Faint Hearts,
Fair Maid
More like it and sadly no connection with mine! Photo kind permission of Classic and Sporscar Centre.
Just as it’s an unwritten law of the automotive universe that the perennial tyre-kicker cannot desist from removing the cylinder head from any available engine they come upon (and never replacing it); it is equally true that motoring pundits cannot resist pontificating about the best, or worst cars, they have ever owned. Sometimes these contentions extend into print as the ten worst cars in history; or twenty; or even thirty!
It is a silly game. ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison;’ or as the French might have it: ‘It is the ‘orses for the courses’. The very worst car I ever owned, beating a Derby Bentley by the range of its faults, rather than their substance, was a 1935 Austin Ten Lichfield.
To draw a parallel with the Model T Ford - whether the Austin Lichfield was a very bad good car, or a very good bad car, would be unfair. The Austin was a very good car. It is just that mine wasn’t.
To put things in context. The Lichfield was a small, ten horsepower (1200 cc) family saloon made between 1934 and 1936, that, for around, £150 was extremely good value. For your hard earned savings you got a generous amount of leather upholstery, four speeds, a very sweet and reliable motor and, with so little traffic on the roads, few worries about Longbridge’s archaic cable brakes.
BYE 775 was a ‘distress purchase’, precipitated by a fault in the gearbox of my trusty and much loved Austin Big Seven, now stuck in first gear; and the ensuing panic about lack of transport for work. In addition, whereas normal young folk may have had acquisitive urges concerning MGs, Jaguars, Austin Healeys, Minis or even Morris Minors, I had a totally irrational craving for the Al Capone lines of an Austin Lichfield (beauty in the eye etcetera) and, of course, enhanced p-o-w-e-r; at least over the Big Seven. I was encouraged in these perceptions by my car-mad best friend, and his large family, who had what they described as, a ‘showroom condition’ Lichfield among their collection of ‘bangers’ . These included a very non-roadworthy Austin Seven RN saloon with skeletal bodywork, a basically ‘MoT-able’ (the then Ministry of Transport roadworthiness inspection) Alvis Silver Eagle, whose crowning virtue seemed to be a deafening horn but regularly suffered from a sticking clutch, and a desperately battered, maroon, RMB Series 2.5 litre Riley, the ailments of which I can’t recall.
The Lichfield’s ‘showroom condition’ extended to a brush paint in apple green and black, the green also having been applied to the engine; what has to be acknowledged as a rather well-executed replacement of the headlining, and a not so well executed wooden replacement of the rotten metal of the front floor.
Twenty five pounds changed hands and the wretched thing was mine. Well not quite. The patriarch, a big jowly man, to whom I’d never taken, needed a signature to an ‘as seen, tried and tested’ travesty of a document, a requirement, he explained, that would have been imposed ‘even on a member of the family’. Lesson one in distress. Cars, above all else, sold to family members or friends, are the archetypal instruments of dissent and rupture.
Subsequently I got to drive home what came to be known, not-so-affectionately, as ‘the Lich’. Stylish, in my scaled eyes though it may have been, as we made ponderous progress, it was painfully apparent Lich was not well.
My school physics textbook graphically pointed out, in helping one calculate gradients in those days when we did such things in inches, and cars relied on ‘horsepower’,
that a one-in-ten hill was the top gear limit for a 10 hp vehicle.
A known parameter on my six-mile journey was ‘The Carpenter’s pitch’. In other words, a short straight scarp, that was posted as one-in-ten, ascending past the pub of that name. It was barely two hundreds yards long. Even so, the ‘eight horse’ Big Seven, much to my satisfaction, breasted it lustily in third gear. Lich did make it in that ratio, but more by prayer-power than horsepower. Feeble climbing can, of course, be overlooked. But the further realization that the brakes were reluctant to reduce speed when tackling an incline from the opposite direction, or indeed, reduce speed at all, is another matter.
With a pre-booked MoT test imminent, and the gnawing awareness in the pit of my stomach that I had been duped, it was clear the car needed some pre-exam revision.
