Family Transport 4 - Mostly Cortinas

The fourth entry in this series of car memories and first we'll deal with the only one in this entry that not only isn't a Ford, but isn't a Ford Cortina!

This is a Triumph 1300 and was bought in 1979. It was old (1968) and extremely battered. There was a dent in the roof as though it had been rolled at some time and the paintwork was marked and impossible to wash clean.

It was something of a gentleman's car though, with a walnut wooden dashboard and a refusal to change gear in a hurry. When it was giving signs of imminant death I sold it on through the local car auctions only for the police to come round a couple of weeks later... During the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool, the new owner had abandoned it in the entrance of the Imperial Hotel - which was where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet Ministers were staying...

The new owner hadn't registered it and the police were playing catch-up from the last known owner which was me. At the time of IRA activity, the car was in considerable danger of being blown up by the army! The police officers did grin, but refused to give me a lift to the hotel so I could watch... In the end it wasn't blown up anyway

I had since bought this - a Ford Cortina Mk IV which was only 3 years old and the newest car I'd bought wholly with my own money. The Mark 4 was a relatively rare beast after a very short time. Distinguishable from the Mark 5 mainly because of the front and rear light clusters, they all seemed to disappear off the roads not long after the Mark 5 came out.

It was a bit of a disaster, this car. It had been used as a taxi and although it looked wonderful, we suspected it had gone "round the clock". Odometers at the time only had 5 digits and thus once they reached 100,000 miles they showed zero and started again. It was only recently that cars had been capable of travelling far enough to turn the clock over as the apparent resetting to zero was known. The engine started to smoke quite heavily, with no regard for it's own or any occupants' health! At the same time I was made redundant from work at a time when unemployment was a national issue (when is it not, I know...)

I remained without a car and a job for months that stretched into years. Although it didn't seem so at the time, this was the best thing that could have happened, as I used the time to learn computer programming on a Commodore64 home computer. I used that knowledge to write business software for the first college I worked for in 1985 and that shaped my career since that time and ongoing.

Whilst at that college, the Nautical College in Fleetwood, I bought this - an old Cortina Mark III which was absolutely wonderful. It had been tarted up with a two-tone respray using new Ford colours and was totally unique. It was 13 years old when I bought it and I had it for almost 4 years, being quite upset to lose it when it had an argument with the rear end of a lorry who slammed his anchors on hard for no reason other than to read a map, as I was overtaking the van behind him. Oncoming traffic meant I had to get in front of the van and I hadn't time to stop. The wings of the car were crumpled back over the wheels and I was lucky to walk away unscratched.

The car was a write-off. My friends, who had been in the habit of leaving notes under the windscreen wiper when they saw it parked anywhere, were as devastated as I was. It had been in immaculate condition. Even MOT testers drooled over it each year when I took it in. Whilst new parts were sometimes hard to come by due to its age, they were relatively easy (and cheap) to get from scrap yards! And it was fun doing that. I even bought an indicator stalk from a scrap yard in Norfolk after the steering column set on fire one day whilst on holiday in Great Yarmouth. Now why would that not be fun?!?

It follows that the next purchase was rather urgent and it was this: a Mark V Cortina, bought from a car dealer who turned out to be the father of a colleague. She was really worried we'd be disappointed but, given that I'd opened the boot on the test drive and found an empty can of paint thinners, I knew it had been tarted up and resprayed and in all fairness although it wasn't as exciting as the Mark III, it served us a couple of years which was as much as we could have expected.

In 1990 I had started a collection of pinball machines - as you do... The Ford Sierra Estate joined us, being 3 years old and again, strangely perhaps, this was a brilliant car to drive and own. We trundled pinball machines and jukeboxes about in it and it was our first car with the modern style of hubcap that hid all view of the wheel itself. Up until this time hubcaps just covered the central part of the wheel and the wheel nuts. So you see - there were two cars that weren't Cortinas...

Part 5 of this series will bring us up-to-date.

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