Nothing I like more really than a derelict car or aeroplane, and discovered this one down the side of a Staffordshire warehouse yesterday. If you're reading this abroad then you may have heard of a Staffordshire Terrier... but this is not one of those.
It is in fact a late-model Mini, my first love whom I affectionately called EEK525F for that is what it said on the front. But don't it just get you thinking about transverse transmissions? It was designed by Alec Issigonis, whose father hailed from the west coast of Turkey at such time as it was still Greek; a shipbuilding engineer, he moved to London where Alec was born.
Fresh from designing the Morris Minor ~ the first British car to sell over a million ~ he would introduce what was originally called the Morris Mini Minor in 1959. Arriving at the same time as both me and the Beatles, the world has never really recovered since. The brief was a car under ten feet long with a 10-inch wheel in each corner, suitable for people wearing pink mini-skirts and knee-high boots: the fashion among men at the time.
There is however a sinister twist: it practically introduced engines squeezed into the space above sideways. It was utterly horrendous to work on yourself, and would be replaced in my affections by a Morris Minor pick-up with a canvas roof and tail-gate whose principal facility was the fact my friends could sit on the wheel arches at back when returning from the pub, relieving their bladders out the rear-end on the move: and you don't see that in the BYD adverts, do you?
Ford however took one apart, decided the company must be losing money on each sale ~ which they were ~ and responded with the Cortina. All five versions of this, between 1962 and 1982, were rear-wheel drive (and interesting fact, the head of Ford Europe at the time lived three doors up from me in Hatfield; enjoying evenings of fine wines, food and discussions about the Anglia from time to time).
But here's the thing: put the engine the other way around, as in every model of the Cortina, and everything falls naturally into place. The radiator is at the front, where it needs cooling in the draught. Then there's the engine, followed by clutch and then gearbox... just about where it needs a lever for you to change gear. Set off and the weight is thrown on the rear wheels, where the traction is required, and hit a corner and with a bit of luck you can drift it out instead of spinning it into a railing as I did once with my glorious Sierra 2.7 litre V6 company car.
The modest reduction in length of the car ~ which nobody's bothered about now ~ meant however that any number of manufacturers went down this route, including a reluctant BMW once it had taken charge of a revived Mini. And what this meant was that whereas everything was easily fixed and replaced on a Morris Minor, which you could literally stand in alongside the engine-block, was that maintenance required a workshop visit. And has, ever since, moreso.
But it's Easter, and so gather round.
Story! Story! Story!
Oh come on, alright then. I thought I had it somewhere, but can't find the printed photo of the De Havilland Trident sat on the former airfield in Hatfield before it was broken up for scrap with a jack-hammer. I let myself in, for what beats a derelict car but a derelict airliner? And it's rows of seats, still there in 1970s orange! And the smell always the same, a kind of musty vapour that mingles with the memory of the thousands of passengers this aircraft must have flown to destinations like the Costa Brava... shiny, happy people holding hands.
But come closer. I was tasked with my ground-school for the 737 at East Midlands airport with the legendary John Kinsella who we'd break in the pub with for lunch and go to it in the afternoon fuelled off the back of a few pints of bitter and a Scotch chaser... look away now if you're flying Ryanair tomorrow.
But there had been a derelict Vickers Viscount on the far side of the field, which was used by engineers for various training tasks related to maintenance; the aircraft as was so often the case having crashed and been written off. Sadly in this case, both airliner and its young co-pilot had been written off.
One evening the master-switch having been flicked, the last engineer out the house looked back to see the cabin lights still on... so let himself back and walked up front in order to throw the switch which he figured he'd omitted.
And there, just long enough for him to appreciate what it was, the apparition of that same figure sat again momentarily in the right-hand seat before vanishing back into eternity.
Fuck.
Ed. The Mini popularised the sub-frame, the foremost one of which in the picture. It meant the body was a monocoque, whereas the Morris Minor had floor-panels that could be removed. The author once removed that on the passenger side, which meant they got wet every time he drove through a puddle: the fastest way of losing a girlfriend that he knows.
