Theodore J. Gillam
‘PC catered for my niche requirements’
How Practical Classics catered for Theo’s niche requirements.
For cool people, early 1980 was all about Iron Maiden’s seminal album; the launch of the Audi Quattro; and the untimely death of AC/DC’S front man, Bon Scott. For an intensely stupid and cripplingly shy fifteen-year-old, however, who hadn’t yet looked directly at a real live woman for fear of his internal organs liquefying, Desert Island Discs provided life’s soundtrack and a Quattro was just another modern consumer-durable.
No, all nocturnal and unsavoury habits centred around whatever printed filth I could get my hands on, my copy of Ricardo’s The Highspeed Internal Combustion Engine being particularly well-thumbed around the photos of combustion chambers and flame-fronts. I’d already twisted my poor-old mum’s arm to let me sell my push-bike, cash in my birthday tokens and invest everything in a 1967 Austin A40, costing £40, an MOT man having counselled the previous owner to have it put down due to it having a crusty bottom.
Coffee table meets work bench
Then the very first issue of Practical Classics arrived with the newsagent, and it changed my life. It was the first magazine that catered for my niche requirements and would thus be forensically dissected each month to extract every granule of grinding dust from its pages. Now, when I say PC changed my life, it affected my A40 the most.
Up to that point, I’d polished it, dabbed Vaseline on its battery terminals, and gone ‘brrrrrm brrrrrm’.
But hang on, here was Terry Bramhall, being very confident with 'Zoey', PC’S A40. So, buoyed with new-found zeal, I followed suit, stripping every single bit of that poor little car in a frenzy of low-grade spannering and battered knuckles.
My petty cash fund was turned into the only welding means I could afford, an SIP arc set that was so ridiculously ill-suited to repairing an A40’s oxidised and doily-like substrate, I alternated between irretrievably sticking rods to it and vaporising large tracts of what might once have been sill, while expanding my vocabulary to include more words beginning with F, B and C. Inexplicably, like a desperate automotive version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, as Terry was relishing the progress with PC’S A40 project, I would sit amidst the progressively melted, disembowelled and grisly wreckage of mine. What eventually happened to HHO 630E? Look away now if you’re of a nervous disposition… yep, knacker’s yard. Oh, the humanity.
While this might have been met with much wailing and gnashing of teeth by many, with the exuberance of youth (and stupidity, don’t forget) my enthusiasm, now massaged on a monthly basis by PC, had become yet more tumescent. No magazine I’d found previously had combined an appreciation of classic cars with the heavily soiled fingering more commonly enjoyed in workshop manuals. I truly identified with what it stood for and became a committed Pc-pervert from that first issue onwards. I even defied my mum by swerving college in favour of an engineering apprenticeship, which wouldn’t have come about if I hadn’t firmly identified as a car nut by 1981, soon owning then-cheap automotive detritus like early Reliant Regal Dropheads and Alfa Romeo 2600 Sprints.
Breaking the fourth wall
I variously became a car mechanic, an assistantcurator of a weird car museum in Kew, and a psychologist working in road safety research. It was 20 years after the first issue of PC hit the shelves that I was rudely awoken when I face-planted my desk at a university, possibly while writing the specialist tarmac porn 'Overtaking on Wide Single-carriageway Roads’, that I decided to write a letter to John Pearson, got an interview around the same time as a jobbing actor called Hopkins, became a freelance writer and ended up enveloped in PC’S ample bosom, now for 20 of its 40 years. Thank you, Practical Classics. For everything.