Motoring
The private car was common enough but during the war years these were taken off the road, as no petrol was available. They were stored in garages, little more than a wooden shed, and were jacked up on bricks as the frail tyres would collapse, crack up and rot if they were to have stood on the ground for the five years they were banned from the highway. When restrictions ended all these old cars were pushed out and lovingly cleaned and polished. The first allocation of petrol coupons enabled my father to get the car going, but it was a long time before he saved up enough coupons for us to visit our relatives in Llandudno. This was a real adventure and the statistics of the journey remain in my mind to this day. It was 204 mile up and 202 back. My father explained the counter was on the back left hand wheel which made fewer rotations on the somewhat curved road along the Welsh border. I think it was because we took a wrong turning in Leominster.
Our family car was a 1935 Morris Ten and it averaged 30 miles per gallon on a long run. Petrol was 2/3d a gallon, which went up soon to 2/9d a gallon. This is about 14 pence in new money for a gallon and a lot people said they'd give up driving if the price went up to 3/- which is 15 pence a gallon. There were no heaters in such old cars My mother wore a fur coat and hat and we had blankets over our knees. Although the war ended in 1945, it was 1947 before we had enough petrol coupons to embark on that journey. 1947 was also the worse winter since records began, with 3ft of snow drifting to 4ft or more.
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The first car I owned was at the age of 26 when I gave up a firms van and acquired my own Mini-van. I was driving along in 1962 and saw KWL on a new car and this prompted me to ring Oxford County Council to ask when 1 NWL would be released. They said:
'1 NWL will be out next Thursday. If you want it buy a new car'
This prompted me to buy my first ever brand new car and I have since transferred the number plate over thirty times. The registration number cost nothing because in those days only the Lord Mayor and I had personalised number plates. It wasn't the fashion it is today.
On a flight back to Japan I met Malcolm Green. Apart from having a radio business, he also owned a car showroom in Haverfordwest. We talked cars from time to time, and on the long journey back to the UK, the wine was flowing and he came up the aisle and saw a chess game in progress. He leant over and took a few moves and began to disturb the strategy, so I switched the conversation to cars. I distinctly remember he perched on a table hinged to the forward bulkhead and sat there rather precariously talking about a new MG.
By the time we'd touched down at Heathrow I'd said I would buy this new V8 from him. MG and Rover were in the same British Motor Corporation stable, and Rover had developed a Buick alloy engine for its V8 saloons. Shoehorning that into an MG body was tight, but it replaced the former MGC which had a heavy caste iron straight six 3 litre engine made by Austin. The car was transformed and it became much sought after, having enormous power and speed, in a straight line. I took delivery of the MG on the day of its release and enjoyed it immensely and I covered 72,000 miles I spotted it a week or so after I had sold it. It had been 'clocked' to 32,000 miles by some unscrupulous intermediary.
It would be boring to describe every car which I loved, but a few were notable. I've already referred to the MGB V8. The most elegant was undoubted the Bentley R Type bought for £2,250 when it was thirty years old. I used it for four years and eventually sold it for over £3,000, but had spent some money on restoration of the steel body shell and cellulose.
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While I had this car, I had the opportunity to buy a Wolseley 6/80 with only 68,000 on the clock. It was a collector's piece but was rather overshadowed in my life by the Bentley, so I soon sold it.
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Bron and I collected a Mercedes from the factory in Germany. At that time you could elect to have an air-ticket to the factory and drive it home yourself, as a no-cost option instead of it being shipped on a transporter. They put us up in a good hotel on arrival and next morning we had a tour of the factory to see similar cars being built. After lunch we looked down from a lounge on the carpeted hand-over area. Cars arrived every five minutes and eventually our name was called. By the time we reached the carpeted area our brand new purple Mercedes was centre stage.
The polished Teutonic handover procedure included the salesman knowing everything about our previous Mercedes and then explaining the differences, finally opening the boot to reveal our suitcase which had been magically transferred from our hotel. His discomfiture was clear when I passed Bron the keys and she got in the driving seat:
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'The woman . . . she is driving?' Shock horror . . . he was apparently thinking 'what sort of a wimp have I been talking to?'
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We drove it home on German number plates via Amsterdam where we failed to find the famous red-light district. But we did find a good hat shop in Groningen where I bought a lovely trilby. The car took on its new identity 1 NWL as soon as it reached the UK.
Our first company car in Budapest was an ancient Škoda, with a rear engine and a heater that burnt pure petrol. We were in the lap of luxury as most people had no car, and those that did were driving old Ladas and Trabants. The East Germans assembled 3 million Trabants over a 30 year period, with virtually no modification or improvement over that time. I particularly remember one moment when we were driving along the embankment with the Danube on our left. I turned up the slip road to the city street above. As we arrived, with windows wide open as it was a hot morning, there was an almighty noise! The bonnet of a Trabant fell off and skidded along the cobbled paviers. It was noisy, but no one was hurt. The owner got out, clipped the bonnet back on and continued. One of the weaknesses with these cars was that they could be eaten by cattle in the right circumstances. The body was supposed to be made of fibre reinforced resin, but in times of stricture they used water as the medium for a paper-maché alternative. Some of these cars were nearly 30 years old and often languished in farm outbuildings. If they were wet with weeks of rain, they became soft and animals would tear away chunks and eat the bodywork.
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We got to know Peter, the quality manager of a client's factory and eventually he joined us as our first employee in Budapest. He used to come to work on a moped, but like all Hungarians his aspirations were to live the life of a Western manager and soon the bike gave way to a Daewoo car which was made in Korea. Daewoo cars in those days were built on obsolete production lines, models from General Motors, and Peter's was once popular in the UK as a Vauxhall Astra. Renault did much the same. The former Renault 12 plant and manufacturing equipment was moved to Eastern Europe in the 1970s and hundreds of thousands of similar cars were made, but re-branded Dacia.A couple of decades later that brand has been introduced in western Europe as a sub-brand of Renault.
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It wasn't long before Peter crashed his lovely Daewoo. Driving standards were poor in those days and parking in the city was enterprising, to say the least. The most common method was to park in chevron style with the car at 45 degrees to the pavement and one wheel up on the pavement. Everyone did this and cars were squeezed into every available space in a city that until a year before had little other than official cars belonging to the state.
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Countries like Hungary were the resting place for all the write-offs from other Western European countries and were often 'cut-and-shut'. This was a form of body collision "repair" based on buying a wrecked car and sawing off the damaged end to replace it with a matching section from another car damaged at the other end. Most would not pass a MOT elsewhere but became the prized possessions of Eastern European families in the 1990s.