With the kind permission of Classic & Sports Car Magazine - Published October 2003 [Page 132-139]

COMMON PEOPLE

What makes a mid-week meeting in Harpenden the best-kept secret in the classic world?

David Evans has a thirst for knowledge

It must be what raves used to be like: a speculative e-mail, a tentative phone call – then a deluge of both on the day, when everyone’s talking about it. The unlikely venue for this unpublicised get-together that dwarfs most formal classic car shows? Harpenden: a quiet, well-to-do Hertfordshire town that becomes motor city one evening every summer.

Classics on the Common started 10 years ago as an extension to a local pub meet, as joint organiser Peter Madden of the Rover P5 Owners’ Club explains: “There were just 25 cars the first year, 125 the next – and it just snowballed from there. Then the council put a drop kerb on the other part of the common, so that we could use that as well.” Last year, even after a biblical downpour, there were 1300. “This year,” adds Madden, “we’ve covered just about every blade of grass in Harpenden.”

They set a new record: more than 1800 cars, for a Wednesday evening event with no formal publicity, just word of mouth. The council is obviously impressed: in April it gave Madden and partner in crime John Tibble of The Carpenters Arms an Award of Merit. “Obviously we have a lot of help from stewards,” Tibble points out, “and wives getting bombarded with phone calls – they start at about Christmas.” It’s in a good cause though – the event raised about £1600 for local charities. Both are mad-keen classic fans: Madden owns a mint 1968 Rover 3.5 Litre Coupé “practical to drive and easily keeps up on the motorway”, while they run in Tibble’s family – he has a lovely Mk2 Jag and a Harley, his daughter Georgina a Viva HC.

“Trouble is,” Tibble adds, surveying the sprawling classic car park, “for a show that’s supposed to be discreet, just look at it. It’s friendly, it’s informal – and it’s heaving at a quarter-past six. And it shouldn’t be. I told the police that most of the cars wouldn’t start arriving until 6:30pm – but they keep getting here earlier.

The local boys in blue give it a qualified thumbs-up, however. “We have a few concerns, because it’s getting bigger,” says Chris Sharwood-Smith, event and contingency planning officer for Hertfordshire Police. “But it’s a fantastic event.” Later his specials are effectively marshalling the occasional burn-out – if things get a little over-enthusiastic, they slip a traffic car out into the cruise. Next year they should bring a couple of old Rovers from the Police Museum for authenticity.

Not that there’s any aggro, and residents turn out in droves to admire the display. As local Miles Radcliffe puts it: “You couldn’t have a football match with this amount of people without there being any trouble.”

Even the nearby SAS has it covered – St Albans Scooter Club. “We’ve been coming for about five years,” says club secretary Phil Brown. “We meet at The Silver Cup across the road, check out the common, then convoy over to our favourite watering hole.”

And what’s the most common thing you overhear? “Look at that – my old man used to have one of those. It was a lovely old thing.”

Unlike most classic car meets, there’s no one-make parking or marque pecking order, as Madden explains: “You can park as a group if you like, as long as you arrive together. But the best thing is, you never know what’s going to turn up.” Most prefer the mix ’n’ match approach – Model T Ford overlooking Fiat 128, Aston DB6 cheek by jowl with Sunbeam Rapier, Baja buggy rep back-to-back with Vauxhall Prince Henry. Within minutes of arriving, many are unpacking picnics and settling in for the evening.

Some clubs are together but you suspect, with a Germanic bent, they might have popped a few drip trays down the night before. With a surreal twist, there’s even a bloke scuttling up and down the rows all evening on a Sinclair C5. On the overspill common, within a few cars’ lengths of each other, there’s a fabulous AMC AMX, a Zodiac V8 custom and an Abbott-bodied Bristol 405 drophead. 

Yet it’s not just a local event for local people: there’s a Standard Flying 8 from Switzerland, Aussies who’ve brought their Vauxhalls over for the Centenary and a double-decker driven down by the Aycliffe & District Bus Preservation Society. It’s the last surviving United Bristol – a rolling restoration that the society has owned for more than than 20 years.

Come half-eight, though, and they start to drift away into the night, with the locals lining the main drag. They save the biggest applause for the bus, slowly wending its way back to County Durham – maximum speed: 38mph.