My mechanical mentor at the time was a superb, Austin-trained, mechanic of the old school. A man who could actually fix cars, rather than follow the instructions of a computer to bolt on an expensive new part and be left wondering why the machinery still didn’t work. I took Lich to him. And as he sagely pointed out: ‘There is a great difference between the amateur expert and the expert amateur.’
The patent assigned to Ernest Monnington Bowden in 1896 describes a ‘fine wire rope that could slide within a tube, directly transmitting pulling, pushing or turning movements to the rope from one end to the other without requiring pulleys or flexible joints’. The snag was, my ropes (Bowden cables) exerted very little pulling or pushing movement, and virtually none to the brakes. This was because the wires had been seized in their casings for many years. Liberal applications of oil and an inordinate amount of patience, eventually got things moving to ‘MoT-squeak-through’ sufficiency.
I mentioned earlier the cylinder head removing proclavity of the car buff. Another is to second-guess the designs of some of the automotive titans of our time. Hence, the oil baffles in the crankcases of Austin Sevens can be left out, drain holes drilled in axle tubes in preference to effective hub oil seals and so on. Lich had no rear shock dampers. They had been deemed superfluous during the transformation to ‘showroom condition’. However, in those somewhat casual early years of the roadworthiness test (it was introduced in 1963) their absence passed unnoticed, or, at least, without comment.
My grandfather accompanied me in scores of road test cars and usually had some drole observation regarding their performance. Naturally, as you do with a ‘new’ car, I took grandad for a spin in Lich. I only remember one comment as we climbed a very gentle incline away from a road junction: “She don’t seem to have much ‘go’.” By the same token, I showed off my ‘fresh wheels’ to the more motoring orientated colleagues at work. Here I recall the assessment of one individual delivered in his charming Monmouth drawl:
“He’s a bit ‘arsh, Mart. A bit ‘arsh’.
Why Lich was quite so feeble, and indeed, ‘‘arsh’, was a source of constant speculation. The consensus was mis-timed ignition. I still have the piece of grubby blue notepaper, tucked inside a copy of Pitman’s Book of the Austin Ten, on which my father and I puzzled as to exactly what the valves were doing; and when. Mis-timed the car probably was, the clue being the vendor’s boast that it would - and no doubt had - run on paraffin.
I once knew of a boat where the crew, while they lay in their bunks, were mystified as to why the hull rocked to and fro around the bulkheads. Then they realized there was no longer any positive connection between the two. My father sometimes drove Lich, and this gave passengers the opportunity to observe their surroundings, as with the aforementioned sailors. It seemed odd to me how the Austin’s pedals seemed to move about in the floor, and I put this to father. “ It’s not the pedals moving in the floor,” my father declared, “but the bloody floor moving around the pedals.”
Did Lich have any good points. Indeed it did. The one winter of my ownership was unusually severe for South Wales with accompanying road chaos. However, with virtually no power and 18 inch diameter wheels shod with tyres only four-and-a-half inches wide we had the traction of a snow-cat, to the extent Lich could claw itself up snow and ice covered gradients that defeated much more sophisticated machinery.
Yet, it was more adolescent precociousness than its unexpected glacial qualities that prompted me to undertake a perilous adventure in pursuit of a young lady.
She had been the belle of my last year at school, desired by all the males in the class. Why I supposed she would have the least interest in even passing the time of day with a nerd in a super-annuated 1935 Austin Ten I shall never know. But such is the madness of love-lorn youth, and Lich and I set off along a snow-deep A40 for Cheltenham so I could make my mark with the object of my desire who was reputedly now studying art there.
Whether or not I actually located the college, I can’t remember. Feint heart was already palpitating in the suburbs of the iconic Georgian town and by the time we arrived it had prevailed. I fled. Lich wasn’t capable of fleeing anything or anywhere in the heroic sense of the word. But there had been a stirling, sure-wheeled performance over those treacherous roads to Gloucstershire and home. It was, perhaps, his finest hour.
