Championing the Champ - if you could afford the fuel

On our way to the Adams’ place, we had passed through a fairly large area of heathland, a wild area of scrub and small woodlands, and as Brad drove the Champ out of the gate and down the road, gingerly getting the feel of the vehicle, both of us knew where we were going. And after a mile or two, we were on the edge of the heath. Brad looked at me and grinned, turned the wheel, and drove off the road onto a rutted track. We looked at the four-wheel drive lever longingly. Although bumpy and rutted, the tires gripped, and the vehicle ambled along in two-wheel drive. The ride was surprisingly smooth, which was not surprising, as the Champ had for the times, a rather sophisticated independent suspension system. A copse on a steep hill loomed to our right, and we looked at each other. And grinned. And then giggled. Brad pulled off the track onto the greensward, through the bracken, and with a knowing look and a bemused smile as if he did this kind of thing every hour or so, pulled the four-wheel drive lever back with a flourish, and guided the vehicle up a short but very steep incline.  

The Champ handled the incline effortlessly. And crested the top. Which indeed was a crest. A very pointy one. So pointy that it acted as a fulcrum for the Champ which tilted, almost tottering, at the top, and then went down the other side. Minus the muffler which it transpired had been astride the pivot point. The now unrestricted motor roared, bellowed, rumbled, thundered, and as Brad hit the brakes the sound sank to a grumbling gurgle, punctuated by the cracks and bangs of small unrestrained backfires.

We looked at each other aghast. How could this be? The mighty Champ, humbled by a wee little ridge? Our feelings of immense pride in our vehicle’s invincibility were dashed. It obviously wasn’t invincible. No more than five minutes of off-roading and the bloody exhaust system had come off. In shocked silence, we picked up the pieces and put them in the back, and drove back towards the road.

As the gravity of the situation became apparent, our hitherto carefree attitude changed to one of disquiet, and then to concern framed in worry. We were driving an unregistered vehicle. No registration plates, just some chalked numbers where the plates should be, the remaining evidence of the auction at which Adams had bought the vehicle. And as the vehicle wasn’t registered, it wasn’t insured. All we had was the receipt from Adams that he had assured us would be sufficient to wave at the registration people, and they would register it. All very well for the registration folks, but not a deal closer as far as any local bobby might be concerned. We had naively figured that as it was Easter weekend, we could fairly quickly and hopefully innocuously drive back to Minehead early on Easter Sunday, and not arouse any attention. Such naivety overlooked the simple fact that the Champ itself was rather noteworthy. I mean, there were only about eleven thousand of them built in the first place. So it was a bit of a head-turner. And now, minus the muffler, it announced its presence from a great distance.

We drove off in conversational silence. We were silent, the Champ wasn’t. Brad drove gently, avoiding sudden downshifts that would create reverberating and thundering eruptions of violent noise. If someone passed us going the other way, the noise would momentarily increase as the passing car acted as a wall against the unrestrained exhaust, as did driving past houses, walls, or thick hedges. In fact, driving past pretty much anything.

A few miles down the road we picked up a hitchhiker, a wan and slight young man dressed in jeans and a thin jacket, and put him in the back, among the exhaust debris. Poor bastard must have been freezing, as we had no top. Being in front, the windshield kept us, if not warm, at least unfrozen. Because of the wind and the unbridled motor, any attempts at conversation with him were futile. The three of us sat in the Champ, our mutually grim silence enclosed in a wrapping of aural mayhem.

By about eight or nine we approached the copse at which we had spent the previous night. Brad pulled off the road, drove up the short track to the wood and cut the motor. A merciful silence enveloped us. We could hear the sounds of the woodland, the sough of the wind in the branches, chirps, and low whistles of wildlife. 

The serenity was palpable, as was the chill of the evening.

The hitchhiker shivered and wrapped his coat tighter around him. ‘Bloody ‘ell, cold in the back of your car, wow. So what are we doing here?’ While he was saying this, Brad strode over to where we had buried the wine and haggis the night before and started poking at the ground with a stick. No sooner than the words ‘We’re gonna stay the night here, you’re welcome to share our food’ had come out of my mouth the guy shook his head vigorously. ‘Don’t think so, thanks all the same’, and started to walk towards the road, eyeing Brad, who by now had unearthed a bottle of wine and an indescribable lump of something, with an expression of suspicion, incredulity, and horror. And then he was gone, into the night, vanished.

