Meet the history-rewriting Peel built to take a family of four on adventure holidays
This Mini-based kit car was built as a practical holiday hauler for a resourceful, road-tripping family. Its owners past and present tell its tale
1966 – Malcolm Turner investigates Mini specials
‘Malcolm was an artist by trade – he painted designs on metal boxes for a firm in Barnsley – but he was always interested in cars,’ says Val Turner of her late husband. ‘He had an old Austin when we met, then a ‘Beezer’ – a BSA – and then a Ford-based Special.
‘But it was only a two-plus-two, and by the mid-sixties we had a young family. It was only a matter of time before the children outgrew the back seats of the Special, and it was then that he became interested in Mini-based kits, because of the increased interior space that the front-wheel-drive packaging allowed. There were a lot of them around in 1966, the Mini being the ‘in’ car at the time, and easy to re-shell.
‘He didn’t go to motor shows – with the family, we didn’t have time – but he bought all sorts of car magazines. He looked into all the various options, including the Mini Marcos, plus anything to do with the Mini itself. He chose the Peel because it offered more back-seat space than any of the other specials on the market at the time.’
Malcolm was an avid builder of kits, and felt the need to build the Peel to go with his previous project. ‘He’d just built a Mirror trailer-tent, a Barry Bucknell design available through The Daily Mirror newspaper, on the lounge carpet while the 1966 World Cup was on TV, and needed a car capable of towing it,’ Val explains.
Malcolm’s correspondence with the Isle of Man-based Peel company began just after he completed the trailer-tent build in 1966, and his letters cast new light on the history of the company. Prior to this car and its paperwork re-emerging in 2018 after a long lay-up in Malcolm’s garage, it was widely assumed that Peel folded in 1966.
1970 – Malcolm Turner takes delivery of his Viking kit
‘Peel partly paid for the shipping from the Isle of Man – there had been a delay,’ Val recalls, ‘and Malcolm got to work building it straight away, but it was some years before it was actually on the road.
‘The work involved to get it finished was so different to his day job; just as intricate and painstaking, but very different. We’d just bought a semi-detached house with a garage – it was partly chosen because of this, so Malcolm would have somewhere to build the Peel – and he started spending all his free time on it. He’d go to work at 8am, come home at 7pm, have his tea, then spend the rest of the evening working on the car. I gave support; as he saw it, he couldn’t do anything else until he had built the family car. He was fanatical about putting things together. As it neared completion in 1972, I remember hoping he’d hurry up because the children were banging their heads against the roof in the back of the Ford Special.
‘The curious French people would come over and talk to us, and all because of that car’
‘It wasn’t a case of a kit as an alternative to buying a new conventional car. We were a young family living on a tight budget, and couldn’t afford a new car, but we had a garage and the ability to build one. Malcolm thought differently like that. He was meticulous, keeping absolutely everything to do with the car filed and in order, including the paperwork, but also all the magazine articles that had led him to his decision.
‘The car was registered just before the Spring Bank Holiday in 1972. That first journey was an adventure – we took it camping with the trailer-tent. We’d only towed the trailer with the Ford Special once or twice before getting the Viking on the road, but once it was ready we took it on nearly all our holidays.
‘We camped a lot with the Caravanning and Camping Club, and got very involved, taking the Peel and the trailer tent to C&CC rallies most weekends in the Seventies – it became our life really. Malcolm became increasingly involved in the organisational side of the Club too.
‘That said, the car could be quite hard work when camping. I’d have to get everything packed and ready on a Friday night, so we could just jump into it and drive to the site when the children came back from school and Malcolm returned from work. Both the car and the trailer were extremely compact, so getting a weekend’s worth of food and clothes into it required quite a degree of forward planning!
‘Our longest trip in the car was to France in 1978, to Mont St Michel, then Paris and Brittany when the children were 15 and 16 and about to go to college,’ says Val. ‘They’d spent most of their childhood weekends on the road in that car, and we wanted to give them a taste of foreign travel before they left home. We took lightweight tents that time – sometimes it was quite alarming towing the trailertent, because the car was so small that drivers coming up behind it would only see the trailer and not the car!
‘Driving the Peel in Paris was an experience. Thankfully, my brother-in-law lived there at the time and led the way, acting as an escort driver. It felt a bit alien at first, driving this little right-hand-drive car on the right-hand side of the road, but Malcolm soon got used to it. After a while it became quite fun – an adventure, like every trip in that car was.
‘Particularly so in Brittany. In that part of France, certainly at the time, there was a culture of promenading after the evening meal, taking in particular viewpoints. And for a week this eccentric English family, with their two small tents and their funny little yellow car, cooking their food on a stove on the ground in between, became one of those viewpoints! When the French go camping they take proper trestle tables, cutlery and ceramic plates, so we stuck out like a sore thumb.
‘And yet, people would come over and talk to us. We swapped details and hosted our new French friends in later years, and all because of that car.’
