Family Transport 2 - My Cars

In the first part of this look at family cars we saw a tiny part of Dad's Ford Popular...because no photos exist of all of it! That started a trend...

This is the only photo I can find showing his second Cortina... As a bonus it does show me, Mum and Dad, so my brother Frank obviously took it. Not a single photo could I find of the blue and white Cortina he had before this all-white one.

His next car was a Ford Zephyr 6 Mk IV. I apologise wholeheartedly for the twerp standing on top of it... I wonder who it is... A least that photograph shows all of the car... After a few breakdowns during the four years he had this car (average life of a car in the sixties was 80,000 miles and Dad did over 20,000 a year) he traded it in for the brand new Ford Escort Mk I. In Great Yarmouth... 220 miles from home... Because it broke down again on the way there. Unfortunately there are no photos at all of the Escort. Dad hated it anyway. After the Zephyr it was just too small.

He bought another Zephyr 6. And with this we are back to photos showing just a tiny bit of the car! So away from this sad trend and Dad's cars! Let's have a look at mine

I was 16. You could drive 3-wheelers at 16. That's the only reason... ok? This was NJA 619, a 1959 Reliant Regal Mk IV van with lights of many colours as can be seen here! The seats were like deck chairs and the engine, set far back because of the central front wheel, jutted out into the cockpit of the car. This was good for two reasons. One: there was no heater but the engine got hot! Two: 11 years old was very old for a car in 1970 and the bloody thing used to break down every 15 miles or so because oil leaked into the pistons and fouled the spark plugs up... With the engine between me and the passenger, I could change the spark plugs without leaving the car in the rain!

This could have got extremely expensive but I had two sets of plugs, a rag, a file and a set of feeler gauges in the car. Whoever was in the passenger seat would clean one set of plugs and when the car conked out the new set could be installed in around 5 minutes flat, whereupon we set off again and the passenger set to work on the recently removed set of plugs!

To qualify for a 16 year old to drive it a 3-wheel car had to be under a certain weight. Unfortunately someone had put a metal sheet over a hole in the floor in the back of the van and when we had to have it weighed it was overweight. It was illegal for me to drive it, so a replacement was sought.

I bought a 1962 Reliant Regal Mk VI saloon next which I drove until I was old enough for a 4-wheeled car. Alex Dyson remembered this car mainly for the fact that it once did a magnificent seven miles before he had to clean up the spark plugs...

Actually I drove it until the engine bearings went and the engine crunched into the radiator, fan first with a huge cloud of steam and a wave of heat into the car. I reached for the gear lever but it wasn't there - it had disappeared - dropped through the floor... I've never seen Mum get out of a car so quick in all my life! To make matters worse a long queue of laughing people was at the bus stop just next to us...

Coming up... the 4-wheeled cars! (But the entry after that one will not feature 5-wheeled cars...)

Return to Family Memories Index

Dissention in the Ranks

In the entry Stow-on-the-Wold I described how my first car, a Reliant Regal MkIV, needed to have the spark plugs cleaned every 20 miles.

This "sparked" (sorry!) an email from mate Alex:

"20 miles my arse - I remember going to the Regal (cinema not the Reliant) one time after you had spent half of Saturday afternoon cleaning your spark plugs, then you had to change the buggers again before we set off home!"

It's so sad when old friends lose their memories and succumb to old age, but the journey Alex is remembering was in my second car - a Reliant Regal MkV or MkVI which was a saloon car not a van and indeed messed up its spark plugs in a mere 7-10 miles. I had to ditch the van after the Department of Transport decided to ask me to have it weighed and it turned out to weigh more than the maximum allowed for a 16-year-old to drive.

This was due to a metal sheet that had been placed in the back of the van to cover holes in the wooden flooring! The blue Ford Anglia seat that had replaced Reliant's original deckchair style passenger seat couldn't have helped either...

I was lucky with cars - the saloon car gave up the ghost spectacularly when the engine mountings snapped one day, plunging the engine down and forward into the radiator, causing clouds of steam from the front of the car and great hilarity from the small crowd waiting at a bus stop just opposite...

Stow-on-the-Wold

Don't you just love those Cotswolds place-names! Stow-on-the-Wold, Moreton-in-the-Marsh, and of course, Bourton-on-the-Water. All aligned in a straight line along the A429 or, as the Romans knew it, the Fosse Way.

Any of these three villages is well worth a visit. We have been on numerous occasions, sometimes making a very slight detour to Upper and Lower Slaughter - a name so evocative of evil doings, but such a delightful place to visit.

This is the second of my postcard views tonight and this one from the late 1950s or early 1960s is one of my favourites as it shows a model of the very first car I owned and drove - a MkIV Reliant Regal.

Unfortunately half hidden in shadow, photographs of these 3-wheeled cars are hard to come across. The one I had was a van and whilst this one is the same shape exactly, the model shown has had windows fitted - an expensive luxury as this made the car liable at the time for Purchase Tax whereas the van had solid (I use the term loosely!) fibreglass sides.

It was in fact the first fibreglass Reliant. Previous models had been aluminium - that metal whose name is such a challenge for our friends across the Atlantic!

The Reliant van had been made in 1959 and was 11 years old by the time I made its acquaintance. The engine, a 700cc sidevalve - which meant that the spark plugs pointed up vertically out of the top of the engine - was completely knackered and friends soon got used to it breaking down and me changing the spark plugs and cleaning the oil and deposits off the old set for use in another 20 miles...

This is the beast itself! One white headlight and one yellow one. In the 1960s many drivers preferred yellow headlights because they shone through smog better than white light, which just lit up the fog and soot and made it look like you had a wall around you.

I passed my driving test in this vehicle, although I had to take another to be able to drive a 4-wheeled car when I was 17. The only reason for having such an embarrassing car was that it was legal to drive at 16!

There's more about the car and its successors on my Nostalgia web site.