In a deflated mood we ate the awful haggis, drank the dregs of the souring wine, and vainly attempted to avoid the smoke of the fire, unrolled our sleeping bags and stretched out under the trees, exhausted.

Wakened by that cold shiver, that herald of the approaching dawn that occurs around 4 am, we rolled our bindles, threw them into the back of the Champ, and set off for Minehead. It was Easter Sunday and the roads were deserted. In those days the M4 was no more than a planner’s dream, and we roared through Oxford, howled through Swindon and bellowed through Bath, the tall Georgian terraced row houses bellowing back at us. I had not heard the term ‘white knuckle drive’ back then, but that is what it was. Every mile was fraught with apprehension, eyes feverishly checking the mirrors, the road ahead, the side roads … cops, cops, cops … they must hear us, surely they must hear us … and then from Bath down the A39, through Midsomer Norton, Wells, Glastonbury, Bridgwater and finally to Minehead, where we pulled up outside our flat in the early afternoon. Made it!

A minute later a local cop pulled up and looked at the Champ. That’s right …. Just a minute after we had arrived, and shut down the howling monster, we, and the Champ, were under the frowning gaze of the local constabulary. He obviously hadn’t seen such a vehicle before, and he got out and started to walk around it. And noticed the lack of registration plates. At least the motor had been shut down before he arrived. 

And so Brad, being the owner, entered the tangle of rules, regulations, must-does and hadn’t-dones that ensue when driving an unregistered vehicle on the Queen’s highway.

Like most problems and hassles that loom so large at the time, they were ultimately resolved, and within a few days were but a forgotten memory. The exhaust was repaired, the registration was completed and we started to explore the wild tracks and ancient roads of Exmoor. And what a gorgeous, beguiling, mysterious, and enchanting part of the South West of England is Exmoor. Its wildness is wanton in its seductiveness, its winding lanes sunken by centuries of the egress and regress of carts, driven herds of lowing cattle, huge flocks of sheep, ocean-like in their vastness and billowing backs, undulating between the stone-faced earthen banks, topped by beech, ash and hawthorn hedges, where in places the untrimmed tops on either side had grown to form a green tunnel, blocking out the light and the sun, and then around a corner, past a gateway - a sudden window into and out onto the landscape - the hedges had been trimmed by a conscientious farmer, quite possibly laid in the traditional manner, where the saplings’ growth had been expertly sliced through with a sharp machete close to the root two-thirds of the way through, and the remaining stem bent uphill and tied - with baling twine of course - to the next tree. The result was a growing fence that came spring put forth green shoots and within a couple of months bright green leaves would cover the wounds inflicted by the hedger, and thus maintained the hedge grew thicker and thicker over the years. This scene is very familiar to those who live in these areas, but for those who don’t, let me explain baling twine. And the importance of baling twine to agriculture. When hay or straw was baled by what we now might think of as ‘old-fashioned’ balers - that is, those that packed hay into rectangular bales - those bales were held together by two lengths of twine. And that twine stayed on the bales until the bales were cut for feed or bedding - the twine ended up hanging over a nail in the barn or was stuffed into a handy pocket. Very possibly within the next half an hour or so, the farm worker might come across a gate with a broken hinge or latch. No problem, the twine’ll fix it. I remember a cartoon by Giles, obviously drawn in the last war, featuring two farm workers leaning on a gate in a decrepit farmyard, one with the evidence of the usefulness of baler twine everywhere, and one rustic saying to the other, ‘If that ‘itler invents a gas that’ll disintegrate baler twine, us’ll be done for’. By the sixties, the older hessian twine was being replaced by polypropylene twine. It was stronger, but sadly it slowly but inexorably added to the litter that increasingly became visible in the countryside. It was coloured orange and took forever to break down. 