However, some of Malcolm’s self-built experiments were less successful. ‘Having built the trailer tent, Barry Bucknell’s next Mirror kit was a dinghy, but that wasn’t a success,’ says Val. ‘I was the sailor, having come from a seafaring family, and Malcolm thought this dinghy would be an ideal platform for him to fish from. However, he wasn’t a natural sailor and on our first trip out he fell in the water, and took me with him! The Peel towed the dinghy no problem at all, but we only used it a few times – he stuck to camping after that.’
As the Seventies drew to a close, the car’s role suddenly changed. ‘Malcolm made his mind up that he was going to make some improvements to the Viking,’ Val explains. ‘He put a bigger engine in it – a 1275cc A-series – and wanted to modify it further with a bigger carburettor and extra tuning.’ In the process Malcolm drilled a hole in the bonnet to clear the new engine’s SU carb, but as Val explains, life intervened.
‘Firstly, Malcolm’s parents fell ill and needed care, and then he was made redundant. That damaged him in many ways – he’d done that job since he was 15, and had become very specialised in his field, but the entire business of hand-painted metal was taken over by mass-production methods in the Eighties.
‘He was unemployed for a while, then tried various different jobs, but the Peel remained in his garage, off the road. I went back to nursing, and needed a more conventional car, so – staying with the theme at least – I bought a Mini, because they’d come down in price by that point. Needing something to tow the trailer-tent, Malcolm bought a Talbot Horizon, but we never really got on with it. Unlike any of his previous cars – the Austin, BSA, Ford Special or the Peel – if it broke down you couldn’t just fix it on the side of the road. That spirit of uncertainty and resourcefulness was something we’d always associated with motoring.
‘Ultimately the Viking stayed in the garage and became a museum piece. He wouldn’t let anyone else touch it. I thought while he was unemployed he might spend some time working on it, but he never did. He poured his time into the Caravanning and Camping Club instead, but he always said he’d get round to finishing the Viking one day.’
Sadly, Malcolm never worked on the car again. He and Val separated, and upon his death in February 2018, Val discovered it exactly where he had left it in the garage all those years before. ‘Everything about the Viking had been put in the back of the car,’ she recalls. ‘Including all the paperwork related to the car from early brochures, magazine cuttings and correspondance with Peel, and things like new headlights, still in their boxes, waiting to be fitted.’
2018 – John Fisher rescues the Viking.
‘When she rediscovered the car in 2018, Val Turner contacted the Mini Marcos Club, which put her in touch with Mini specials authority Jeroen Booij in the Netherlands,’ says Mini enthusiast and current owner John Fisher. ‘He passed Val’s contact details on to me because he knew I had a Peel Viking. Word had got out that this unusual car was for sale, and people were messing her around – someone had offered her £500 to take it away – so I knew I had to act fast.
‘What to do with it now is a difficult question – restore it or get the mechanicals going and leave the rest as-is?’
‘When I went to view it, I found it in the garage buried up to its roof in spare parts. Everything was seized, and the hydrolastic spheres had collapsed – I’ve replaced those with blocks of two-by-four at the moment, just so it can be moved around. I had to smash the hubs off just to get it rolling.
‘After going through all the accompanying documentation I realised how unusual it was. It was built in 1969 on the Isle of Man supposedly after Manx Peel production had ended. TVR was in deep financial trouble in 1966, and sold its V8-powered Trident prototype to dealer Bill Last, who then had to buy Peel – also in trouble – in order to use the Trident name. With Last’s purchase of Peel came the moulds and tooling to build the Viking – of which only a couple of prototypes had been made by that point – so the production Viking bodyshells were supposedly all built at Last’s premises in Woodbridge, Suffolk, under the Minisport brand.
‘However, Malcolm’s correspondence with Peel, and his shipping documents, prove that this bodyshell kit was made to order on the Isle of Man in 1969. That said, it came with a list of Peel accessories available from Viking Performance in Suffolk, which suggests that rather than Peel shutting down car production after Last’s takeover, the two firms worked with each other. Peel Engineering didn’t just build cars, but also glassfibre-hulled boats and motorcycle fairings, so it still had Manx production capacity in 1969.
‘I decided to show it at the 2018 NEC Classic Motor Show. I’d spoken to the organisers about my other Viking, which had been on a microcar stand before, and the idea that year was to have a general Peel stand, so we went from there. Given its condition, the plan was to display it as a barn find.
‘It looked good for something full of junk, but close-up it was disgusting, and when I smelt it I decided to give it a thorough cleaning out – otherwise the stand would have had to be covered with air fresheners! It was just as well – by the time I’d finished, I’d filled a wheelie-bin with mouse nests and there was a lot of mouse damage, particularly to the interior trim and pipe lagging.
‘What to do with it now is a difficult question, because there are so many opinions as to the right state for it. It’s currently 50/50 as to whether I do a full restoration, or just get the mechanical parts going and leave the rest as-is.
‘I’ll do the latter initially and take a decision from there, but my red Viking is battered and original and I think Val would like to see this as it was. Trouble is, I have so many projects and so little time.
‘I’ve been putting diesel in the engine for the past couple of months just to free it up, but it’s not wanting to move at the moment, so whatever comes next will be an engine-out job. But the Turners’ Viking will be back on the road again soon.’