ROVER 95 PAIN, PLUS HILLMAN IMP & AUSTIN TEN MEMORIES
Ouch! I was sorry to see from Part 7 of the P4 saga in the October issue that the rust is as bad as I feared, and actually made worse by the past efforts of Messrs. B. Odgit and S. Cram. However, as you say, it is a good opportunity to show how these areas can be properly repaired with Wadhams’ panels and the skill of an expert like Alan Denne.
Looking at photo 3 in that feature, it looks as if your car has been fitted with a proper tow bar. The layers of paint revealed around the areas to be repaired make me wonder if your car was Rover’s White originally, which is much whiter than the creamy shade it now bears. By way of illustration, see this picture of an original Rover colour samples pack, actually issued in autumn 1964 for the 3 Litre, showing the white, with immediately under it the (very dark) Pine Green in which our 1965 3 Litre was painted from new.
On another tack, items on the Hillman Imp in previous issues brought back two memories, the first of which also involves Salome, our P4 95. In 1972 the Rover's owner Aunt Helen went on holiday to Yugoslavia, leaving the car safely in the garage. My grandmother, who had moved to live with Helen four years previously on the death of my grandfather, stayed with my parents, my brother and I at our home in Sutton Coldfield while Helen was away.
Unfortunately, the hotel where Helen stayed was undergoing refurbishment and her room was damp, with the result that she came home suffering from a bad cough, and had to call the doctor the next day. He visited and diagnosed congestion of the lungs, which was so serious that the doctor visited Helen daily until she began to improve. Gran rang us and explained she needed help to nurse Helen. I was in the gap between finishing school and going to university that autumn, so I packed a suitcase, got in my 1963 Bond 250G three wheeler and drove to Nottingham, where I stayed for some weeks.
Towards the end of that time, my mother’s cousin – who lived with her friend in a bungalow in a village near Macclesfield – suggested that we meet them for lunch at a pub in the Peak District. Helen was not yet sufficiently recovered to make the trip, but suggested we use the Rover. My mother and my brother came over from Sutton Coldfield in her Mini and they, Gran and I then set off in the Rover and duly had a nice lunch. Then the cousin and her friend suggested we follow them back to their bungalow for tea. They installed Gran and my mother in the back of their Hillman Imp, and I followed in the Rover with my brother as passenger.
All went well until they suddenly turned off the main road onto a narrow, twisting side road and accelerated briskly away, making the most of the Imp’s excellent handling. Not knowing where they lived, or even the address, and in those days before the luxury of a sat nav, I was faced with the task of keeping them in sight. The fact that I managed to achieve this proves both the performance and the remarkable road holding of the P4, but it was a steep learning curve for an 18 year old.
The other Imp memory is that when at university, I was asked by the son of the warden of my hall of residence whether I could help him repair the paintwork of the sills of his quite young metallic green Imp, the impact of small stones and other such debris having stripped the paint from them. We were able to clean back to bare metal, apply an anti-rust product and then spray the sills with primer and top coat which, so far as I know, proved a long lasting repair. Later I heard a tale that Rootes had inspectors on the production line who often found that there were severe paint runs on the sills of Imps and the Arrow series Hunters. There was a worker assigned to sand off the paint runs, often revealing bare metal, and then spray on colour coat without priming first. If that tale is true, it would explain how the problem with the green Imp arose.
The October issue also has a feature on the pre-war Austin Ten. My grandfather was Methodist minister at Bakewell in Derbyshire in the late 1930s and, so far as I know, his car was an Austin Ten like the one shown. One winter’s evening he was taking a service at a village chapel high in the hills, and when the congregation came out afterwards, they found that a blizzard had arrived and the snowfall was such that there was a drift blocking the way to the road leading back to Bakewell. The men told him to drive up to the snowdrift. They then surrounded the sides and back of the Austin and literally threw it over the drift, so that my grandfather was able to drive home!