By R. GennTed and
I took the train to Minehead in Somerset to pick up the car.
For some months I had been negotiating over the phone from Vancouver trying to find and
buy a well restored Austin Seven. Through another enthusiast I located a '38 Ruby recently
restored by policeman Mike Poval. The car was a rally winner and well-known hill climber.
After a taxi ride from the train station, we met Mike for the first time and within
minutes we had the garage doors opened, started the Ruby and drove her out into the spring
sunshine. Ted grimaced with apprehension, it was smaller than he had thought. Could this
little buggy get us where we wanted to go?
Looking over the record of ownership which is a feature of English licensing, I was
surprised to learn that I was the twenty-third owner. She had originally been registered
as a demonstration car by the Austin Motor Company, rumored to be on display at Earl's
Court in 1938 and had subsequently been owned by various ladies, mostly in Somerset and
Devon.
 |
Ted grimaced with apprehension,
it was smaller than he had
thought. Could this little buggy
get us where we wanted to go? |
After a phone call to secure A7 Club insurance and a familiarization
examination to determine the car's idiosyncrasies, we said good-bye to Mike and turned
west towards our starting point of Land's End a hundred miles away.
Through the use of the excellent 1-inch to the mile Ordnance maps, we had determined to
do most of the trip on secondary roads. We carried a complete set of the maps for our
route. A few moments of grinding away up onto Exmoor made me realize we were going to get
to know some hedgehogs and rabbits on a first name basis. Porlock Hill, a well-known local
obstacle, appeared ahead. "Watch the hairpins," Mike had warned us, and as the
grade increased a sign announced "LOWEST GEAR NOW." Dutifully I went into
bull-low and even though we nearly stopped as we rounded the bends, the little engine
carried us forward at a respectable 10 mph. Looking in the rear vision mirror, I realized
we were at the head of a substantial parade.
Having achieved our first of many summits, we now sped along a magnificent upland at 30
or 35 mph. We dipped down into and climbed out of picturesque hamlets along the north
Cornish coast. It was than I realized what an institution the Austin Seven is. In villages
and along hedgerows faces beamed back at us, particularly faces of older people, recalling
the memory of the once ubiquitous Seven. Whenever we stopped someone would materialize and
inform us that he "Learned to drive in one of those," or "That was our
honeymoon car," or "They don't make them like that anymore." I guess they
don't. They make them faster, with better acceleration and brakes, and a little more
comfortable. Ted and I are both large-size chaps, and we had to learn to keep our elbows
to ourselves.
We paid our respects at the grave of Sir Francis Chichester at Shirwell and an old
Cornishman met us at the churchyard gate. "Where be y' go'in," he asked.
"We're off to John O'Groats," I said. He shook his head in admiration at the
thought of such a great distance. "Treat 'er gen’l," he warned.
English hotels are a delight if you get the right ones, and we had good luck
practically every night. Astonished hotel-keepers Andrew and Thea Brand at Beaconside in
Bideford were typical of the hospitality we were to encounter. A lovely country home with
a fine view, wonderful wines in a quiet dining room and charmingly decorated rooms. In the
morning Andrew and Thea and staff waved us off from the front door as we ground away up
the driveway.
Our journey from Land’s End began at 5:33 PM on the 11th of April with the
odometer reading 61572. An elderly hiker in excellent physical condition obliged by taking
our picture. Looking at the car and shaking his head, he said, "It’s a boy doing
a man’s work." It was then that I decided to start writing down what people said
about the car.
Off we went, east along the south coast. The daffodils nodded our passage. It was April
and balmy, and we were in England. Perhaps it’s the richest man who walks, the second
richest drives slowly and stops frequently. The maps and AA guides invited us to look at
barrow mounds, stone circles, and monuments. Photo-ops were everywhere, generally with the
car in the foreground.
In our first full day out of the coast village of Mousehole (pronounced Mousel), we
made a total of 35 miles. We would have to do better than that if were to do the trip in
the two weeks we had allotted. The hiking route is 765 miles. We planned our route to be
about 1100 miles.
Cream teas in Devon could have been our downfall. The car was slow enough, but we were
putting on weight, perhaps more than the Ruby could handle. Eventually, we had to get out
of Devon because it looked like they were running out of clotted cream.
Mevagissey, Yeovil, over Brunel's bridge into Bristol. That night we pubbed in Frampton
Cotterell and decided to drop in on the following day to the twenty-second birthday party
of my goddaughter who was reading law at Cambridge. With hangovers, we put on 150 miles.
It can be done.