But Somerset and Exmoor was, and is, a lot more than little lanes and hedges. The old cottages and farms are stunning in their elementary and unassuming charm, the round stone pillars of the buildings edging the farm yards, the thatched roofs of the cottages, massive thick mantles of wheat straw or reed flowing down the steeply ridged roofs, looking for all the world like strange mushrooms, or weird furry creatures with huge eyebrows, and the endless misshapen geometric sprawl of fields, large, small, rectangular, square or oblong, and then the forests, steep coombes covered in bracken and gorse, and at the bottom a brook, sparkling in the sun, rushing, rushing, rushing past fallen trees, under ancient stone bridges, across fords, all a gravity-driven charge to the sea.

It is impossible not to be enchanted, impossible not to be drawn into this kaleidoscope of fantastic beauty, and thus, with the undeniable ease of having four-wheel drive, we could be miles along a stony and grassy track, hall an hour from a tarred road; splash through a few yards of muddy water and carry on, the scent of west country mud drying on the exhaust system as scintillating as the smell of woodsmoke, and then reach a vantage point and stop the Champ, cut the motor, and look across the Bristol Channel to Wales, look east to the Quantock Hills and West to Dunkery Beacon, and breath in the wind from the Atlantic. The wonderful thing about this part of Somerset is that you are never far from the ocean - the Bristol Channel to the north, that great tongue of salt water that extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the West and laps the River Severn estuary in the east, in a kind of unending aquatic cunnilingus.

Salt is in the air, gulls abound, the entire place exudes a deep and serene fecundity, the moors an expanse of blazing orange gorse, purple heather, great sweeps of bracken and then close nibbled fine turf, with sheep and rabbit droppings, the evidence of regular customers at this popular buffet. And the wind comes in great blasts from the west, spilling secrets from afar that only the wheeling birds understand, so gusty and vigorous that we’d stand on rocks and bluffs and lean into it, a buffeting cushion of energy whipping our faces, pulling at our coats, billow after billow, until it reached such a crescendo that we’d whoop and shout with joy, crazed with the exhilaration of being alive in such a magical place. 

Ah, Somerset, blessed keeper of our souls.

In those days there were countless miles of old tracks, green lanes, drovers' paths that were technically public roads, and we explored mile after mile. It was the early days of four-wheel drive and we were cognisant of the damage that could be done by haplessly driving willy-nilly over open moorland. Sadly the latter-years of unthinking and careless antics of city folks getting behind the wheels of their Land Rovers and other 4wd SUVs have now forced the authorities to close down many, if not all, of these ancient trackways to motor vehicles. 

The Champ was a lot of fun, but it had one big drawback. It used a lot of petrol, an awful lot. And we were teenagers, forever impecunious, and thus forever incapable of completely filling the tank. Inevitably a moment would come when we would be a few miles from home and the motor would die. 

‘Bloody ‘ell, we just put a fiver in the tank, gotta be impossible that it’s run out already’. 

No, it wasn’t impossible, and it most definitely had run out. Hopefully, there would be petrol in the jerrycan, but all too often its contents had already been poured into the tank with the thought that it would get us a few more miles, and so wearily we’d walk back to town with the empty can. It held four and a half gallons, which is a heavy load to carry a couple of hundred yards, let alone a mile or two. Or three or four. So it was rarely filled to the top on those occasions when it had to be carried a distance. More like just a couple of gallons. So we learned, quite quickly, that a couple of gallons did not take the Champ very far. Pour the liquid into the tank and drive to the nearest petrol station and spend the last of our rapidly shrinking budget. Offerings, oblations, sacrifices to the Champ god, the merciless eternally thirsty Champ god who devoured all. Again and again and again.

Adventures abounded, good ones and bad ones. There was always a balancing factor … the more fun on an outing, the more likely a disaster would occur. There was the time we went to Porlock, and while maneuvering in a parking lot, we managed to reverse over a stanchion, a length of pipe set in concrete in a five-gallon barrel, part of an abandoned boundary marker that once upon a time had help up a chain or a rope. The barrel flipped and the pipe jammed itself between the prop shaft and the transmission tunnel. Or maybe it got stuck between the shaft from the transmission to the rear axle and the shaft from the rear axle to the front one. It’s been so long since I was under a Champ that exactly just where it was stuck, I cannot remember. Doesn’t matter anyway. What did matter was that the only way to free the vehicle was to cut the pipe, and we were too poor and certainly too cheap to call for help. All we had for a tool was a small broken hacksaw blade - one of those little itty bitty blades, about a quarter of an inch wide. And it was broken - so the length was about three or four inches, and the pipe was probably an inch and a half. So it’s fairly easy to imagine the fun we had, lying on our backs, taking turns to cut through this wretched pipe. It took all afternoon, but finally, we cut through it and freed the vehicle, and drove home. Brad had a call a week or so later from the indignant owner of the parking lot - someone had written down the registration number and given it to him. He wanted to be paid for the damage … 