Inevitably, with the Big Seven repaired, the time for the Lich and I to part had come.
A local newspaper advertisement produced an apparently enthusiast buyer. From time to time I saw it languishing forlornly on the street where it now lived. Perhaps the penny had dropped.
It is a silly game. ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison;’ or as the French might have it: ‘It is the ‘orses for the courses’. The very worst car I ever owned, beating a Derby Bentley by the range of its faults, rather than their substance, was a 1935 Austin Ten Lichfield.
To draw a parallel with the Model T Ford - whether the Austin Lichfield was a very bad good car, or a very good bad car, would be unfair. The Austin was a very good car. It is just that mine wasn’t.
To put things in context. The Lichfield was a small, ten horsepower (1200 cc) family saloon made between 1934 and 1936, that, for around, £150 was extremely good value. For your hard earned savings you got a generous amount of leather upholstery, four speeds, a very sweet and reliable motor and, with so little traffic on the roads, few worries about Longbridge’s archaic cable brakes.
BYE 775 was a ‘distress purchase’, precipitated by a fault in the gearbox of my trusty and much loved Austin Big Seven, now stuck in first gear; and the ensuing panic about lack of transport for work. In addition, whereas normal young folk may have had acquisitive urges concerning MGs, Jaguars, Austin Healeys, Minis or even Morris Minors, I had a totally irrational craving for the Al Capone lines of an Austin Lichfield (beauty in the eye etcetera) and, of course, enhanced p-o-w-e-r; at least over the Big Seven. I was encouraged in these perceptions by my car-mad best friend, and his large family, who had what they described as, a ‘showroom condition’ Lichfield among their collection of ‘bangers’ . These included a very non-roadworthy Austin Seven RN saloon with skeletal bodywork, a basically ‘MoT-able’ (the then Ministry of Transport roadworthiness inspection) Alvis Silver Eagle, whose crowning virtue seemed to be a deafening horn but regularly suffered from a sticking clutch, and a desperately battered, maroon, RMB Series 2.5 litre Riley, the ailments of which I can’t recall.
The Lichfield’s ‘showroom condition’ extended to a brush paint in apple green and black, the green also having been applied to the engine; what has to be acknowledged as a rather well-executed replacement of the headlining, and a not so well executed wooden replacement of the rotten metal of the front floor.
Twenty five pounds changed hands and the wretched thing was mine. Well not quite. The patriarch, a big jowly man, to whom I’d never taken, needed a signature to an ‘as seen, tried and tested’ travesty of a document, a requirement, he explained, that would have been imposed ‘even on a member of the family’. Lesson one in distress. Cars, above all else, sold to family members or friends, are the archetypal instruments of dissent and rupture.
Subsequently I got to drive home what came to be known, not-so-affectionately, as ‘the Lich’. Stylish, in my scaled eyes though it may have been, as we made ponderous progress, it was painfully apparent Lich was not well.
My school physics textbook graphically pointed out, in helping one calculate gradients in those days when we did such things in inches, and cars relied on ‘horsepower’,
that a one-in-ten hill was the top gear limit for a 10 hp vehicle.
A known parameter on my six-mile journey was ‘The Carpenter’s pitch’. In other words, a short straight scarp, that was posted as one-in-ten, ascending past the pub of that name. It was barely two hundreds yards long. Even so, the ‘eight horse’ Big Seven, much to my satisfaction, breasted it lustily in third gear. Lich did make it in that ratio, but more by prayer-power than horsepower. Feeble climbing can, of course, be overlooked. But the further realization that the brakes were reluctant to reduce speed when tackling an incline from the opposite direction, or indeed, reduce speed at all, is another matter.
With a pre-booked MoT test imminent, and the gnawing awareness in the pit of my stomach that I had been duped, it was clear the car needed some pre-exam revision.
My mechanical mentor at the time was a superb, Austin-trained, mechanic of the old school. A man who could actually fix cars, rather than follow the instructions of a computer to bolt on an expensive new part and be left wondering why the machinery still didn’t work. I took Lich to him. And as he sagely pointed out: ‘There is a great difference between the amateur expert and the expert amateur.’
