Looking back this is my first published story since last November when I popped over to the Cotswolds. It’s not that I have been staying in the Warehouse all that time, but writing about grinding round the M25 in the miserable winter dark and the rain does not make much of a tale.
True, I went to see some lovely people, friends old and new. Lee in Watford sold me some more of his 1:76 scale buses and David in Sevenoaks, who collects gorgeous, mostly 1:18 scale supercars, passed on more of his collection, all of which are appearing on the website at present. The trips to get them though were very dreary and, a few Ferraris and Lamborghinis aside, there was not much on the roads worth telling you about. Nor was there any countryside to describe. I made a trip into Chiswick, and another to Ealing, very dull both of them, with the privilege of paying £12.50 a pop ULEZ charge.
I did have some welcome visitors to the Kingston Bagpuize warehouse. It actually makes a pleasant day out to come here as we are in pretty countryside and there is a very good farm shop and garden centre nearby (Millets Farm) with a cafe that is well worth a visit. Meg the Little Wheels cavapoo loves to go there as they have farm animals, rabbits and hens which she can terrorise (or thinks she can).
Colin has been bringing me carloads of his collection which he leaves as credit on our system against future buys. This works well for him as he is re-aligning his collection away from 1:43 scale cars towards 1:76 scale buses.
Edwin and his wife called in before Christmas with a good sized delivery of very fine models. The re-release Corgi Toys you will have seen on the website recently came from Edwin. Also very welcome were the chocolates his wife brought for the team and the dog treats which she brought for Meg. Meg loved them, much nicer than the supermarket fare she normally has to put up with.
I also received some nice products by courier. Mark in Inverness sent me another consignment of his finely modelled 1:43 and 1:18 scale cars. Mark is a very experienced and discerning collector so I always look forward to receiving stock from him. He favours Nordic cars, Saab and Volvo, so look out for more of those in the web store,
So – the winter hibernation is coming to a close, the whiteboards in the office are full of deals to be done and it looks like I have upcoming trips to Hampshire, West London, and eastern England, the sellers have mostly accepted my offers, very fair offers all of them.
Looking back over my reports of trips out in the van it is exactly a year since my first one describing a trip to buy old Dinky Toys from a Vicar in Herefordshire. Me and the van have covered a lot of ground since then.
The van, by the way, is in fine form, it tripped over on to 150,000 miles a couple of weeks ago, 90,000 of which have been driven by me in the last five years, and it feels good and strong for another 150,000, so on February 1st we both headed west for Plymouth to see Des.
I think I’ve only visited Plymouth once before, nearly 30 years ago, to catch a ferry to France for a family holiday. As it would have been in the middle of the night with three fractious kids in the car to deal with, I have no memory of it. Some things are best forgotten.
At this time of year it is always easier going west on my trips as the low sun is behind you both ways. Winter trips to the east, if the weather is clear, mean you have the sun in your eyes all day long.
As I had a three and half hour journey to Plymouth from Abingdon I made a very early start at 5:15am so it was still way off dawn. It’s hard to spot classics in the dark but heading along the M4 near Swindon I was overtaken by a very distinctive shape. There is no mistaking the squat rear profile of the Mk1 Renault 5 Turbo with those huge rear arches.
This car is by IXO in 1:43 scale.
The first generation Renault 5 came on the scene in 1972 and remained in production for 12 years until it was replaced in 1984 by the very similar second generation car marketed in France as the ‘Supercinq’. My wife and I owned two of the second gen cars which we liked very much, tough and reliable, they were excellent family second cars while the children were small.
The Turbo was a whole other proposition. It was based on the first generation car and had a turbo-charged engine mounted where the rear seats should be. This turned a front wheel drive shopping trolley into a mid-engined fire breathing rear wheel drive rally car, which achieved some little success in the era of the Lancia Stratos and the Audi Quattro.
The sky was beginning to lighten as I passed by Bristol and joined the M5 and by the time I got to Bridgewater it was full daylight. It was then I spotted my second classic.
This Citroen 2CV Dolly is by Corgi Toys in 1:36 scale, not from Corgi’s finest hour as they were about to go bust when this came out. Those wheels are horrible.
The car I spotted was a Dolly in cream and burgundy and looked to be very nicely restored. The first Renault 5 my wife and I owned replaced a 2CV, this would be in 1984 just before we were married. Our, or rather my, 2CV was the vanilla version rather than the Dolly or Charleston. It was a ‘Club’ in jade green. The Club trim gave you square headlamps, striped cloth seats like deck chairs and the roof folded from the front rather than rolled up, meaning you could open it from inside the car. You could not open it while moving though as the wind would catch it like a sail and it would be ripped out of your hand.
