Big Read: Bob Bell's First Jeep
My first real Jeep - a Ford GPW, registered as HRO 443
The Exchange and Mart came out every Thursday. It was a popular publication and was to be found at any newsstand, and in its peak years, its circulation was over 350,000. It started out in 1868 and was the world’s first classified ad magazine. It ceased to be printed in 2009 and is now a major online presence, specialising in cars and motor vehicles.
Thursday was thus the major day of the week, and a quick trip to a newsstand was de rigeur, a weekly act driven by a panting compulsion. I had a close friend, Dave Turvey, who was also of the jeep inclination, and who had also owned a Champ at the same time Brad and I were bouncing around the countryside in one, and now he was also in London, and working with me in the warehouse at Island Records. Together we’d scrutinize the jeep ads. The section included Land Rovers, Austin Gipsies, Austin Champs and jeeps, mainly ex-military Willys and Ford jeeps from WW2. The Willys were known as MBs, and Fords as GPWs. They were pretty much identical, and all the parts were interchangeable. And there were a lot of them in the UK. There was a dealer in West Hampstead in North London, Metamet Ltd, that dealt in parts and also sold the vehicles now and then. Back in the fifties, they had also modified them for civilian life, offering several different versions, such as a shooting brake, an estate car, a saloon and so forth.
I followed up on a handful of ads. One was a Willys offered at thirty pounds, but ‘needed a bit of work’. I drove a few miles outside of Willesden, to a small village, and knocked at the door of a large house. A ruddy-faced man opened it and said, ‘Oh, about the jeep is it?’ And led me around the house to a large field. At the far end was the rustiest vehicle I had ever seen … I glumly looked it over. It looked as if it had been garaged underwater. Seeing my reaction, the owner admitted, ‘Yeah, ’tis a bit rusty, no doubt about it, but it did have 40lbs of oil pressure when we towed it back here’. Looking under it, over it and around it, there was not a speck of paint to be seen. Even the springs looked like they were one solid mass of rust.
I muttered my apologies … ‘Sorry, but I really was looking for something that didn’t need quite so much work’, with an involuntary accent on the ‘quite’.
After two or three similar sallies, I found a 1943 Ford GPW advertised for seventy pounds, at a farm in Hertfordshire, to the northwest of London. Dave and I drove out there on a Saturday to inspect it. It was all there but had been modified a bit. It had a wooden framed hard top bolted to it, with a tailgate and an extended rear bumper, making the vehicle about six inches longer than standard. The front seats had been removed, and replaced with a wide plank covered in foam and vinyl - the seat back being a similar construction. This arrangement meant that three could now sit in the front, although the middle passenger had to twist his or her legs to avoid the gear shifts. The doors had windows that rolled up and down, and the rear windows were on sliders. The top was plywood, bent to a pleasing forward-looking downward curve, covered in tarred canvas. It looked quite distinctive and had been well designed and executed, obviously by a real coach builder.
‘Does it run’? ‘Well, I think it does, but it is really low on oil’ was the answer. It is a sign of my abysmal mechanical ignorance that I demanded to hear it run before buying it, and so the farmer hooked up his tractor to it, and pulled us around the farmyard, with the jeep in second gear. Sure enough, it started, missed a bit, and then ran, albeit a little roughly.’ That’s enough’, shouted the worried farmer, ‘don’t wanna blow a bearing’ and I shut it off.
We haggled over the price. I didn’t want to pay more than 60 pounds. Ultimately he relented, but on condition he kept the battery that was in it and substituted it for a weird and very ancient 6-volt battery in some kind of wooden case. I handed over the money and told him I’d arrange for a tow truck to come and collect it, as it was obviously in no condition to make a seventy or eighty-mile drive to Hemel Hempstead.
Dave and I drove home in a glorious daze.
It was delivered to a lock-up garage, a mile or two from my flat in Hemel Hempstead, which I had rented for the express purpose of parking it, and after the delivery, I spent several hours looking at it. From the front, from the back, from each side, and then lying on my back underneath it. And then sat in it, turning the steering wheel back and forth, shifting gears, engaging four-wheel drive and the low range. Opened the glove box and sniffed the oily smell, rummaging through an assortment of old receipts, a couple of spark plugs, an empty cigarette packet, and the logbook.
