Bob Bell: on Champs and Jeeps
When Martin Hesp first talked to me about writing for this website, I told him that I was rather busy rebuilding an early Willys jeep, and wasn’t sure if I had the time to write. He was, I recall, quite dismissive, saying I should be writing and not just ‘doing up old jeeps’. It is not for me to say who is right or wrong in this instance, other than to say that I enjoy doing both, but this particular old jeep had been taking up space in my garage for years and years, and so I really, really needed to bring it back to life thus not only justifying my storing it for god knows how many long years, but also to put a long-postponed project to rest. Then, maybe then, I might get back to writing.
It’s kind of hard to know just when all this jeep madness started. Born as I was just after the war, life was defined by growing up in its aftermath. My family, their families, and all of their friends and neighbors spoke of it constantly. Not that it was the sole subject of discussion, indeed, far from it, but it was a constant, a reference point, as in ‘before the war’, ‘since the war’ etc. And as I grew up, it was the focus of films, radio plays, books and magazines. And of course, comics. Illustrated tales of derring-do, heroic stories of heroism, lantern-jawed muscle-bound figures striding fearlessly into harm’s way, and emerging unscratched, unbloodied, firm of resolve and clear of conscience.
Visiting my grandparents in London we’d walk past rows of bomb sites, the houses on either side of entire streets flattened, just piles of blackened bricks among the nettles and brambles. A drive in the country would take us past pillboxes in hedgerows, odd-looking concrete buildings, and big fields that mum or dad would point out as being an RAF airfield just a few years before.
My friends and I never played Cowboys and Indians, but rather British and Germans, chasing each other with toy guns, or more often, teaming up together to fight imaginary Germans. And when we weren’t doing that it was playing with toy soldiers, toy tanks, lorries and jeeps. And as I grew older, reading books on World War Two, of which there seemed to be an endless and growing supply. I frequented Green’s, a grubby, dark and poky newsagent just off High Street in Winchester. Mr. Green was a gloriously shabby man, usually wearing an old moth-eaten woolen cardigan, horn-rimmed glasses, and aided and abetted by his mother, an aging old crone with white hair going yellow, matching a mouthful of broken and equally yellow teeth. She seemed, to my young eyes, to be way north of a hundred. The counter took up about two-thirds of one side of the shop, the top piled high with magazines and newspapers. On the wall behind were shelves of cigarette cartons, tobacco tins and cigarette papers. Mr. Green inevitably had a soggy brown stub of a roll-up in his mouth. Bound newspapers lay in bundles about the floor, blocking the way to overflowing bookshelves crammed with paperbacks. There were books everywhere, mainly used, although there was a small case with new ones, tomes that rarely seemed to get bought.
On the pavement outside, there were wooden cases on each side of the door, cases that were moved inside the shop each night. These were jammed with books, hardbacks with and without dust covers, and paperbacks, paperbacks by the score. Penguin, Ace, Pan, Hodder and Stoughton … some dogeared, others scribbled on, here a missing back cover, there a creased and torn front cover … and the cover art ranged from the austere early Penguins, with their standardized orange and black designs to the stupendously lurid Ace and Pans, the crime and thriller genres featuring invariably buxom young ladies in a state of semi-undress projecting either terror or come-hither seduction in their eyes, and the rows of war novels, memoirs of those who endured and survived, tales of those who didn’t, recounting of time spent as prisoners of war in Germany and in the East under the Japanese, spine tingling titles such as ‘Camp on Blood Island’, mingled amongst ‘The Colditz Story’ and ‘The Wooden Horse’ … I’d stand there carefully checking the titles, examine the covers, opening pages at random, and then finally selecting which ones were worthy of my pocket money, take them inside and hand my money over to Mr Green or his mother, and then hurry home, aglow with the purchase, bubbling inside with anticipation at the evening’s read.
My bedroom became filled with books of all kinds. Christmas usually brought a smattering of classics, Dickens, Dumas, DeFoe, and Scott, whose works nestled up against a growing collection of paperbacks by Leslie Charteris, chronicler of Simon Templar, the Saint. Next to Charteris was Crompton, Richmal Crompton, who wrote of the adventures of William Brown, the eternal schoolboy, whose adventures never ceased to amuse. Richmal, whom, I had learned to my astonishment, was a woman, had very neatly nailed the essence of boyhood.