Later that summer, Brad moved into a tent up on North Hill, down the bottom of a steep track, overlooking the Bristol Channel, away from the world. It was the summer of love, and thus a perfectly normal thing to do. One rainy night he was awakened by the sound of spinning tires, so he exited the tent to investigate. It was a police car, hopelessly stuck. The embarrassed cop mumbled something about ‘just looking around …’ but rapidly had to admit that he was checking on Brad, and ‘no, he hadn’t done anything, wrong, no, not at all, the sergeant asked me to see what was going on here, and of course, I can see that you are just camping. I really hate to have to ask, but I am just wondering if you might just be able to give me a tow up this hill? You know, with that army car of yours?’

Another night a friend said he had to get down to Cornwall, and asked if we could drive him down there - he’d pay for the petrol. It was miles away, near Liskeard or someplace, but it was an adventure, and he was paying, and so off we went, presciently taking our sleeping bags along. We delivered him and started back.

Miles driven in a Champ, just like in an old jeep or ancient Land Rover, are long miles, long tiring aching arm miles, red-rimmed eye miles, and about halfway home, we heard a very loud ping from the engine. We pulled over and popped the bonnet, aiming a wavering and blinking yellow-beamed flashlight into the engine compartment. Nothing untoward was apparent. We drove on and ten minutes later the sound repeated. Again we investigated, and this time noticed two small bolts missing from where the fan mounted to the water pump. 

The excitement of the adventure started to fade, and that familiar old car owner paranoia settled in. Neither of us were mechanics, we had no tools to speak of, and very little money. And it was dark and it was very late and we were exhausted. We drove into a little town and found a bus shelter to spend the night in. We could examine the vehicle come dawn when it was light enough to figure out what was going on. 

The Sixties was a time of drug exploration, grass and hash, leapers and sleepers, uppers and downers, and of course psychedelics. I had some heavy-duty sleeping pills with me, Mandrax, and we took a couple each, figuring that they would ensure a few hours of deep sleep, and hopefully and simultaneously soften the wooden benches. We probably had not been asleep more than half an hour when we were awoken by the police. Well, that’s not entirely true. We were roused, and our eyes opened, and then closed again. Awake we were not, but then we weren’t really asleep either. We were very very stoned, which was what Mandies were all about. You took ‘em and stayed awake, and became, well, let’s not put too fine a spin upon it, rather stupid, but in a strangely pleasant way. 

Back then the cops just did not like strangers stretching out to sleep in the great outdoors. The Vagrancy Act and all that. The Sixties had seen Kerouac’s rucksack revolution come to life in the UK. Beatniks, and later hippies, hitch-hiked the roads country-wide, rucksacks or bindles on their backs, sleeping in fields, bus shelters, and beaches. This sense of freedom, this cocking-the-snook at conventions greatly offended Mr. Plod, and unsurprisingly these close-shaven, short back-and-sides upholders of all that was decent, took umbrage. Huge great swathes of umbrage. And it goes without saying that they more than frowned upon drugs.

Thus a wee-wee hours interrogation ensued. Who are you, what is your name, question after question, and we just wanted to sleep. Our incoherence confused and bothered them, and so we were bundled into the back of a police car and taken to the station. There was no way we would even dream of telling them, hey, look officers, we’re just done a couple of Mandies, no way at all. So there we were in the police station, being interrogated one at a time, with no story to tell other than the completely true one that we had taken a friend to Cornwall, and were too tired to continue all the way home and that something strange had happened to the engine, and, oh, I’m sorry officer, but I’m so tired, and just got to close my eyes a bit and no sir! You can’t go to sleep here, I want you to answer some more questions .. and so this ludicrous situation went on for hours. Come six in the morning they gave up, realising that we were simply two tired kids trying to get home, and they gave us tea, and then drove us back to the shelter and the Champ. We made it home after a few hours with no more mishaps and replaced the bolts in the fan. Just why they had flown off was anyone’s guess.

