Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2023 i Classic & Vintage Commercials

Sunday April 23 saw thousands of classic vehicles on the road supporting the Federation of British Historic Vehicle Clubs Drive it Day. Now in its 18th year, DID has several aims. One, obviously, is to give classic vehicle owners a good day out driving. However the event also aims to show people outside the hobby just how popular vehicle preservation is by the number of people taking part, but also by the fact that this number of vehicles aren’t seen out every day, that we cover very low mileages and our environmental impact is therefore tiny. Finally, DID aims to show lawmakers and ‘influencers’ just how many people would be adversely affected by legislative attempts to restrict use of older vehicles. Though it tends to be supported mostly by car…

We’re all familiar with the important ‘Meals on Wheels’ service on which many vulnerable people rely,well here’sanexample of ‘Wheels on Wheels’ –Wagon Wheels to be exact. Burton’s Biscuits have been making the famous product for at least 75 years and many generations have relished the delicious taste of the chocolate covered, marsh mallow filled biscuits. To get those biscuits distributed Burton’s used afleet of lorries including this 1965 Perkins engined Commer box van photographed at their Blackpool factory. Peter J Davies.…

The four-door Austin A40 Devon and two-door A40 Dorset were the first all-new family cars introduced after the war, in autumn 1947. Commercial versions - 10cwt van, a factory-built 10cwt pickup and a Countryman estate - arrived in September 1948. The van’s capacity was 116cu.ft. The commercials had bigger, 17in, wheels instead of 16in. of the saloons. Initially, the bonnet and chrome grille were shared with the cars. Lower gear ratios were used and, as was usual on light commercial vehicles at the time, a passenger seat was an optional extra. The engine was a new Austin 1200cc overhead-valve unit with a power output of 40bhp, hence the A40 designation. Price of the van in grey primer in Great Britain was £422 8s 4d in 1950, or an extra tenner…

It’s hard to believe, but this year the British Motor Museum, which hosts both the Classic & Vintage Commercials Show in June, and the Retro Truck Show in September, is 30 years old! The museum opened on May 1 1993, but its origins can be traced back to 1975 when Leyland Historic Vehicles was founded to look after vehicles which had been kept for historic or publicity purposes by the individual companies that made up British Leyland. In 1983, an independent charitable trust was set up to safeguard them, and the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust (BMIHT) was born. The collections rapidly outgrew the Museum at Syon Park, London and the headquarters at Studley Castle. With the help of an £8m investment from Rover Group, a new home was found…

Once Seddon Motors Ltd of Oldham and Atkinson Vehicles Ltd of Preston had joined forces in 1970 it was only a matter of time before the first ‘joint’ product would be announced. By combining the best features of these two very British breeds the company came up with the tilt-cab ‘400 Series’. The new baby, born of the happy couple, was first shown in prototype form at the Amsterdam Show in February 1974. Before Seddon Motors bought Atkinson, the two companies had different design philosophies and were not regarded as natural bedfellows. Atkinson had a long history of heavy vehicle engineering, with its origins back in the steam era, while Seddon was a relative latecomer that had built its success on low-cost, medium weight vehicles in the late 1930s. Seddon…

Just had to write and say thank you for the May edition of Classic & Vintage Commercials. The wonderful centrefold of the Albion Sugar Company Foden four axle/ eight legger was really lovely. I must admit that it looks a little careworn compared with their Foden tankers! As a young foot duty police officer in the 1950’s I often worked 53 traffic point at the junction of Borough High Street and St Thomas Street. There was a constant stream of wonderful lorries coming along St Thomas Street, the best were the immaculate Foden tankers of the Albion Sugar Company, you could literally eat your meal off them, they really glistened! The tankers would often be followed by lorries of Silver Roadways which were also in top condition, to be followed…

Though most people think of electric cars as the latest thing, battery electric road vehicles (BERV) have actually been around since prewar times, and had clear environmental benefits is the smog-laden cities of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Unfortunately though, the concept was held back by the weight of the lead-acid batteries needed, and the only ‘industry’ to adopt electric power to any extent was doorstep milk delivery. Here, electric power had an additional benefit – it was far more socially acceptable at 5.30am than the noisy diesels of the time. The Morrison-Electricar was at the cutting edge of BERVs, and their first vehicle was built for a local bakery in 1933. Founder Alfred Morrison had dabbled for years in various engineering projects, but by the late 1920s was concentrating…

Kelsey Publishing runs a major back-issue service for most of its titles, including Classic & Vintage Commercials. The back issues advertisement llists issues that are available from the past 16 months, but we have stocks going back much further than that. In fact, more than 300 CVC back-issues are available from us. Virtually every issue back to 2010 is available, and we also have many back as far as 2005! There are two ways to obtain these. One is to visit the Kelsey Media stand if you see it at a show or event this year – we can’t be everywhere, but we do try to get to as many as we can. The other is to order online at shop.kelsey.co.uk Then go to transport, then to Classic & Vintage…

This is not normally something I would do but I’m very intrigued by the picture of a Dennis Pax  of the May 2023 issue. First off, there’s a whole load of things going on from the old boy doing his shopping to the decorator sans Health & Safety nonsense (no one got injured did they), but also the shop front which clearly says Dickinson & Adams. They, to me as a child, were a car dealership on the corner of Leagrave Road, Luton. So, very simple question, is that Park Street opposite the Tech College? I feel sure it is. The Volvo was simple. Those Luton Grey bricks are such a giveaway although I hadn’t realised the factory units in the distance had been there quite that long. Tony Welch…

Back in the April issue, Classic & Vintage Commercials called in on Jamie Newton, a Norfolkbased enthusiast who has, over the past decade, assembled a rather remarkable collection of preserved lorries. In that issue, we looked at Jamie’s Fords and his solitary AEC. This time we’re moving on to consider the three Leylands. To recap briefly, Jamie is now in his early fifties, comes from a farming background and his initial preservationbased interest was vintage tractors; plus a 7½ tonner for ‘tractor transport’. He has, though, “always liked lorries”, and in the past decade he has finally found himself in a position to put that enthusiasm into practice. But once he did start, he found it rather hard to stop, and over the past decade he has assembled a collection…

Last month we looked at Ford Thames Trader models made as toys whilst the real truck was in production. From the 1990s onwards, new diecast models were released intended for adult collectors. CORGI Corgi produced a new 1/50 scale diecast Thames Trader casting which appeared in many different guises over several years. This had the Mk2 cab, usually with TRADER lettering across the middle of the grille (although on some early models this was not applied). Earlier issues generally tended to be rather more basic than later ones. A typical early issue was a box van in Corgi’s Golden Oldies range in red and yellow Heinz 57 Varieties livery, Model No. 19303, issued to celebrate Corgi’s 40th anniversary in 1996. The grille was painted silver but without any badges or…

When I was scouring the Continent with Charles Fontaine for brewery transport stories and pictures for our book we came across a marvellous stone statue of a 1920s lorry carrying barrels at Anchor Brewery in Schiltigheim in Northern France. The carved vehicle was finely detailed and resembled a Willème of the type created from wartime Liberty chassis. I hadn’t appreciated how popular British beer had once been on the Continent and had assumed that all our exports had been of IPA to hot colonies. I suppose that an early indication of its spread was given in Edouard Manet’s well-known 1882 painting of the bar at the Folies Bergères that depicts two bottles of Bass on the counter. In honour of this, we’ll show a picture of Whitbread lorry distribution in…