The jeep was grimy and greasy, but the frame and the body were in good shape, straight, and relatively rust-free. The first item to be tackled was the removal of the top, which was difficult, but not impossible. It was heavy but with the help of Dave, the two of us unbolted it and at the risk of incurring multiple hernias, managed to lift it clear of the jeep and put it in the rear of the garage. That had required muscle and demolition - certainly not any mechanical skill. We topped up the motor with oil and cranked it with the tired and ancient battery. It fired and caught, but idled roughly and erratically, and died.
During the preceding weeks, consumed by jeep fever, I had stumbled upon a book by Bart Vanderveen titled ‘The Jeep’. Published by Warne, in conjunction with something called The Olyslager Auto Library, it was one of the very few books about jeeps then available. It, and ‘The Observer’s Book of Military Vehicles’, became frequently thumbed sources of information. And then Dave and I discovered the All Wheel Drive Club. Whether it was from a notice tacked on the wall at Metamet, or from an ad in the Exchange and Mart I cannot remember. It’s unimportant anyway. What was important was that we started to attend their monthly meetings in Surrey, in the upstairs room in a pub in Redhill. My membership number was 60.
We were ecstatic to learn that each month a talk was given by none other than the revered Vanderveen, whose status had by now ascended to guru-like supremacy. Never mind the fact that neither of us really understood the finer points of his lectures, the mechanical and scientific attributes of the vehicles he described often being way past our comprehension … just to be in his presence was enough. We were quite confident that the knowledge would ultimately be absorbed, osmosis-like, as the weeks went by. The fellow members were an odd mixture. Bankers, gardeners, lawyers, mechanics, painters and laborers… all united by an unstinting appreciation of four-wheel drive. Some came in their business suits, others in oily coveralls … and all hushed when the oracle Vanderveen gave forth.
I mentioned my recent purchase to one of the members, owning up to the fact that I just didn’t have the knowledge, the tools, or most important of all, the foggiest idea of how to get the vehicle roadworthy. ‘Aha, you need to speak to Ed’, was the response and he took me by the arm and introduced me to a young man with an earnest demeanor, a man who radiated knowledge, who listened to my description of the garage-bound jeep in grave silence, nodding, brows occasionally furrowing, and then, when I had finished, said. “Well, sounds like it needs a valve job and a tune-up. If you can get it to my place, I could do all that for you.” He wrote down his address and gave me his phone number. ‘Ed’s the name … gimme a buzz when you’ve arranged the delivery … I’m there all the time.”
Simple as that.
Next door to Music House, the home of Island and Trojan Records, and the Musicland chain of record stores, at the bottom of Neasden Lane, was a garage. They serviced the company cars and vans, and just why I didn’t have them take care of the jeep I have no idea, none whatsoever. Most possibly because in my naivety, I probably thought that only a ‘jeep guy’ should work on it, that it was such a specialized vehicle that an ‘ordinary mechanic’ wouldn’t know where to start. Complete nonsense, of course, and in hindsight, it would have been a far, far better arrangement had I taken it there. But I didn’t - I paid for a tow truck which arrived at the lock-up in Hemel Hempstead, loaded the jeep, and set off for Ed’s place in deepest Surrey. Dave and I followed in my company car, and we arrived at Ed’s a few miles from Redhill. It turned out that Ed’s abode belied his humble auto-mechanic image, and was a large Georgian house set back from the road, hidden by mature hedges, and a copse of large beech trees.
There were a couple of jeeps parked beside the garage, and a large object concealed under a large olive-drab tarpaulin.
Ed appeared from a garage at the side of the house, and waved us over … the truck driver backed up to the front of the garage, let down the jeep, unhooked the chains, grinned, and held out his hand. Money was exchanged, and off he rumbled over the drive, the gravel crunching under his tires, out through the gate, and disappeared.
Ed looked the jeep over, his demeanor one of cool professionalism tempered with a certain amount of boyish enthusiasm that could not hide his obvious love of these vehicles. ‘Heck, it’s a lot better than I thought it was going to be.’ He lifted the hood, casting an eye over the engine. ‘Yep, it’s all here, doesn’t look like it has been modified at all’, he said with an air of relieved satisfaction.
‘Shouldn’t take too long … I’ll try and get to it before the end of the week’.
Seeing us gazing at his jeeps, he wandered over to them and gave us a rapid run-down on their history. ‘This one is a Willys, and an early one, a slat grill, see, it’s called that because the radiator grill is made out of slatted steel … they just made a few thousand of these before they started to use the Ford style of stamped steel grills, and this one,’ gesturing to the other one, ‘Well, I know it’s painted in military paint, but actually it is an early civilian one, a CJ2A. Don’t see many of these over here.’
