Nick Larkin
Nick pays tribute to the earliest issues of PC
How the early issues of Practical classics captivated our Nick.
The date: June 1980. The Place: WH Smith, Ashby-de-la-zouch. The Shelf: middle one. The subject: My first Ever sighting of Practical Classics! Issue Number: Three. No publication would ever have a greater influence on my life. No, not even Razzle!
Trembling with shock and pure joy I frantically leafed through the precious black and white PC pages. I’d loved cars of the early Sixties backwards ever since my memory would register anything. I’d bought some books, but seriously had no idea there was any form of classic enthusiast movement, unless you counted slaughterers of BMC Farina and Rover P4 on the banger track for the ‘entertainment’ of ITV World of Sport viewers. My all-time fave, the Wolseley 6/80, was confined to old films of the type you’d only see on BBC2 on Saturday afternoon. Here was salvation in magazine form.
Heavens, there was a feature on the Jaguar 3½ litre, sharply contrasting with ‘Victor Engine Strip; and ‘Save your MGB door.’ Surely they were still making those things in Abingdon?
With a cheery ‘sorry’ to the former women’s prison guards WH Smith employed to stop people reading publications without buying, I rushed to the till to hand over my 60p, approximately a third of my trainee journalist’s weekly salary.
Now I had my own copy I could really inspect that Jaguar’s leather seats, and scream at a mindless letter complaining that the legendary A55 Farina would ‘never be a classic’ despite being included in the Price Guide, the sicko! Wow they are restoring an Austin A40! They reckon people should pay £1700 for a Mini Cooper S. Ah, the Market Trends section with strange graphs that no-could ever understand. Crumbs, there was even an owners’ club for the Armstrong Siddeley and plans for a Vauxhall Cresta organisation.
Forty years on I can confess to becoming a PC addict. I stalked newsagents for the latest issue and genuinely went home on a downer if it hadn’t arrived. And on one occasion, when working nearby, I actually went to look at the Beckenham offices. On a Sunday. I don’t know what I expected to see.
I preserved my PCS in plastic wallets.
The magazine got me to many rallies, the first being a 1983 Cambridge Oxford Owners Club event at Crich when a most opinionated young enthusiast pilloried my suggestion that my MG Magnette Farina was definitely worth £250. That was one Mr Peter Simpson, a future great friend who would later become editor of this magazine.
No other classic car title had the same approachable friendliness, which of course continues to this day! I loved the long-term restorations of ‘Zoey’ the A40, the Sunbeam Rapier and the Staff Car Sagas featuring gentlemen of a certain age fiddling with A35 gearboxes in the pebble-dashed garages of lead-windowed Home Counties semis amid the wafting smells of Sunday lunch. The wonderful writings of Paul Sanderson about his Wolseley 6/80 – an undoubted influence on myself. Most importantly the mag welcomed you to a movement – the classic car fraternity.
I did apply for a job on PC in 1985 but didn’t get it – my letter is stored in the same national archive as that from Decca Records turning The Beatles down.
PC did inspire me to write about classics and I joined Popular Classics in 1989, finally becoming features editor of this magazine when the two titles were merged in 1996.
Now 1980 seems like a world away, and it definitely wasn’t the best of times to put your house up as collateral and start this magazine. Speaking purely as one of hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts who have enjoyed this mag, thank goodness they did! Happy 40th Practical Classics!n
‘I went to look at PC’S offices. On a Sunday. Not sure what I expected to see’