If you only go to one car show, make it Classics on the Common: it’s what having an old motor is all about. And the date for next year? Nobody knows: expect to hear on the day.

In the meantime, we caught up with a few of the regulars at this year’s event. 

George and Barbara Seymour – 1953 Vauxhall Vagabond convertible

“You can’t take a photo with me in my thongs,” says George Seymour looking at his flip-flops. Aussies George and wife Barbara were meant to have done Vauxhall’s centenary tour in their 1937 tourer. “But,” says George, “it suffered a terminal engine failure about a week before it was due to be shipped over. So, with typical Aussie mateship, Neil Heilbrunn, who I’ve known for 30 years and did the trip with his wife Maria in their 30-98, kindly offered me his ’53 Vagabond. It’s quite a rare thing – about 1500 were made by GM Holden for the Australian market, in Wyvern and Velox forms, and between 60 to 100 survive.”

“We’re here by accident really,” explains Barbara. “We heard about this event from the Vauxhall Owners’ Club who’ve been fantastic. What a great show.”

“We did the 1000 Mile Trial around the UK,” says George, “ and just carried on. We’ve done 7500 miles. There’s so much to see here, you’ve hardly got the engine warm and there’s somewhere to stop again. We’ve only had a couple of minor problems: a brake pipe, the starter motor and two flat tyres – both in Wales. I don’t know what they put on the roads over there.”

It ended on a sour note, sadly: “When they loaded Neil’s 30-98 into the container, it was badly damaged.”

Peter Watcham – 1971 Lancia Fulvia 1600HF S2

One Lancia isn’t enough for Peter Watcham, technical director of automotive and

aerospace test rig maker Eland. His daily driver is a personal import Kappa Coupé 20v Turbo, he also has a Beta Coupé Volumex in which he’s done 168,000 miles, still regularly used for track days and rallies, and the mint Fulvia 1600HF that he took on the Via Appia run earlier this year. 

“It was great fun but hard work,” he enthuses. “We took the train from Calais to Nice, then drove around the Riviera and up to Lake Orta, where the rally started. We visited the Lancia Collection in Turin and the Biscaretti Museum, then to Lucca, Pisa, Follonica, toured Rome, then down the Via Appia and up to the ruined temple overlooking Terracina. After that we went back to Rome and followed part of the Mille Miglia route to Prato, just outside Bologna and Piacenza: 2163 miles on its own wheels, plus two train rides and the ferry.”

Just after they returned, they went on a Carpenters Arms tour and straight from that to the Lancia Motor Club’s national rally: “Where, much to our amazement, it won the concours prize for Fulvias – largely, I think, because it had been working quite hard.”

Kerry Schroeder – 1964 Mercedes-Benz 300SE

Harpenden regular Kerry Schroeder, who runs Maintenance Tools & Supplies in nearby Royston, perfectly sums up the evening: “There’s lots of lovely stuff here, and the best bit is that it’s all mixed up together.”

“My cars enjoy a rolling restoration,” he explains, “they’re meant to be used. If you take them off the road you lose interest. The interior on this is a bit ragged, but I take the dog out in it so it won’t be retrimmed just yet. I like my cars to be spot on mechanically though.” Schroeder has owned the gorgeous cabriolet for 16 years: “I’ve always had a passion for the 300 ever since my father bought one in 1968. It encompassed so much technological superiority – the air suspension, the extraordinary aluminium engine derived from the Le Mans car and the disc brakes all round. But it was massively expensive: it cost £5500 new.”

“People are suspicious of the air suspension,” he adds, “because it was rarely set up properly, but get a good one and it gives you such a spectrum of use. You can drive it like a tourer or a sports car and throw it into corners – it’s so responsive.”

“But it’s not a car for the faint-hearted,” he cautions. “Maintenance is involved and parts are expensive, although just about everything is available new from Mercedes. One of the ways I’ve managed to keep it on the road over the years is to acquire various scrap cars and junkers for parts.”

Chris Overton – 1967 TVR 1800s Mk4

Few people were as busy as Chris Overton, one of the marshals. So how do people take being turned away when it’s full? “They’re mostly OK. When they ask about one-make parking you say it’s Hobson’s choice – but that’s the beauty of the event.” The snapper, who photographs cars for a living, has special memories of his now mint 1800S: “As a lad, I had a Saturday job cleaning cars at Barnet Motor Company, the local TVR dealer. Twenty years later, I bought this car which was the demonstrator from when I worked there.”