Dismissing it, he strode over to the tarpaulin, and with the air of a carnival barker, raised his voice and assuming a dramatic stance, gave forth with ‘And now Ladies and Gentleman, now, for your further edification, education and utter and boundless enjoyment, here, here ….’ a further pause as he wrestled with the tarp …. ‘Here, Ladies and Gentleman’ … throwing the tarp aside, ‘Here is my Amphib!’
And there it was. An amphibious jeep. Sitting right in front of us. A little battered, a little rusty, in need of some paint, but there it was, there it was in all its glory, a very real and very present amphibious jeep. In the steel, so to speak.
Of course, the saga of Half Safe came up, and of course, Ed was very familiar with the book and knew the guys at Metamet who had aided Ben Carlin, with parts and knowledge as he rebuilt Half Safe after finally arriving in Birmingham in 1952. Indeed Ed seemed to be almost as well informed as Bart Vanderveen on the subject of jeeps, their history and all the associated ephemera that came with them.
We left him later that afternoon in a welter of excitement, heightened by his promise to deliver the jeep to Music House by the end of the following week.
The days went by slowly. We planned to drive down to Somerset immediately after taking delivery of the tuned-up jeep, and two of our fellow workers at Island signed on for the adventure, two Scotsmen as it happened, Rod McClaren and Norman Blythe. Finally, the anticipated day came, and the clock-watching began. No particular time had been set other than ‘some time in the afternoon’ and possibly the vagueness of this arrangement should have given us a little sense of unease. Three o’clock came and went, as did four o’clock. No matter, we had to work until six anyway, but when five o’clock passed, and then six, and still no jeep, a certain anxiety set in. Come six-thirty, work was over, and we retired over the road to the White Hart, to have a beer and continue the wait.
By eight-thirty there was still no sign of Ed and the jeep, which was probably, upon reflection, for the best, because by then beer was being consumed in a quantity that accurately reflected the disappointment of the four would-be adventurers, and by then we all had the conviction that Ed wasn’t going to show that evening. In light of today’s technology, it is impossible to imagine that such a lack of communication was actually possible; the age of the cell phone has changed everything. Back then most of the folks I knew did not have a telephone in their flat or apartment. We had a phone number for Ed, but experience had taught us that either it was either answered by his father who seems to regard all calls for his son to be a waste of his time, or, more likely, the phone just rang unanswered. No answering machines back then. We had spoken to Ed early in the morning, which was when he’d said ‘Sometime in the afternoon’, but after that, nada, zilch, nothing.
Depressed, we left the White Hart for our various homes, the weekends’ adventure reluctantly but inevitably postponed.
A successful phone call the next Monday yielded the dubious information that Ed had run into several problems, that had forced him to delay the delivery. It was hard to determine just what these problems were, and whether they actually involved the jeep or something more mysterious. Indeed, the more we spoke with Ed, the more mysterious things appeared to be. Dates were moved, previously unreported ‘minor mechanical issues’ became a ‘bit more on the major side’, and the projected delivery date was moved up to the coming Friday, and once again plans were set.
Another wrinkle had presented itself, and that was that the jeep was not registered to me. To register it I had to ensure it passed the Ministry of Transport test, the MOT as it was popularly known, for all cars over five years of age. It was an annual test for cars of that vintage, and to register the vehicle, one had to present the MOT certificate along with the certificate of insurance. The obvious resolution of this very ordinary and common situation would have been to have had the jeep delivered, had it MOT’d locally, present the documents to the Registry, and then drive down to Somerset when all the legal niceties had been executed.
Of course, this was far too simple a procedure for us to even envision, so driven were we by the prospect of taking delivery and immediately driving west, into the setting sun, for a weekend of glorious adventures. Immediately, instantly, forthwith, pronto, lickety-split, ask me no questions, don’t waste time querying the why but jump in, turn the key, and be away, wheels a rolling, motoring west, Somerset bound …
And a simple way of circumnavigating the registration issue was to simply book an MOT test in Minehead on Saturday morning. It turned out that it was perfectly legal to drive an unregistered vehicle on the road if one was on the way to an MOT test. The jeep had registration plates of course, HRO 443, it was just that the current fee could not be paid until the MOT was completed. And so without the MOT, the vehicle was technically unregistered. With an ordinary vehicle, a regular car or van, this paranoia would not have been so present, but the fact was that we were planning to drive 180 miles in an old jeep, with no top, no tailgate, and with four long-haired teenagers in it. In the UK in those days, even if it had a blinking, flashing beacon on it, it could not have aroused more attention and been more of an invitation to get pulled over by one of the country’s finest.
