The Austin Cambridge Years

This isn't ours, but ours was the same, but right hand drive.

I think the Cambridge came from the same garage as the A40, but it wasn’t brand new.  I guess with a sister on the way and a move to the City of Cambridge made a bigger car necessary.  It was huge compared with the A40, fitted with two maroon vinyl armchairs in the front and a massive bench seat in the rear.  The boot could swallow everything you needed for a week’s holiday and have room to bring more junk back.  Once again, it was Italian styled, but missed the innovations of the A40, going instead for a more traditional walnut veneer and chrome approach.  It had fins, it had chrome and it had bling, but it had them in a gentlemanly tweedy kind of way.  The estate version (which we didn’t have) looked like a scaled down Cheverolet Bel Air Nomad SurfWagon.

Under the bonnet, coughing and wheezing to pull all the fins and vinyl, was an 1800 Leyland B series.  I bumped into a guy at Mallory Park recently who had put a full race spec MGB engine into his and it was still sluggish and difficult to keep up with modern traffic, evidently the Ford Type 9 5 speed gearbox makes them liveable with in modern times.  But when we had ours a top speed of 90 mph and a 0-60 time measured on a calendar were the norm.  

I remember going to Cambridge in it to see our new house just before it was finished and I remember using it when we moved.  Dad had a job with Sindalls, a Cambridge building firm and I think the house came at a special price with the job.  The really exciting journeys I remember were holidays in North Wales. 

Penny was probably about 18 months old and had a crude early baby seat which hooked over the back of the rear bench seat. That left Norman and me sat either side.  When we got to Betwys-y- Coed there was thunder and lightning in the air but we continued over the Crimea Pass (A470) to Blaenau Ffestiniog.  The road disappeared into the thunder clouds and the lightning was going off below and around us.  I spent most of the journey hiding in the small gap under Penny’s baby seat with Penny crying and Norman curled up in his corner by the back door.

On another Welsh trip I suffered from travel sickness and was given a seaside castle bucket to throw up in.  I remember stopping by Lake Gwynant for a breath of fresh air and too wash the bucket it out.  The fish in the lake seemed to love it.

Some of the Austin Cambridge years are such clear memories as we had some of Grandad’s 8mm movies of it transferred to video.  The next challenge is to transfer the video from VHS to PC so blog readers can see it.

The Austin Cambridge worked hard, I don’t remember any breakdowns, just good times.  We regularly went from Cambridge into East London to visit family, long before the M11 using the old A11.  This took us through the delightful towns of Bishops Stortford, Sawbridgeworth and Harlow and down through Epping Forest.  In the spring we used to stop and pick Pussy  Willow to take to Grandma.  I bet there is a sign saying don’t pick the flowers now.

The A40 Years

I have no memories of mammoth journeys, breakdowns or other escapades in the A40.  I can remember travelling in the back of it, but not for any significant reason.  We must have used it to pop into East London to see grandparents, possibly to travel on holidays and as a general run about, but I have no recollection.  I do know what was going on around the time we owned it though.  

I was born in Cornwell Crescent in Stanford-Le-Hope, Essex.  Yes I am an Essex boy.  I have always identified more with my East London routes and my Cambridge years though.  I certainly have no desire to call Stanford-Le-Hope home.  I have been back a few times, it is OK, but certainly nothing special.  It is a small village by the side of the A13 which grew like mad in the late 1950’s.  When I lived there most of the inhabitants had moved out of East London into local authority built and owned housing estates, London Overspill they called it. 

In 1870-72, John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described Stanford le Hope like this:

STANFORD-LE-HOPE, a parish in Orsett district, Essex; on the river Thames and the Southend railway, 10 miles SSE of Brentwood. It has a post-office under Romford, and a r. station. Acres, 2,984; of which 570 are foreshore. Real property, £4,244. Pop., 504. Houses, 95. The property is divided among a few. The living is a rectory in the diocese of Rochester. Value, £590.* Patron, the Rev. J.Knott. The church is old but good. There are an endowed school with £38 a year, and charities £17.

It just had more houses by 1960.  Our house in Cornwell Crescent was set back from the road on a curve as the road climbed the hill.  From the downstairs windows you could just see the sloping front garden, from upstairs you could see the cars parked in the road.  It was the end of a terrace, I think of 4 houses.  The Robinsons lived next door, then there were two more houses before the famous motorsport venue, Steadman’s Hill.

Steadman’s Hill was the Stanford-Le-Hope centre of jigger racing.  A jigger is what many other parts of the world would refer to as go-karts or soap boxes or trolleys.  The Steadman’s racing formula was simple, home made and powered only by gravity.  Construction varied from a set of pram wheels with a board replacing the pram to sophisticated ply wood constructions with steering and brakes.  The surface was large, uneven concrete paving slabs.  The left hand side of the hill was a wooden panel fence and the right hand side grassed wasteland with a variety of sharp and heavy objects concealed in the grass.  Rarely did jiggers race side by side as the track was only about 4 slabs wide, more often a time trial approach was taken.  There were also some early ‘Drifting’ type competitions with points awarded for style and the enormity of the inevitable roll.

One of my early jiggers featured castor wheels from an old sofa.  It was impossible to steer and even if you managed to turn the wooden chassis the wheels would immediately castor round, leaving you still travelling down the hill, but sideways.  You can learn a lot about steering and suspension development from jiggers.  Very few safety features were fitted and the hill had little crash protection, so any design error resulted in gravel rash, bruising and minor cuts.  This usually resulted in swift re-design work.

