Volkswagen Beetle

After more than 47 years, 170,000 miles and an impromptu restoration, this VW Beetle is still with its original owner. He recounts its life from first-date cupid to family heirloom

The life story of a Volkswagen Beetle

In December 1971 Alan Course buys a car not a house

It was quite a year for Alan Course. ‘I sold my Austin 1100 early in 1971 to save for a house deposit, which left me with just an Austin Seven and my 1962 BSA Bantam to get around on. I still have that too, by the way. Then later in the year I was dumped by my fiancée, so I decided to blow all the house money I’d saved on a car instead. My first reaction was to buy something like a secondhand Alpine or Spridget, but that didn’t last long when reality kicked in.

‘At the time I worked as a manager in the bus licensing section of the Ministry of Transport, Eastern Traffic Area. It was an interesting job that took me around the country, and also had a department of vehicle examiners who proved very useful. At just six years old, my Austin 1100 was already suffering from severe rot, despite my best efforts to keep it at bay.

‘Their suggestion was a VW Beetle, which required some thinking about. Back then Beetles were not cool, and certainly not helpful for one’s image with the ladies. But this felt like my one opportunity to have something reliable and practical; I couldn’t afford to get it wrong again. Nothing else, fashionable or not, for less than £1000 seemed to meet those requirements.

‘Having decided on a Beetle I happened to see a Type 3 Fastback in Gentian Blue, so that had to be the colour. As it turned out, Volkswagen only used it from 1971-72. None of the three Volkswagen dealers around Cambridge had a Beetle 1300 in that colour in stock, then someone where I worked suggested I contact Boroughbury Garage in Peterborough, an authorised VW dealer that happened to have a new Gentian Blue 1300 on its forecourt.’ The site of that garage is now just a small car park, with the building long gone.

‘I bought CFL 460K from there on 20 December 1971. It cost me £849 after haggling a £53.50 discount. I said I wanted stone guards and rear mud flaps too, but the salesman declined to throw those in. I said I’d buy a light blue one from Birches in Cambridge instead and got up to leave. I’ll always remember the salesman saying as I got to the door, “All right, you can have your bloody mud flaps and stone guards free of charge.”

‘I still have the invoice, along with the one for the car’s first service, which cost £2.34. Still with an eye on making it last, I had Dinitrol underbody rustproofing treatment applied in early 1972.

‘As expected, the Beetle was no help at all where the ladies were concerned, but I was in the main seeing

and/or dating nurses then, who seemed more practical and less fashion-conscious than, for example, hairdressers, who would turn their noses up at it.

‘It certainly didn’t matter to Rosemary, a nurse/ midwife whom I met at a party in 1973. We went on our first date in the Beetle. During the date she mentioned that after working a week of nights she was going home to her parents’ house near Colwyn Bay for Easter. I offered to take her, stay and bring her back, because that way I had Easter by the sea in North Wales. We were married in 1974, and still are.

‘After that, the Beetle stayed simply because of a series of more important draws on our funds. A detached bungalow for our first home really was way out of our price bracket, even after I sold my Austin Seven to help pay the deposit. Then three children came along, each of them brought home from hospital in the Beetle. It made me reason that if I kept the car in good condition it made financial sense to keep it.

‘So it remained our only form of transport until the mid-eighties, including being used for numerous family camping trips, towing a box trailer and with the three children sitting on their sleeping bags in the back with camping essentials packed around their feet.

All that use obviously took its toll and by 1985, having clocked up around 118,000 miles, the Beetle was in need of an engine rebuild. Says Alan, ‘The crankshaft only showed negligible wear, but the bores were worn. It was rebuilt by a local chap at a total cost of £405.99 including just £90 for 18 hours of his labour. I had wanted to keep the original engine capacity, but was advised that the 1600cc parts they could get were of better quality than what was available for a 1300cc engine, so got the bonus of a little more power.

‘It was around this time that I became good friends with Jim Footman, a lifelong Volkswagen mechanic, after I had been timekeeper at a Beetle engine-changing competition at Stoneleigh Park. He kindly took care of the car from then on, because it had not been helped in the previous few years by a series of unsatisfactory independent garages. If it hadn’t been for Jim, the car would probably not be on the road today, or in its present condition.

The Beetle finally stepped down from frontline duties in the mid-eighties and became their second car. ‘Our three children were growing fast and we needed something larger. The Beetle helped with that too. I’d used it for a lot of work journeys and the profit from all the mileage payments allowed us to buy a Passat in 1986. Rosemary was then able to use the Beetle to meet her varying work shift requirements.

That’s how things continued for the next nine years, with the Beetle still in regular use but clocking up much less mileage because it was mostly doing local runs. It was getting steadily scruffier though, so around 1995 they felt that it needed some TLC.

‘Jim suggested that although the car seemed basically sound, it would be worth lifting the body off to tidy some areas up and to replace the outer wings. We did this in the front garden, using two sturdy trestles and eight sturdy helpers. I soon had the front wings off, but much of the inner front wings came off too.

‘I was quite despondent then, particularly when my late mother, seeing the car spread around the garden and garage, commented that it’d never run again. That made me absolutely determined that it would. We’d become quite attached to the car; it had been part of the family for 24 years. People thought I was mad spending money on a relatively late-model Beetle because, “Only the early ones will ever be worth anything”.

‘Luckily by then I had become friends with Rob Ransley, an ace welder and car restorer more used to working on Jaguar XKS, Lamborghinis and Bentleys. He laughed at the idea of a Beetle, but did it anyway.

‘I became well acquainted with Volkswagen Heritage, buying inner wings, sills, door bottoms and many other items to help with the restoration. Rob and his son then made an excellent job of welding in all the new panels and respraying the car in its original Gentian Blue. The body was then reunited with the floorpan, and the quality of Rob’s work showed in the captive nuts on the new sills aligning perfectly with the floorpan, despite him not previously having them together at the same time. The floorpan had been protected by the early rustproofing treatment and needed no attention other than new jacking points.

‘Another longstanding friend, Roger Coleman, carpeted the car for me. Sadly the original-spec rubber floor matting was no longer available. The rest of the interior is still original, including the vinyl seats. It’s a testament to Volkswagen quality. We did keep the seats covered while the kids were young to protect them, and there’s no sign of wear on them at all.

‘I had the original bumpers and one of the hubcaps rechromed. They are so much better than the lighter pattern replacement parts you can get. Spread out over two years, the restoration work cost us around £7000, so I don’t feel like we’ve lost on that considering what the Beetle is worth. Not that you ever restore a car to make money anyway. My wife went a little quiet when I said that after the restoration it would not be resuming second car duties or be left in hospital car parks, but she understood once she saw it finished.

‘It’s now covered 170,000 miles and for much of her life has lived outside. She is still driven regularly, except now she has her own garage and does not venture out when there is salt on the roads. There’s a bit of transmission whine, probably from towing the trailer, but that’s fine – it isn’t getting any worse.

‘Environmentally it’s been better than owning a whole string of new cars too. After the engine rebuild, an MOT tester put a probe in the exhaust, purely out of interest, and said it would pass the emissions standards of a much more modern vehicle.

‘Aside from all the memories, it has saved us the cost of constant car changes with the inevitable depreciation. No one believed me when I used to say this car will see me out. They do now. I will never part with it and hopefully it will pass to one of our grandchildren. The eldest is now 17 and studying engineering, so when I’ve gone, if he wants it, it’s his.’

‘My mother commented that it’d never run again. That made me determined that it would’