The 2CV lasted about two weeks after we moved in together. The idea was that my soon to be wife would use the 2CV as a local runabout while I drove my company Cavalier SRi. That idea lasted as long as her first trip to Sainsbury’s, She managed the weird gate on the gear shift and the umbrella handle hand brake, it was when her foot went through the rusty floor and then the boot lid came off in her hand that her mind was made up. A week or so later a nice new Supercinq was sitting on the drive. I always liked the 2CV.
I continued past the end of the M5 onto the A38 Devon Expressway and started to enjoy the Devon countryside, although we are still in the depths of winter it was a lovely sunny day with a promise of spring to come. I turned off the Devon Expressway and headed into Plymouth. Like every other town I visit these days it is surrounded by new housing development.
I like to pick up on the history of the places I visit however in Plymouth’s case it seems to be less about what happened there as what people left there to do elsewhere, in ships mostly.
I suppose the city’s most famous early starring role was in repelling the Spanish Armada in 1588. It was from Plymouth that Sir Francis Drake led the British fleet which over the next several days defeated the Spanish. As ever in warfare it is technological breakthroughs which can prove decisive. This goes right back to the invention of stirrups which allowed archers to fire from horseback to I suppose in our times, the use of cheap drones to destroy expensive capital weapons like ships and tanks. In the 16th Century the British developed fast and nimble warships, bristling with canon, which began the British Navy’s domination of the seas for the next several centuries. The Spanish ships were big and unwieldy and their commanders were chosen because they were born into the right noble families. The British commanders tended to be very able pirates who were much better seamen. They were incentivised by being allowed to keep much of what they looted from the Spanish ships.
Some of the early British settlements in North America set out from Plymouth, in 1587 Drake led an expedition to Roanoake, in what became North Carolina, returning with maize, tobacco and potatoes apparently. The settlement he left there though was gone without trace when another expedition visited a few years later. It was also from Plymouth in 1620 that the Pilgrim Fathers set sail.
Less heroic was the City’s early involvement with the trans-Atlantic slave trade led from Plymouth by Sir John Hawkins. The Spanish had been looting gold and silver from Central and South America for a number of years by the end of the 16th Century and after taking all they could find they went after the mines which were its source. By this time they had laid waste the ancient civilisations they found there and they could find few indigenous people to work the mines, mostly they had been slaughtered, died from unfamiliar European diseases to which they had no immunity or simply run away. There was a ready market in slaves in north and west Africa and these began to be shipped across the Atlantic to work the Spanish mines. A horrible business finally brought to an end by the British Navy three hundred years later.
As I approached Des’ home I spotted a rare sight for the suburbs of a provincial city. A Lamborghini Huracán.
This is not a normal car for the school run (except of course if it is a school like the one where my wife works, where the dads try to out-do each other with posh cars when they come to pick up the boys at the end of term). However there it was queueing up at the traffic lights. I tend to spot Lambos and Ferraris on the M25, in the sticks, not so much, what a treat. The model is a Japanese hand-build by Make-Up in 1:18 scale.
I had agreed to buy Des’ collection of 1:43 scale cars which he had built up over the past 30 years. He was a contracting software engineer back in the day, being sent all over the world to work on IBM mainframes. A lot of his collection had come from these trips.
When I handle models in a collection I get a feel for the way they have been looked after by the state of the plastic cases. Des’ models were in smooth and shiny cases which although up to 30 years old, felt like new. In addition to the eclectic mixture in the picture above there is a large collection of Solido and Brumm cars. We will enjoy working with this collection.
On leaving Plymouth I headed back along the Devon Expressway, where a couple of treats were in store. the first was a Rover P6 in Almond Yellow.
Like the car in the photo it was a 3.5 litre V8 with the spare mounted on the boot. it was in very shiny and fully restored condition. I was very jealous. I would love to own one of these. I test drove one back in the seventies and chose a Volvo instead, a serious regret on my part.
The model is in 1:18 scale by Modelcar Group.
Then came a Standard. I only got a fleeting glimpse across the central reservation but that shape is very distinctive.
The model in the picture above is a Flying 12 in 1:43 scale by Somerville in white metal. I think the car I saw had a chrome centre to the grille so it was not exactly this car, but close enough. This is a very rare sight, especially on a day when there are no classic car shows going on round about.
At Exeter I was presented with a choice. My next destination was in Somerset not far from Shepton Mallet, and I could go back up the M5 and then head east or take a more direct route on the A roads. Guess which I took.
I followed the A30 for Honiton and thereafter the A303 to Ilchester. The A303 is a favourite road of mine, not just because it passes Stonehenge much father east, but because between Honiton and Ilchester it runs along a ridge with superb views to the north. In fact it is very scenic right through into Berkshire. Despite the lovely sunshine the countryside was still in its winter sleep, nothing is happening yet in the fields. The trees are bare and the grass has a grey cast; tired and waiting for Spring. There are signs in the hedgerow banks though, with clumps of snowdrops poking through and showing little drifts of white, that Spring will be along soon.