Writing this reminded me of a vaguely similar encounter I had had with the police some years before when I was around seventeen, and living in Winchester with my parents. I had been to a party in Stockbridge with a girlfriend. We had an argument, and I left the party around midnight to hitch the eight miles home. After walking through dark and deserted country roads a couple of miles with no rides, I saw a barn just inside a gate, and by then, being thoroughly tired, and probably still a bit drunk, I thought I’d go inside and sleep until dawn. 

The night was pitch black and silent. It seemed I was in the middle of nowhere. I rounded the corner of the barn feeling for the way in and walked through a wide opening. In an instant, I was blinded by powerful lights and the crackle of radios, and about five policemen appeared out of the gloom. I could see a police car and motor-cycles in the barn.

‘What are you doing here’ was the immediate question. I had spent that summer hitching around the West Country and knew that the law frowned upon sleeping out, the Vagrancy Act once again. So I made up a stupid cock-n-bull story about meeting someone here who was going to give me a ride home. A really asinine, feeble-minded, hare-brained, derisible story. ‘Empty your pockets’ was the next order. I smoked roll-your-owns back then. They always went out, so you needed to carry matches. I pulled out four or five books of matches from my pockets. Without another word, they bundled me into the police car and drove me to Andover Police Station. 

Turned out there had been a spate of arson in the area, and the police had had a tip that this particular barn was going to be burnt down that evening. So it was all rather incriminating. Doggedly I stuck to my feather-headed story, hour after hour until the cops finally, and certainly regretfully, came to the conclusion that one, I wasn’t the arsonist, and two, I was probably far too stupid to even consider the idea, and thus convinced that they could not pin the crimes on me, they drove me home. So at least I got a ride. All the way to the front door.

Minehead was a tourist town, buzzing in the summer and dead in the winter. The season and the off-season. Permanent jobs were hard to find. Brad and I dreamed of starting a bookshop, selling poetry, avant-garde literature, all the stuff that dreams were made of. Our complete lack of funds and lack of knowledge of the book trade only made the dream more chimerical. We registered a trademark, Blue Mountain Books, and looked for premises. I saw a job opening at the local library, and it was like a telegram from the gods: here is where I can quickly learn about books! 

I went for an interview and got the job. I heard months later, through Brad, whose mother knew someone on the interview board but did not know it was I being interviewed, that a young man had been before the board seeking a job who had told them that he had General Certificates of Education in many subjects but had never produced them for scrutiny. The young man of course, was me. It had never occurred to me you had to show these things to get a job. In fact, I had never bothered to collect them from school when I had left. I suppose I just figured that whoever wanted to check on those kind of things just made a phone call or something. And as it happens, I never did get any certificates for exams I had passed. I naively thought my word was enough and this was the only time anyone ever asked me about them. So much for a classical education.

The library job was, truth to tell, extremely boring. Tedious, humdrum, monotonous … an entire Roget’s Thesaurus’ worth of boring. The clientele was for the most part equally insipid, other than the odd times a drunk might wander in, or someone with a mental affliction. I would watch the senior staff try to deal with these disturbances with a wry smile. What is the Dewey classification for a loony?

However, the library did turn up one book which changed things a bit. A slim tome entitled ‘Half-Safe - Across the Atlantic by Jeep'’ written by an Australian, Ben Carlin.

When Carlin was in India, just after the war, he had seen an amphibious jeep, and remarked to a colleague, 'You know, Mac, with a bit of titivation, you could go around the world in one of these things'.

'Half-Safe', published in 1955, was the story of how, in 1947, he had purchased an amphibious jeep in the USA, and sailed it across the Atlantic, up Africa, through Europe, across the Channel and finally arrived in London. 

It is a tale of dogged ingenuity, of a relentless and an unflagging battle against almost insurmountable odds, and is ultimately a testament to the lengths a jeep lunatic will travel, in order to prove to the world that jeeps will go anywhere. 

Even across the Atlantic.