The Way We Were

Beaulieu, summer 1989

The first of this year’s big Beaulieu Autojumbles takes place this weekend (13 and 14 May). It’s practically a rite of passage for any classic car owner, trawling through the fields of these events in search of an elusive part, grime under your fingernails, sweat on your brow and rust stains on your clothes. Well, who wears their best attire when they’re ’jumbling? Keep searching, because with more than 2000 stands to browse, you might just find that Amilcar magneto or Zaporozhets cylinder head that you need perched on a wobbly wallpaper table, or tucked under an old tarpaulin. There’s treasure to be found.

But step away from the hustle and bustle of the event fields and there are plenty of complete classics – rather than just bits of them – to drool over. This view of the 1989 event will be familiar to stallholders as Exhibitors’ Field, the place to park up and pitch your tent or caravan before putting in two days’ worth of hard trading on your stand; you can almost hear the whistle of a camping kettle. Beyond the sea of beige and orange tents and caravans, you can see the throngs of bargain hunters in the distant fields.

Unsurprisingly, many of the stallholders still trundle over to the New Forest in all sorts of interesting machines, and there is a mixture of old favourites to be seen here, as well as 1980s’ moderns that are now rightly regarded as classics. You can’t miss the eye-searing yellow paintwork of the Ford Capri MkIII in the foreground; surely it’s no coincdence that it’s parked up next to another Capri – this one fitted with a slightly uncool towbar – so perhaps they travelled in convoy. Judging from the racy stripes on their flanks, both are ‘S’ models, with hip-hugging Recaro seats and bootlid spoilers. But are they both the coveted 3.0S model, as thrashed by Bodie in The

Professionals, or the similar-looking but less lairy 1.6S or 2.0S?

Also sharing the same camping spot are a Volkswagen Golf MkI and Ford Escort estate, alongside a rather smart Singer Gazelle; its rounded roofline and roll-over rear wing fins marking it out as a 1959-1963 model. Next in line is an Austin FX4 taxi, looking rather out of place parked up on grass instead of pounding London’s streets. This roomy cab would certainly be a quirky alternative to a small van, but we wonder if it has retired from duty or if its cabbie owner has a stand?

We love classic camper vans, but breaking the mould from the usual Commer and Volkswagen suspects is a Bedford TJ. Yes, it almost certainly did start life as an ambulance, judging from its white-painted body, but this sturdy truck would have made an ideal starting point for a roomy home-made camper conversion; you can be sure that there is plenty of space inside to stretch out. With the TJ-type still available to UK buyers until 1975, despite its dated 1950s styling, this one probably wasn’t all that old, even in 1989.

Ford Cortina estates are clearly a smart choice for autojumbling, with a shiny MkIV parked close by to a vinyl-roof clad MkIII, while there’s also a dusty-looking Jaguar 420 tucked between the tents. Look closely and you will spot a couple of Land Rovers and a pop-top VW camper van. Will that titchy box trailer be towed home behind the silver be-striped Fiesta at the end of the weekend? We reckon the much roomier, Whites-branded Leyland Sherpa van close by would have certainly earned its keep as show transport.

The beauty of this event is that, aside from growing to include even more stands over the years, it has remained fundamentally the same; a pipe-smoking, trilby-hatted visitor to the first Beaulieu Autojumble in 1967 would still feel very much at home at the 2017 event.

Just make sure you wear your walking boots, because there’s a lot of ground to cover!

‘you might just find that amilcar magneto or Zaporozhets cylinder head perched on a wobbly wallpaper table’ THe a TO Z OF aUTOJUMBle