I headed north up the A37 for Shepton Mallet passing the West of England Show Ground where in the past I have been to Land Rover shows and toy fairs. Shepton Mallet has been an important town on major routes for hundreds of years sitting as it does on the Fosse Way. This is the ancient Roman Road crossing southern England west to east.
It is also home to Showerings Cider Mill which sits in a narrow valley next to the river Sheppey. This was the first of a number of cider producers I was to see on this journey.
Next stop was Chilcompton where I was to meet Bob. He and his wife have recently downsized and are looking to free up some space, so they had decided it was time to sell his collection of very nice 1:43 scale cars.
These are just the sort of models we really like at Little Wheels. They are good quality and well modelled examples of interesting cars. In addition to the variety above there was a set of the Panini Formula 1 cars.
We enjoyed a good long chat about his models in the lovely warm sunshine in Bob’s front garden, where we were joined by his neighbour, who just happened to have a box of Eddie Stobart trucks in his garage that were looking for a new home. We were able to do a deal which made us both happy and I got an extra set of models which I was not expecting.
Chilcompton sits high in the Mendips and from there I headed toward Weston Super Mare, dropping down on to the Somerset Levels through The Coombe, a pretty and meandering chalk gorge, like a miniature version of nearby Cheddar Gorge.
On the way I passed through the village of Sandford which is dominated by the huge Thatchers cider works. As you drive through the village you catch sight of large factory buildings set behind the houses, all painted dark green in an attempt to make them less conspicuous, it mostly works, but in the end it is a little village with a massive factory inside it.
As I exited the village I spotted my last classic of the day parked in an open garage at the side of the road.
It was an Austin Maestro, one of British Leyland’s last brave attempts to produce a car that the public wanted to buy. The model is also from the last days of a dying manufacturer, Corgi Toys. It is supposed to have some electronics but I’ve never been able to work out what they do. This was to reflect the fact that the full size car had a synthesised voice which talked to the driver. The model is of a Turbo, the car I saw was a more mundane variant.
From here I was to travel cross-country to the village of Puxton where I had arranged to meet another Andrew. However on the way Google Maps decided it was time to have a little fun with me. The roads kept getting narrower until there was grass growing up the middle and at one point I met a car where we just could not pass. On one side of the road the verge was collapsed into deep greasy mud and on the other was a massive drainage ditch, the Levels are in the end a drained marsh. I had to back up using mirrors along what felt like a knife edge, with perils either side of me, for about 200 yards until we could pass. Google maps should have an ‘avoid stupid roads’ feature.
Andrew was waiting for me at Puxton with a small collection of Corgi planes which belonged to his son. We quickly did the deal and I loaded the van for an easy trip home.
All was going well, I was heading up the A34 in South Oxfordshire thinking that although I’d been on the road for more than 11 hours it had been a good trip, when everything stopped. I was almost home and a closed lane meant I sat there for another half an hour waiting to get through. In the end it was 12 hours on the road, but I had a van full of excellent products.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s ramble, if you did please scroll to the bottom of the page and click the ‘Like’ button.
What’s in the Van? – Home
30th November – A Quick Trip to the Cotswolds
9th November – Southampton and a Visit From The Press
2nd November – All Around the Big Smoke
19th October – Stonnall & Bicester
4th/5th October – Berkhamstead & Poole
21st/22nd September – Stratford & Farnham
20th September – Duesenberg Coupe Simone
14th September – Croydon
10th September – New Romney
24th August – Shrewsbury
17th August – Airedale, Gainsborough & Leicester
3rd August – Bedford
27th July – Worthing
13th July – Chatteris, Hinckley & Nuneaton
6/7th July – Magor & Westbury
15/16th June – Newcastle upon Tyne
8th June – Bournemouth, Ringwood & Bracknell
1st June – Diss, Stewartby & Brackley
25th May – Rickmansworth
12th May – Kingston & Fleet
4th May – Witham
21st April – Staines
12th April – Dereham
6th April – Warminster
30th March – Doncaster, Gainsborough & Peterborough
18/22nd March – Bedford & Epsom
15/16th March 2023 – London, Hemel Hempstead & Stafford
8th March 2023 – Warwick & Solihull
5th March 2023 – Huntingdon & Bedford
23rd February 2023 – Little Wheels Museum
16th February 2023 – Devon & Dorset
9th February 2023 – Nottinghamshire & Lincolnshire
2nd February 2023 – Gloucester & Hereford
What's in the Van? 
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