Overton found the rare Mk4 in 1988 and spent three years rebuilding it with his brother-in-law Neil Pinkstone. “It had been in a garage for 14 years with broken rear suspension,” he recalls. “Fortunately, most of the hard-to-get parts, such as trim, were on it.”

Only 38 were made with right-hand drive but, as Overton puts it: “Quite a lot survive – you can’t get rid of them because the bodies don’t rust, unlike the chassis. The body was bonded on, so the hardest part of restoring the car was cutting it off – a nightmare.

“Since then, touch wood, it’s been reliable. It’s done a couple of Norwich Unions and track days – but the best trips were to the Oldtimer GP at the Nürburgring.”

Leonard and Patricia Boulton – 1959 Jensen 541R

“Diana and Charles had Camilla,” jokes Patricia Boulton with a resigned look towards the gleaming 541R, “and we have the Jensen. At least I know where he is though – in the garage.” “But from there,” husband Leonard chips in, “I’ve got an escape route to the Rose & Crown.”

“This isn’t exactly the Louis Vuitton,” he adds [the car won the classic coupé group there last year], “but that’s not the point. It’s a bit of fun and not too serious.” “And you never know what’s going to turn up,” says Pat, who goes to virtually all the concours events with the Jensen, painted two-tone pink on Richard Jensen’s instruction for the ’59 Earls Court motor show. “One of our best trips was to take the car back to where it started – for lunch at the Dolphin & Anchor Hotel in Chichester.

“It saved the first owner’s life one night. He was caught in a thunderstorm and the front bumper was struck by lightning which bounced on to a metal car because the Jensen’s body is plastic.”

It may be a show regular but, as foundry boss Leonard points out, the late-model triple-carb 541R, which he’s owned since 1981, is still used all-year round to keep it in good working order: “It just takes more work to clean it up in the winter.”

Warren Kennedy – 1916 Talbot 4CY 15/20hp

Local restorer Warren Kennedy has tackled many sports cars over the years, but the imposing Talbot was his first Edwardian. “It was believed to be the first car bought by Qantas,” he explains, “and had a flatbed body because it was used as a mobile workshop from 1918-’28 in the outback where it became known as the Qantas Flyer.”

Apparently, they even carried engines around on it. “It was found in the 1960s but not restored,” he adds, “then much later sold to a guy in Scotland. I bought it, still in pieces, in November 2001 and seven months later did the Liège-Rome-Liège rally a week after finishing it. All it had in period was two seats and the flat back so it needed a rear body in keeping with that, so we decided on a baby balloon car.”

How does it compare to his Riley and Frazer Nashes? “It’s a serious barrel of laughs. In France we were paced at 80mph going down through the forests. We broke three teeth on the pinion gear on the Liège, but fortunately my right-hand man had packed the spare set. Since then, we haven’t put a spanner on it apart from servicing and it’s done about 8000 miles in the past 12 months, including the Ardennes weekend, and the response was amazing at the Talbot Centenary.”

Werner Maurer – 1945 Standard Flying 8

Retired Rothschild Bank manager Werner Maurer drove his charming Standard about 600 miles from Volketswil, Switzerland back to the county where it was first registered for his fourth visit to Classics on the Common. “I started at 5:30 yesterday morning,” he says, “and arrived at about 5:30 this evening.” The drophead coupé completes his trio: “I found my first Standard 20 years ago, a Flying 8 saloon in a barn about 15 miles from my home. It was a car I admired as a boy when one of our neighbours had one. Later I bought a tourer.” Maurer restored the car “down to the last bolt” – doing all of the welding, mechanical and electrical work himself, including making a new wiring loom.

He also visited the widow of its previous owner: “Mrs Cleret was really pleased to see the car in such splendid condition. She called the neighbours and her brother-in-law to come and see it. She always expected a photo, but never believed she would see the car again.” He then took in the International Standard Rally, at which the Flying 8 won five first prizes, including Car of the Show and the Distance Award, and headed home: “The car runs beautifully, cruising at 75kph. On the England tour I covered 1697 miles.” Maurer’s set also includes a ‘48 Hillman Minx, a ‘66 Autobianchi Primula and Fiat Topolinos.

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