John Simister
John remembers this magazine from the very start
John remembers PC from the start.
Forty years since Practical Classics was launched… I was still feeling quite youthful until that fact sank in. I well remember the frisson of excitement when I saw the first issue in WH Smith. No-one had produced a magazine quite like this before, even though the marriage of the emerging world of classic cars with the world of DIY maintenance, repairs and restoration seems obvious to us now. Here was an emphasis on doing things to old cars for the pleasure of it, for the joy of getting to know something from an earlier era, rather than simply getting stuck in to save money.
Not that the cars were necessarily ancient. The MGB, although the subject of a rust-repair feature in the second issue, was still in production, and some early project cars were in their teens when their bodyshells gained their rebuilds. Cars rotted more back then, which makes the survival of Sixties cars today even more remarkable.
I bought issue number one, of course, and filled in the competition coupon to win a Sprite. That meant I had to buy issue number two, to get the second competition coupon and send them in together. Obviously, I didn’t win the Frogeye, but I was hooked on PC from that point onwards.
Banging the drum
It was not until three years after PC’S launch that the magazine ran a feature on what was then (and for many years before and after) my classic car of choice: the Hillman Imp. I used to write to Michael Brisby, the editor, from time to time, and we even spoke by telephone. I was always pushing the Rootes dimension and eventually Michael caved in. Assistant editor John Williams was dispatched to meet a couple of Imp-mad friends and me, we convened at Imp Service in Selsdon, near Croydon, and a buying feature duly appeared in the April 1983 issue of PC.
Thanks to that feature, I think I’m the first member of PC’S current writing team to have appeared in the magazine. Not with words, apart from a name check in the ‘thanks to’ at the story’s end, but in a photograph: the right hand pointing to an Imp rust trap at the bottom of a rear wing on page 74 is mine. In today’s world of instant online public visibility, you wouldn’t believe how thrilling that was.
Less is somehow more
A year later I was a motoring journalist myself (on the weekly Motor magazine), and it quickly became clear to me how magazines were put together, how the production process worked, what a sub-editor did and how budgets were used up. And it was very obvious that PC was a low-budget operation with its monochrome or spot-colour pages and a small staff clearly overstretched. The factual mistakes and proof-reading errors irritated me, but I could also understand how and why they happened.
And these shortcomings produced an unexpected positive effect. PC might have been short on what the publishing industry called magazine craft, but it somehow made the magazine more accessible and easier for the reader to identify with – more human, if you like. It had the feel of a club mag, which encouraged reader interaction.
Those early issues were mostly based on practical stories and buying guides, give or take an occasional drive in something exotic. The first issue’s Ferrari 500 Superfast certainly set the bar high in that regard. Drive stories, group tests and adventures were more the province of the later Popular Classics, but when PC absorbed its in-house stablemate the stage was set for the format we know and love today. It’s still the magazine that gives me the biggest shot of pleasure when it lands on the doormat every four weeks.n
‘It had the feel of a club magazine, which encouraged reader interaction’