The patent assigned to Ernest Monnington Bowden in 1896 describes a ‘fine wire rope that could slide within a tube, directly transmitting pulling, pushing or turning movements to the rope from one end to the other without requiring pulleys or flexible joints’. The snag was, my ropes (Bowden cables) exerted very little pulling or pushing movement, and virtually none to the brakes. This was because the wires had been seized in their casings for many years. Liberal applications of oil and an inordinate amount of patience, eventually got things moving to ‘MoT-squeak-through’ sufficiency.
I mentioned earlier the cylinder head removing proclavity of the car buff. Another is to second-guess the designs of some of the automotive titans of our time. Hence, the oil baffles in the crankcases of Austin Sevens can be left out, drain holes drilled in axle tubes in preference to effective hub oil seals and so on. Lich had no rear shock dampers. They had been deemed superfluous during the transformation to ‘showroom condition’. However, in those somewhat casual early years of the roadworthiness test (it was introduced in 1963) their absence passed unnoticed, or, at least, without comment.
My grandfather accompanied me in scores of road test cars and usually had some drole observation regarding their performance. Naturally, as you do with a ‘new’ car, I took grandad for a spin in Lich. I only remember one comment as we climbed a very gentle incline away from a road junction: “She don’t seem to have much ‘go’.” By the same token, I showed off my ‘fresh wheels’ to the more motoring orientated colleagues at work. Here I recall the assessment of one individual delivered in his charming Monmouth drawl:
“He’s a bit ‘arsh, Mart. A bit ‘arsh’.
Why Lich was quite so feeble, and indeed, ‘‘arsh’, was a source of constant speculation. The consensus was mis-timed ignition. I still have the piece of grubby blue notepaper, tucked inside a copy of Pitman’s Book of the Austin Ten, on which my father and I puzzled as to exactly what the valves were doing; and when. Mis-timed the car probably was, the clue being the vendor’s boast that it would - and no doubt had - run on paraffin.
I once knew of a boat where the crew, while they lay in their bunks, were mystified as to why the hull rocked to and fro around the bulkheads. Then they realized there was no longer any positive connection between the two. My father sometimes drove Lich, and this gave passengers the opportunity to observe their surroundings, as with the aforementioned sailors. It seemed odd to me how the Austin’s pedals seemed to move about in the floor, and I put this to father. “ It’s not the pedals moving in the floor,” my father declared, “but the bloody floor moving around the pedals.”
Did Lich have any good points. Indeed it did. The one winter of my ownership was unusually severe for South Wales with accompanying road chaos. However, with virtually no power and 18 inch diameter wheels shod with tyres only four-and-a-half inches wide we had the traction of a snow-cat, to the extent Lich could claw itself up snow and ice covered gradients that defeated much more sophisticated machinery.
Yet, it was more adolescent precociousness than its unexpected glacial qualities that prompted me to undertake a perilous adventure in pursuit of a young lady.
She had been the belle of my last year at school, desired by all the males in the class. Why I supposed she would have the least interest in even passing the time of day with a nerd in a super-annuated 1935 Austin Ten I shall never know. But such is the madness of love-lorn youth, and Lich and I set off along a snow-deep A40 for Cheltenham so I could make my mark with the object of my desire who was reputedly now studying art there.
Whether or not I actually located the college, I can’t remember. Feint heart was already palpitating in the suburbs of the iconic Georgian town and by the time we arrived it had prevailed. I fled. Lich wasn’t capable of fleeing anything or anywhere in the heroic sense of the word. But there had been a stirling, sure-wheeled performance over those treacherous roads to Gloucstershire and home. It was, perhaps, his finest hour.
Inevitably, with the Big Seven repaired, the time for the Lich and I to part had come.
A local newspaper advertisement produced an apparently enthusiast buyer. From time to time I saw it languishing forlornly on the street where it now lived. Perhaps the penny had dropped.