished looking elderly gentleman of a car whom we promptly named ‘GRANFER‘, not least because of the unique registration GR 4. 'Granfer' served us very well for almost two years, transporting us up and down the A1 between our new home in Newcastle and our friends and family in West Yorkshire.

This was shortly after the Suez crisis when petrol rationing was re-introduced, so we had to conserve our petrol coupons (supplemented by a couple of black market tanks full) for the bi-monthly visits.

It was during the winter of 1958 that we discovered Granfer's eyesight was failing, so I replaced the individual headlights with a pair of Lucas P100 units of 12" diameter - huge searchlights cannibalised from a wrecked 1938 Jaguar SS100. Regretfully, the car's dynamo was not up to the job, providing a mere glow-worm of light for those after dark A1 trips, made all the more hazardous in wet, wintry conditions by a single, 6" windscreen wiper that swept spasmodically.

It had to be assisted by hand operation in hard-driving rain, so I suppose we were something of an accident waiting to happen, but happily we survived.
However, Granfer regretfully underwent a major mechanical catastrophe on one of our visits to Yorkshire. Driving uphill at near maximum revs (probably around 2000 rpm in this venerable side valve engine) a cacophonous metal-to-metal clatter announced the appearance of a piston rod as it punched its way out of the side of the engine. A write-off, no less.

Mad Medley of Morley
I placed the car into the care of a Mr Frank Medley, a self employed car service engineer and a man whose eccentricity had led to his featuring in the national newspapers some years earlier. (It seems that following Frank's major overhaul of a Rolls Royce, the local customer - now fallen into dire financial straits - had been unable to pay in cash and had settled his bill in kind by passing on his top hat and tails, once worn at Ascot).

For years afterwards, Frank wore the toff's togs in lieu of overalls, winning a name for excellent work, if oddball appearance. So Frank took control of our crisis, towing Granfer into his lock-up workshop, and started to scour Yorkshire scrapyards for a 25 year old 10/4 engine, whilst we returned to Newcastle by bus.

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