It was the war books, however, that took up most of the space. A huge twenty-volume collection of weekly dispatches put out by The Times during WW1 took up one long shelf, as did a series of magazines issued by HM Government during WW2, mainly propaganda themes items such as ‘Bloody but Unbowed’ about the London Blitz, with a black and white photo of St Paul’s Cathedral obscured by smoke during an air raid.
So this was the theme, or at least the background, to my growing up in the UK under the long shadow of WW2. The arrival of Bill Haley in 1954 broadened my worldview, and as the years went by, the games of British and Germans grew old, and the fascination and attraction of Rock n Roll grew. By the early sixties, the WW2 books were sold or given away, and writers such as Kerouac, Sillitoe, Miller and Lawrence took their place.
Summers spent in Minehead, West Somerset, working summer jobs washing dishes and flipping burgers, introduced me to a shaggy-haired black leather jacketed lunatic with a mad sense of humour, ironic and twisted, whose name was Brad, and together we spent hours discussing the finer points of making a campfire, how sensibly insane Zen Buddhism was, and how ridiculous the modern world was. Brad rode a motorbike, whereas I didn’t learn to drive until I was 18, and had spent much of my teenage years cycling, both as a sport and as a simple, cheap and available mode of transport. Cars, I thought, weren’t very interesting, although I did admire the ex-War Department lorries that I would encounter when out on the bike. The attraction was ill-defined at first, but part of it was their utilitarian looks, the lack of chrome and flash, the sense of sturdy usefulness, a certain modesty born of pride in their obvious adaptability to all terrains. To Brad and I, during the first stirrings of counter-cultural consciousness - we were reading Kerouac and Ginsberg, after all - vehicles like these, stripped of their military implications, were the antithesis of ‘modern consumer rubbish’, which phrase epitomized our anathema of current society. No need to add that Bob Dylan was on the turntable too.
Back in Winchester after the summer of 1964, I returned to Eastleigh Tech to resume my A levels, with a vague idea of becoming a journalist. There was a new influx of students that year, among them was Norman Reader, a chap from Kenya, who had moved back to England, his parent’s home country, borne back to the home country on the winds of change blowing through the remnants of the British Empire. We became friendly and one lunchtime he said to me, ‘Bob, come and take a look at this’ and led me out to the college parking lot. He walked over to an ex-army jeep, the canvas top down and the windshield lying flat on the bonnet. It was a dusty olive drab, with canvas seat cushions, and non-directional tires, the type we called track grips. Not only did the vehicle have an undefinable yet very real attraction for me, but also, to my chagrin and regret, had the same effect upon the then girl of my dreams, Marguerite, whom I was attempting to woo. From that day forth, Marguerite was to be seen seated in the passenger seat of that old Willys, a dreamy smile on her face, and those long flowing black locks streaming behind her, undulating in the breeze. Prior to the arrival of this jeep, Marguerite and I would often walk the few miles back to Winchester from Eastleigh, following the course of the River Itchen, enjoying the late summer glow through the scented meadows, resting now and then at a stile, halfway over, to share a view, a thought, a smile, amidst the ever-present hum and drone of insects, and the very fecundity of our surroundings … that indefinable and eternal feeling of forever summer, that summer which is forever youthful, forever golden, forever forever in our minds, an icon of times long gone by, winking at us from a faraway distance.
And then Norman and his jeep had arrived, and those walks and Marguerite really were things of the past.
By 1965, so was college, and by late August I was working in London, in a dream job at Island Records that lasted a scant ten months or so before I was laid off during a financial crisis at the company, and so, drifting back to Somerset in the summer of 1966, I met up with Brad again. We took to reading the Exchange and Mart, a weekly magazine full of classified advertisements, selling anything and everything. We noted that week after week, the Books section contained ads from a gentleman requesting ‘Anything by Doris Lessing’, while another section contained an ad by one Harold Bates, advertising his invention that enabled your car to run on chicken shit. Yes, you read that quite correctly, chicken shit. It was some kind of manure converter that Harold had perfected, and now he was selling it to the world at large. This was way before The Whole Earth Catalog, of course, but this was the way the wind was blowing. And then there was the ‘Jeeps’ section …. This we perused with both avidity and a growing sense of wonder. The war had been over by twenty years or so by then, and surplus jeeps were everywhere. And so were Austin Champs.