I have nagging memories of a double bend about two thirds of the way down which went right left.  The right hander had a kerb on the outside that dropped into a garage and parking area (for residents cars not competitors jiggers.  In fact all racing could be stopped by someone parking in the wrong place.).  The left hander had a run off into the wasteland for anyone who made it as far as the left hander and then there was a short flat section down to Mr Steadman’s shop.  I have just looked on google maps and it has all been replaced by housing, just like Brooklands was.

Whilst we lived there my father worked as a Quantity Surveyor, I think for Terson’s The Builders.  I remember him taking me and my brother to the top of a 13 storey tower block in Southend on Sea that he had worked on.  It was the highest building I had ever been up. I guess we went in the A40.

My mother was a housewife, but supplemented her housekeeping money trimming shoes for Bata Shoes and pea picking.  The Bata shoes used to be delivered to the house in a huge cardboard box.  They were plastic jellie sandals like you only see now at the seaside. They had a very special smell.  From the mould they had flappy bits round the edge of the soles and my mother would use a small, very sharp knife to trim them.  All the rubbish and the trimmed shoes went back in the box and was exchanged for another box each week.

Pea picking was a massive adventure with groups of women and children being collected by the farmer, and taken to the fields.  Here we were given sacks and walked the rows of pea plants collecting the pods and filling our sacks.  No idea what happened to them then, but no way were they fresh as the moment that the pod went pop.

We also used to go to Pitsea Market.  I think we went on the bus.  I will always remember the fishmongers stall where there was a barrel full of live eels.  He would reach in, select a couple of eels for you, chop off their heads and wrap them in newspaper.  I never liked eels, especially not when they were jellied or served in liquor from a food stand on Southend Sea Front.

I must have started school during the A40 years, I don’t remember much about it.  I went to Abbots Hall infants school I think, which now shows on google maps as The Abbots Hall Children’s Sure Start Centre.  It was up the hill from the house and an easy walk.  I don’t think I was there long as we moved to Cambridge.  I am not sure when it arrived, but an Austin Cambridge replaced the A40 before we moved.

The Start of Something

It was a Saturday morning.  It must have been a Saturday as Dad worked Monday to Friday and nowhere was open on Sundays then.  I am not certain how we got to the garage, I think we walked as I don’t think anyone would have taken a two tone brush painted brown Austin 10 as a trade in.  Especially as you could see the road going past underneath where the floorboards had rotted away.

 I remember arriving and it being stood on the forecourt.  It shone in the sun in its spectacular red and black colour scheme, its chrome work fresh and dazzling, the glass spotless.   The chrome grill reflected the other cars on the forecourt and the chrome hubcaps and wheel trims looked like rotary cheese graters.  It was brand new.

The doors were opened and I climbed into the back.  It smelt fantastic.  The dashboard looked like the control panel of a rocket ship compared to the previous cars I had seen.  Dad and the salesman went to the back of the car and opened the revolutionary split tail gate with the bottom half dropping down to form a flat surface and the glass going up out of the way, just like Range Rover adopted later.  I didn’t realise at the time that the clean lines were created in the Pinin Farina design studios, home of many great Alfas and Ferraris.  It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.  After a quick explanation of all the major controls and some paperwork in the office we left the forecourt and went the long way home.

I think I am the good looking one in the stripy shirt as I never much liked fishing.

It really was revolutionary.  It was a family hatchback, the first ever.  It had the split tailgate, copied by Range Rover.  It had no chassis, it was unitary construction.  Of course, at the time I knew none of this.  To me it was the first brand new car my Dad had ever owned.  It would revolutionise our lives allowing us to go to exotic destinations at speed and in comfort.  It was beautiful.

I have no idea when it was and nobody seems able to remember the registration, other than it didn’t have a letter to denote its age.  I find the lack of a letter difficult to believe, as I thought the lettering system started in 1963 and I am sure I wouldn’t have such vivid memories from the age of 4.  However, I also have memories of earlier motoring escapades which I am certain I have because family members have retold the stories so many times.  The greatest example being, Dad being overtaken by a wheel on the downhill stretch of the A5 approaching Betws y Coed, only to find, on breaking for the bend and the bridge, that it was his own rear wheel from the Austin 10!

My brain has never been very good at organising time.  I know what is in the past and I know roughly, the order.  I just don’t have many dates or times in my head.  So Jimmy and Sue’s suggestion of writing my autobiography presented a bit of a challenge.  Then I spotted the clue, AUTObiography.  One thing I can do is list the make and colour of every car my family and myself have owned, so sequence it by cars.  If I add in a couple of bicycles and the odd school bus I will have a way to organise the lot.  

So that’s the plan, I have already got the list of vehicles almost complete and have started adding detail around them.  I am not sure how long I have to write it, but I will just do a bit now and then when I feel like it. No section will be huge, I want to cover the time with the outstanding memories, not the tedious detail of everyday life. I was going to put them up as chemoblog posts, but that might confuse people, so I have started a new blog to keep them on and will post links on the chemopages.  I might revisit things I have already written, in which case I will post the whole section again.  I am also keeping them all as Word documents so I can put them together easily when a publisher comes along...............