30 cars - 50 years

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About three weeks later Frank called me to say he had located a suitable Morris engine twenty miles away, and that he'd already tested, removed, and transported it to his workshop, and given Granfer a lifesaving heart transplant. His bill for the entire operation was an unbelievable £10, so I shall never forget Frank as the disarmingly odd philanthropic Gentleman Engineer - and you don't find many of those in today's car care establishments.

This incident reminds me of a similar experience with the Hillman some years earlier when, following a severe blizzard at Christmas 1954 at Buckden in Wharfedale, I had been unable to start the car. I phoned a motor engineer at Kettlewell, some seven miles down the dale, who drove up to check over the car, returned to his garage to pick up a replacement top water hose, came back to Buckden and fitted it, cajoled the engine back into life and then asked only ten shillings (50p) for his time, expenses, parts and skill….and this was on Boxing Day. They don't make them like Frank of Morley and Walter of Kettlewell any more.

Eventually, Granfer was sold to a colleague for £10 (he was even more impecunious than myself), who managed to squeeze a few more miles and months out of Granfer before 'old faithful' was finally laid to rest in what I like to think of as a Motor Organ Exchange Facility, in effect, a scrapyard at Hebburn on Tyne. His aluminium body may well now be reconstituted as a Transatlantic superjet, or more likely as a set of pans. R.I.P.

Posh Pitheap
We celebrated the start of the Sixties with an Austin A35 van which was 6 months old, had 6k on the clock and at £365 cost £60 less than its brand new OTR price - a posh purchase by the standards of our previous vehicles. Locally registered as PTY 750 and bought from a miner in Pity Me, Co Durham she was christened ‘Pitheap‘, for obvious reasons, but also because we could never totally eliminate the tiny fragments of coal which had collected in every nook and cranny of the interior. I added a home made, folding bench seat in the back, so, like many A35 vans of that era it became a windowless Austin 'Countryman' estate car, thereby saving the 25% Purchase Tax which applied to passenger cars.

Tax Penalty
As a penalty for this tax concession, officialdom had imposed a speed limit on vans of 40 mph, so in effect we were banned by law from driving in top gear on any road, including the fast new dual carriageway trunk roads being introduced. This diktat was perhaps a forerunner of today's highway situation, where unrealistic speed restrictions are indiscriminately imposed on many major routes, enforced by photo-technology reminiscent of George Orwell's Big Brother in ‘1984‘.

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