After the war, the British Rover company made their version of a jeep, the Land Rover, which had started as a prototype built on a Willys MB chassis - the wartime jeep - but the British Army wanted a vehicle that was designed specifically for their needs, and they turned to Austin. The result was the Austin Champ. A four-wheel drive vehicle with a Rolls Royce B40 engine, waterproofed electrics, and a unique transmission that with the flip of one lever, enabled the vehicle to be driven backward as fast as it could go forward. While I understood that such a feature might be rather useful if one encountered the enemy blocking the way forward on a very narrow country lane where there would be no room nor time to turn around, it did seem a bit defeatist, to say nothing of the terror of getting up to fifth, and top gear, driving backward at 80mph.
The army did purchase a few thousand Champs but encountered severe mechanical problems with the rear axle, which was directly related to the reverse gear function. Maintenance costs ballooned, questions were asked in Parliament, and not all that long after the introduction of the Champ, it was replaced by the Land Rover, and the Champs were sold off as surplus. And ads for them began to appear in the Exchange and Mart. Brad and I examined the ads with interest. One that ran week after week exhorted readers to ‘Be Thankful. Be Wise. Derek Adams will answer all your Austin Champ needs’ and gave an address in Little Gaddesden, near Berkhampstead in Hertfordshire. Mr. Adams’ ad stated he had what appeared to be an unlimited supply of ex-War Department Austin Champs for sale, Austin Champs straight from the army, never registered in the civilian world. Champs with low mileage, Champs with good rear ends, Champs that would run forever. Underwater even.
Brad called Mr. Adams and a deal was struck, and an arrangement was made that he would buy one of his Austin Champs. The date was fixed and Brad and I left Minehead on a Thursday afternoon to hitch-hike to Little Gaddesden, a journey of approximately one hundred and eighty miles.
We were teenagers, be-smitten by ’The Dharma Bums’, the austere holiness of hitch-hiking as the most ethical means of traveling, and the appealingly spartan mode of sleeping under the stars, tentless, just a down sleeping bag and a groundsheet. A book that we had recently discovered was a book published in 1903 by one Harry Roberts, ’The Tramp’s Handbook’. This glorious guide to vagabondage extolled the virtues of the roaming life, with useful hints on how to survive financially along life’s roadways by learning knife sharpening, how to repair pots and pans, and to survive physically by learning how to cook over open fires and many other essential requisites of the open air life. Bedazzled by these possibilities, we had persuaded a blacksmith friend of ours to fashion for us a set of iron cooking sticks: two stakes designed as uprights with crooks at the top to support a horizontal bar from which could be suspended a billy can. These were our pride and joy. We both had feather and down ex-army sleeping bags, laid out over a rubberized ground sheet and then rolled into cylinders and fastened with a belt at each end, and with a further belt passing from one end to the other which was slung over the shoulder. Spare socks were rolled up inside the sleeping bag, together with a bottle of wine and a haggis - a gift from a friend who had recently returned from Scotland - and the cooking sticks inserted between the two belts, thus stiffening the rolled cylinder. The two vertical sticks went on one bag, the horizontal stick on the other. To the lower belt was suspended a billy can and on the other bag one of those sets of aluminum three-in-one cooking sets. We had learned from another book on tramping - ‘Diary of a Supertramp’ by W. H. Davies, that such a bedroll was termed a bindle in the USA, and that the gentleman - for of course they were mainly men - who toted them were bindlestiffs. Mr. Davies, a Welshman, had spent much of his life tramping in the UK and the US, and indeed lost a leg riding the rails in the US.
And so we set off, walking out of Minehead, on the road to Williton, then Bridgwater, and then further east across the middle of southern England, not just heading to our destination with Mr Adams, but as pilgrims on our way our very Destiny itself - an Austin Champ.
We had learned and adopted the lessons of ’The Tramps’ Handbook’ only too well. We were not only tramps in our imagination, we also looked the part. We were dressed in the usual faded and ragged denim jeans, the grubby combat jackets which were back then worn by the lumpen proletariat. Hitch-hiking is never a very easy way of getting around, and when there are two of you the odds against you both getting a ride are necessarily increased. Assuming the demeanor of a couple of scruffy tramps immediately quadruples those odds.
