BRITISH MOTORING PREVAILS
This tale of two vehicles underscores how every classic has a story
Hundreds of hours of work for people they only see once a year plus hundreds of volunteer hours is ... over the top.
(Editor’s note: The Greatest Show on British Wheels rolls into VanDusen Botanical Garden on Saturday, and features classic four-wheel and two-wheel vehicles from the empire. In anticipation of the splendour on the grass, Alyn Edwards whets your appetite with the story behind one of each.) When Kamloops wedding and automotive photographer Andrew Snucins met his future bride Samantha Cooper and learned her middle name was Minnie, he set out to buy her a Mini Cooper S.
As it turned out he fell in love with a good-looking 1974 Austin Mini, which was as close as he could get to the famed Mini Cooper.
The couple had a very limited budget to do some structural restoration to the car for participation in the 2016 Hagerty Spring Thaw Rally with its array of eclectic and exotic vintage cars. For the past eight years, Snucins has been the volunteer photographer for the popular event, scooting ahead of the cars to pho- tograph them in action. The Mini was sent to Robert Maynard at RWM & Co. at the Boundary Bay Airport — restorers of exotic classics such as Jaguars and Ferraris. The news from Rob Maynard would not be good. The car was such a rust bucket underneath the Bondo and fibreglass used in the previous “cover up” restoration that he pulled the seat belt anchors out of the floor by hand.
Essentially there was no floor and the body was full of rust.
The men knew each other from previous rallies, where Snucins was the volunteer photographer and Maynard was the “sweeper,” doing roadside repairs on broken down rally cars. Snucins said he would do what he could to patch up the Mini, doing the work as a filler and training for his apprentice.
Owner Snucins didn’t want Maynard to put the effort in and called to suggest the car be scrapped or used for parts.
But, unbeknownst to the owner, a worker bee had been organized through Dave Hord and his Classic Car Adventures community as the date for his Hagerty Spring Thaw Rally approached.
Secretly, the car was undergoing a full professional restoration, alongside vehicles worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, in a round-the-clock effort to make it rally ready. Maynard and his paid staff worked all day. Then he’d work at night to push for completion.
Up to a dozen volunteers spent two weekends working on the car, some who didn’t even know the owner.
On April 28, Andrew and Samantha attended the prerally driver’s meeting in Vernon, where they were surprised with their freshly restored Austin Mini 1000 being driven up to the hotel entrance. The cheering and screams of delight were followed by tears.
“Hundreds of hours of work for people they only see a once a year plus hundreds of volunteer hours is just over the top,” the emotional owner said. “I’m just a kid with a backpack and camera. This is the most humbling experience of my life.”
Maynard, along with some of his artisans and the volunteers who made this dream a reality, will be on hand with the car now named S Minnie Cooper at Saturday’s All-British Field Meet.
UNCLE CLARKE’S CART
“What is it?” asked Abbotsford School District Tech Ed teacher Dave Liversidge when his fatherin-law handed over a frame and boxes of parts.
Why, it’s Uncle Clarke’s cart, was the response.
This unusual vehicle is a 1934 Harding Deluxe Model B invalid carriage. Thousands of these motorized wheelchair tricycles were given to injured veterans by the British government before and after the Second World War. They were banned because of safety concerns in 2003 and the vast majority of them were destroyed. As such, finding one in any semblance today is a rare sighting.
This particular invalid carriage was imported to Vancouver by the family of Clarke C. Thompson, who had suffered a broken back as a child and could walk only with full leg braces.
He would drive his cart from his home in southeast Vancouver to his downtown accounting office at Carroll and Hastings Street. He could either propel himself with hand pedals or pull up on the starter lever to activate the Villiers motorcycle engine.
Family legend has it that he once raced a train when he first got his cart.
On another occasion he required hospitalization when a rock thrown by a passing truck hit him in the head. He sported goggles after that.
Thompson ran his carriage up the Hope Princeton Highway before it was officially opened so he could say he drove the first motorized vehicle on the road.
He would honk his horn outside his favourite liquor store in the 1940s and 1950s to alert staff to bring out his brand of scotch.
He kept a flask in a butter box on his cart, which his wife upholstered so he could drive with his braced legs outstretched.
Tricia Liversidge remembers using the hand pedals to drive her great uncle’s cart when she was eight years old.
She also remembers the spectacle of him driving himself in his motorized contraption along the streets of Vancouver.
In the 1950s, Uncle Clarke bought a new Buick and had it equipped with hand controls. His cart went into storage and, after he died, was shifted from one storage area to another. At some point it was taken apart for restoration with parts stored in boxes.
Then parts from other vehicles got mixed in.
Dave Liversidge was given a jigsaw puzzle to put together without a picture. Internet research eventually led to the Invalid Carriage Register in England, which identified Uncle Clarke’s cart as the oldest Harding Deluxe Model Invalid Carriage registered, the seventh-oldest British manufactured carriage registered and the only one in Canada known to the register.
Liversidge will display Uncle Clarke’s cart during Saturday’s All-British Field Meet at Vancouver’s VanDusen Botanical Garden as a debuting restoration.