While in Cambridge I looked up Ray Walker, the proprietor of the famous A7 Garage. He
won’t work on anything but old Austins. Hasn't for 35 years. The car was not
performing as well as I thought it should and the steering was stiff. Ray, deaf as a post,
took it in at four o'clock and had it ready by four the next day. Miraculously, he sorted
out the steering and made it a dream to steer, improved the brakes, tuned her up,
re-welded the seats which were in danger of coming loose, and insisted on an extensive
road trial with periodic adjustments with the car parked half on the curb as Cambridge
students swept by on bicycles. Later, as our friends waited at the garage, Ray laboriously
wrote out in longhand everything he had done, why he had done it, and proceeded to give me
an itemized list of everything I had to keep an eye on. Everyone was exasperated but the
list was a godsend on the trip and I'm sure it will be in the future. We pressed on.
Off through the north of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, the flat land brilliant with
daffodils and tulips in large fields. Lincolnshire and Yorkshire and towards Scotland via
the Corbridge--Carter Bar route. In Thirsk, where the television series "All
Creatures Great and Small" was filmed, two ladies were standing on a corner and I
heard one of them say as we passed: "Oh, there’s somebody from the movie."
Other remarks I had collected by this time were the likes of "I had my first kiss in
that car," and "I had my first crumpet in that car."
In Northamptonshire the countryside becomes wild and sparsely populated. It’s a
source of amazement to Canadians that in an area as small as Britain there could be such
desolation and bleakness.
Here the car started to give us a bit of trouble again. A check with a screwdriver
determined that the spark was weak. Where could distributor parts for A7 be found in this
wilderness? Eventually Ruby couldn't make a particularly hard hill, and we had to turn
around and coast back to an obscure roadside garage that we had missed on the way up.
"Go for a walk and I'll see what I can do with her," said the sullen
mechanic. Twenty minutes later, when I was taking pictures up on the fells, I looked down
and saw the Ruby buzzing along the road below. Another road trial!
We ran back to the garage. "Needed a new condenser," he said as he pulled in,
"and I didn't have a distributor rotor; yours is knackkered, so I put in a
Mini's." He also had a dusty box with 10 brand new L-10 spark plugs for A7's. We
bought them all.
Off we went and in minutes we were over the hill, past Hadrian's Wall and into the
lowlands of Scotland. The car had never run better. I did a speed test and got 47 mph out
of her. Ted was grimacing again. The car was hard to hold on the road with the gusty winds
from behind. I turned the driving over to Ted, and we proceeded at our usual measured
pace.
Edinburgh, then onward and northward, red-faced Scots in broad plaid pants with
shoulder high canes grinned and pointed. Every pub along the way was babbling with talk
about the little Ruby that just pulled in. One man came up and said, "Is that your
bonny wee car out there, laddie?" In northern Scotland a man said he had one just
like it, "A good runner but a wee trouble to stop. The tink wouldn't give me 5 quid
for it, so I put 'er on a barge and tipped 'er off into the Loch. That were in '48. Wish I
had 'er now." Old car enthusiasts anguish over these sorts of stories. The poor wee
thing down there with Nessie.
As we proceeded North, the weather grew colder. On the second to last day before John
O'Groats there was snow and sleet. A terrific head-wind slowed us down to a crawl. We were
cold and the distance seemed magnified by the climate.
Ted, who had been early disappointed that there was no heater, went into a store and
bought Scottish underwear. It seemed to me to be as cold as I had ever felt it in Canada,
but we looked at each other at the same time and said: "We are going to make
it."
It's no big deal. A young Englishman, Clive Ball, had driven a 1929 "7"
around the world between 1965 and 1972 and wrote a wonderful book about it. "Seven
Years with Samantha" is on the bookshelf of many a vintage Austin owner.
At 10 AM on the twentieth of April, we reached John O’Groats in a howling gale.
1171 miles from Land's End. Eleven days. We kept reminding ourselves that the record for
an Austin 7 from Land's End to John O'Groats is 21 1/2 hours, performed in 1978 in a 1933
Box saloon by a pair of tired Englishmen. And that included time out to change to another
engine which they carried as a spare in the back seat.
Now the time had come to head back. Another route had been chosen via Glen Coe and
Alloway, the birthplace of Robert Burns. My plan was to drive the car to Derbyshire and
store it in a friend's garage for future motoring in England. During that dozen or so days
of running through the gears I had come to think of the car as an ideal way of moving over
this sort of landscape; a small vehicle, capable, economical, and simple to maintain.
Somehow I felt that there will always be roads and countryside like this in Britain for
this sort of car to go on.
As cars and lorries passed us in either direction, the drivers blinked their lights or
waved in the characteristic British fashion. More frequently they gave the old thumbs-up
signal which was the one we liked the most. One driver, near the crest of a particularly
arduous hill, gave us the V for victory sign as he pulled by.