We arrived in Williton by early evening, having walked the entire eight miles. Eight miles of interminable clink, clank, clink, clank of the cooking pots banging against the cooking sticks. The early jocularity of the adventure had turned to a grim silence. The road had been narrow, very narrow in places, flanked by tall hedgerows, no verges, the bottoms of the hedges bare red dirt from where the wheels of cars and trucks constantly scraped and chafed - the kind of road any responsible person would advise against walking along. It was, in fact, extremely dangerous, and car after car apprised us of this fact by angrily laying on their horns. We had tried a multitude of ways of raising our thumbs, describing parallelograms in the air, jerky angled slashes, long low sweeps in unison, attempts to summon the gods of good fortune, the drivers of happy countenance, the samaritans of compassion with their warm leather seats.
No rides had appeared. Clink, clank, clink, clank. Honk, honk, clink, clank. So there we were, footsore, hungry, and in Williton by sunset. We walked into Mother Shipton’s Cafe, and gloomily ordered beans on toast and cups of tea.
The night was spent in a field on the edge of Williton, and the morning started well, us getting a ride straight through to Bridgwater, thus sparing us the horrors of possibly having to walk the road through St. Audries, a length of road flanked on both sides by ten foot high stone walls. Being sideswiped by a car along there would have been dramatically more horrible than being pushed into a hedge. Stone walls have no give whatsoever. And then the day deteriorated into a reprise of Thursday. An eternity of clink clank, clink clank, and a fast-growing disappointment at the utter hostility of the car-owning populace. As nightfall approached we were still seventy miles from our destination, tired, with blistered feet, but not yet completely down and out. After all, Destiny was beckoning. The last ride had left us close to a copse on a small hill, and we decided to spend the night there, in the woods, a hundred yards or so away from the road.
We unrolled our bindles, gathered firewood, and set up the cooking sticks. And looked at the haggis. Ever had haggis? Ever cooked haggis? Nope, us neither. A little unsure of the procedure, we examined it. It looked like a big round sausage, but really too big to cook in our aluminum frying pan without mashing it up, and too big to boil in the billy can. And by then we’d drunk all our water so that was out of the question anyway. So we cut it in half and put it in the frying pan, hoping that whatever fat was in the thing would suffice to fry it. It turned out to be peculiarly dry, and it just kind of burned rather than fried. Tired and grumpy, we ate what we could, and passed the wine back and forth, futilely trying to dodge the clouds of woodsmoke. Funny thing about woodsmoke. It has consciousness, you know. A malevolent kind of consciousness. No matter which way you turn, it follows you. You can watch it coming straight at you for a few minutes, and say to yourself, sanely and sensibly, that if I were to move to the other side of the fire, I would be out of the way. Well, good luck with that. The moment you move, that smoke senses the movement and your new position … nothing you can do … just have to sit there and cough and blink, and reflect upon the words of Dennis, Minehead’s local tramp, whom Brad and I had befriended the summer before. ’Twas Dennis who had spoken the celebrated sentiment, ‘I’s allus been partial to the smell of woodsmoke’. As we sat there, shrouded in the swirling smoke, a memory of Dennis came back to me, an occurrence that had happened earlier that summer. I had been working at Butlin’s, the big holiday camp in Minehead. Finishing a late night shift, I was pedaling my bike up the deserted and silent main street, known as The Parade, on my way home. It was about three or four in the morning. I was dog tired, so tired I was three-quarters asleep. In my hallucinated state, I saw what appeared to be a half-naked savage about to jump out at me from behind a tree, wielding a long spear. Immediately seizing the moment, and thus the advantage of surprise, I let out an immense shriek. In turn, the apparition let out an even louder shriek and jumped up in the air in shock and terror. And it was then that I saw the half-naked savage was, in fact, Dennis, about to rifle through a garbage can with a long pole. And then I was gone, pedaling home, now wide awake. I think that was the last time I saw Dennis.
Dawn broke, its faint light filtering through the trees dappling the ground around us. Stumbling around in the chill air, we rolled our bindles and pondered the remains of the haggis and the wine. Half a haggis, half a bottle of wine. A dilemma. To take with us or to abandon? We decided to bury both and return to this copse on our way back, thus booking a reservation at this fine locale for the following day.