It was agreed that right after paying Ed, we’d jump into the jeep on Friday afternoon and motor west. But once again, we reckoned without Ed’s unreliability. It seemed as if the only thing that could be relied upon with Ed was the fact that he couldn’t be relied upon. Another couple of hours spent at the White Horse, fruitlessly waiting, another Friday night of disappointment. First thing Saturday morning, I called the garage in Minehead where the MOT test was scheduled and rescheduled the test for the following week.
Speaking with Ed the following Monday, he apologized for his non-appearance … some long and convoluted tale of visiting relatives, but he did volunteer the fact that the jeep was ready, and why didn’t I just come down and get it? And so it was that I took the following Thursday off, got a ride to Ed’s place, and at last was able to look at the results of Ed’s work. Not really very much to look at, it turned out. He’d replaced the ancient battery with a newer one, not new, but newer, and said he had done a valve job, tuned it up, changed all the oils, greased it, and bled and adjusted the brakes. I handed him the money and he handed me the key.
This was the long-awaited moment. After weeks of waiting, weeks of anticipation, days of expectation tempered by even more days of involuntary procrastination, I was finally in the driver’s seat, key in hand. ‘Yeah, it’s a key start in this one’, said Ed, ‘ really it should have a button on the floor that you push with your foot to engage the starter, but this one got modified along the way’. I had no idea what he was talking about … I had never been in a vehicle that you started with your foot.
I turned the key, and the motor turned. Slowly. ’ Six-volt system’ muttered Ed, ‘they’re always slow like this’. I’d never encountered a six-volt system before either. After a few tortuously slow engine revolutions, the engine fired, and settle into a rough idle. ‘Give it a bit less choke’ advised the mortal who had once been a guru, and the roughness evened out. He showed me what the two levers from the transfer case did … engaging four-wheel drive and low range … and then waved me out of the driveway.
The gravel scrunching under tires, I left Ed standing in front of that huge house and started on the drive back to London, and then on to Hemel Hempstead. It felt strange to be driving with the wheel on the left-hand side, and the steering tended to wander a bit. I found that it took a lot more concentration to drive this jeep than it did Islands’ Ford Escort, and it didn’t go very fast. It wasn’t long before I had a fairly long tail of cars behind me, and when a layby approached, I pulled in to let them go by.
On the outskirts of London, as the light faded and the evening dusk fell, cloaking the road ahead in a deepening gloom, I discovered another aspect of a six-volt system. The headlights were not very bright. I strained to see ahead and soon pulled over to see if there was some kind of problem.
Lifting the hood and peering inside, it was impossible to see much without a flashlight. Compounding the problem was the fact that I had no idea just what I should be looking for anyway. I probably had been there no longer than ten minutes when a young lady appeared from the nearest house and asked if I needed to borrow a flashlight. Whether she was simply prescient, or a genuine Samaritan, or had a husband or boyfriend who poked about the engine compartment of old cars in dark evenings, I hadn't the foggiest idea. But 'Yes, a flashlight would be jolly useful' I answered, and she ran back into the house and moments later reappeared with one.
After several minutes of prying and poking, I could find nothing that indicated anything wrong, no loose wires or dead bulbs. At a loss as what else I might do, I returned the flashlight and thanked the woman for her help, got back into the jeep and resumed the journey home. Driving through London was an adventure, a rather terrifying adventure. Left-hand drive in the gloom of the evening and the density of the traffic became an oft-times heart-stopping experience. The vehicle had no indicators, nor any side mirrors so just the commonplace act of passing a parked car came fraught with danger not just to me but also to all the other drivers sharing the road with me.
It was also very cold. I regretted our haste in removing the top. The only consolation was that having no top definitely improved the visibility, which did mean I could to some very small degree mitigate the lack of mirrors and turn signals, but that advantage was diluted by the rather abysmal steering which tended to wander when I turned my head to look behind. And by God, it was cold, my fingers were numb, and my sports jacket and sweater did nothing to keep out the chill … I might as well have been sitting there naked for all the good they seemed to do.
After what seemed to take hours of navigating London in a state close to terror, I finally pulled up at Music House and parked the jeep in the forecourt, and got into my nice warm Ford Escort, with its heater, mirrors, doors and a top, and drove in luxurious warmth, comfort and safety to Hemel Hempstead and home, ruefully pondering the undeniable fact that these modern vehicles did have an advantage or two.
AI generated image of a Willys Jeep
