BACK TO THE BEGINNING
One glance at this Ford 105E, and I was transported back more than 40 years, to when I was a teenager yelping with joy that my first car had arrived. The Ford Anglia was the first car I ever remember noticing – at approximately the age of three. It was near Stranton Church on a visit to my grandmother’s house in West Hartlepool.
Residing in that fair town at the age of 14, I was obsessed with 1950s cars and discovered that a school caretaker was selling an Austin A35 for £5. Sadly I missed that opportunity, but the vendor also had a Ford Anglia 105E, for which there was so little demand that the £25 originally required dropped to just £5 after negotiation by my mother, who ran a playgroup at the school.
Surprisingly, the acquisition met with parental approval because we didn’t have a car, there was the chance that the Anglia could be ‘done-up’. And it would – finally – shut me up.
TBR 195 was originally yellow and white but had been resprayed mid-green. It looked respectable from the offside and ran well, especially after I’d bought a secondhand battery and struggled the mile back home from town with it.
The car had corrosion issues despite being only 12 years old and, this, coupled with my increasingly brave clandestine drives down the street, meant that I arrived home from school one day to discover an oil-stained space where TBR 195 had been standing that morning. It had gone to the scrapman, for a fiver. No depreciation costs, then.
The £25 originally required dropped to just £5 after negotiation’