The remainder of the journey went by in a bleary-eyed woodsmoke-tainted blur. We got a few rides and arrived in Little Gaddesden in the middle of the afternoon.
We had spent the preceding weeks speculating upon this mysterious Derek Adams, his personage, his character, his situation. All we had to go by was the ad in the Exchange and Mart. We had thought we’d be arriving at some type of farm, with a possibly rural but assuredly eccentric riding around in a muddy Austin Champ. I suppose we should have been warned by the sophisticated PR-oriented ’Be Thankful, Be Wise’ wording in the ad, because we arrived at a very palatial house in large and well-kept grounds, with a shiny Jaguar in the driveway. We knocked on the door and were welcomed by a well-dressed well-coiffured young woman who, as she showed us in, turned her head and shouted ‘Derek, Derek, Mr. Bradshaw is here.’
We were shown into a large and luxurious kitchen with gleaming tiles, shining pans hanging from the ceiling, a long marble counter, doors opening out onto larger rooms, and through the windows more of the immaculate gardens.
And then Mr. Adams himself.
A large florid man, in a luxurious huge fur-trimmed coat, a luxuriant black moustache and equally luxuriant black hair strode into the luxurious kitchen. He extended a luxuriously manicured hand festooned with rings and introduced himself. Brad and I felt rather small and extremely smelly. By this time three days had gone by since we had bathed or changed clothes, and the strange interaction of our situation with that of the Adamses was apparent, in both a visual and in an olfactory manner. The two of us eyed each other and smirked - both silently wondering just what Harry Roberts or W. H. Davies would have done in such a situation. Of course, neither of them would have even entertained the idea of owning an Austin Champ.
Mr. Adams beckoned, and we followed him out of the kitchen door. He strode around the corner of a large building, and there they were. About a dozen Austin Champs. All unregistered, straight from the army. Brad handed over three hundred pounds, signed a piece of paper, and Adams pointed out the prize. ‘Does it have a spare tyre?’ asked Brad, and Adams nodded and pulled one from one of the other vehicles, and heaved it up onto the bracket at the back of the vehicle.
‘Here’s how it all works’ he said and indicated the gear shift. ‘Five forward gears, and this lever here puts everything in reverse. Just make sure you are stopped when you engage it of course’ and uttered a luxuriant chuckle, his moustache quivering. ’No key - just flip this switch, and you’re off’.
And with that he went back into the house, leaving us to our Destiny. Our unregistered Destiny.
Editor’s Note: after Bob had finished writing this piece he thought he’d better send a copy to his old friend Brad, who is mentioned quite a few times. We thought it might be interesting for readers to see his reply…
Hello My Friend,
Thanks for sharing your story. I can find nothing amiss - but then you remember 99% more than I ever will.
Sadly this means I have nothing else to add. I do have a some fond memories of Lady Acklands Hut! where we lay about in the woods drinking and lit the fire at night. No need at all to change my name; I have had so many names; and all of them have been fictitious.
I have come to see that there are in truth no real 'persons'; they are all just on ongoing dream in the mind.There is of course a body; but quite apart from the fact that biologically most of the billions of cells are renewed over some seven year cycles; there is nothing permanent about it.
Just why I have few memories;I was born with the name Michael Chapman; then adopted at age one and became Peter Bradshaw. School through to late twenties I was called 'Brad'.....then I lived with Mary and became a member of Subud; and was known as Luke. Then I wandered around India in an orange robe and was known as Swami Prem. I then became a Sannyasin and was known as Rajan. As Rajan I lived and worked in communes until at some point returned to Somerset and lived with Shirley and her kids as a 'family guy';almost normal; buying houses and all that stuff...whatever all these ridiculous changes resulted in no sense of identity at all.
Now; old and nearing the end;I am content as just a nobody; names and past memories mean nothing; and to be honest; unless someone brings it up I never think about any of it.
So reading your very nice story was fun; but I have no idea who 'Brad' was; or anyone else in it. Shakespeare got it right; we are just actors strutting about on the stage pretending to be someone. And it is all noise and vanity; signifying nothing!
