The Way We Were
GRASMERE, WESTMORLAND
Grasmere, Sept 1958
Camping in the Lake District this weekend? These are the cars that holidaymakers were using in 1958…
Perhaps if you’d peered at the peaks in the distance through your Barr & Stroud binoculars you might have spotted a solitary figure somewhere near the summit, whiling away the hours with a sketchbook.
It could very well have been the late Alfred Wainwright, who was halfway through his Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells when this shot was taken. Back then, you could have picked up one of the original copies – printed just down the road in Kendal at presses used by The Westmorland Gazette – for 12/6, and used his handwritten notes and painstakingly detailed sketches to plan your next foray into the fells. The mountain on the left of this shot, Helm Crag, had only just been chronicled in the series’ third instalment, while on the other side of Dunmail Raise, Seat Sandal had been charted in the very first book, The Eastern Fells.
Alfred never used cars to get around the fells dotted around the Lake District, so he would have been more familiar with the charms of a Duple-bodied Leyland Royal Tiger than any of the cars accompanying the outdoor types here, setting up camp on the shores of Grasmere.
But we reckon he would have liked the Austin Cambridge behind the grazing sheep – the 1.5-litre B-series unit would have have been more than capable of clambering up the nearby Wrynose Pass. The pronounced kink in the chrome shoulder line marks this out as being a pre-Farina A55, but not one of the DeLuxe versions.
It looks like the two chaps over at the next tent have given up unpacking their ‘sit up and beg’ Ford, which we reckon is a 1953-on Popular rather than an Anglia but the earlier car’s giveaway larger headlights and side vents are obscured in this shot. It looks like they’ve treated it to a few holiday upgrades, if the aftermarket door mirrors, roof rack and spotlight are anything to go by.
As the tents get ever closer to the water’s edge there are even more examples of Dagenham’s fi nest – including a roof rack-equipped 100E-generation Prefect, complete with metal sun visor – which looks like it’s being used to dry out a sleeping bag!
Further back there’s a Ford Consul MkI, another 100E Prefect, and an Audax-era Hillman Minx, distinguishable from its more
upmarket Singer Gazelle sibling even from this distance on account of there being no two-tone side strip. Interestingly, it’s the only car here with its bonnet up – was it being used to prop up a makeshift campsite washing line, or was it cooling off after a traffi c jam on the A591? Parked perhaps a bit too close to the water’s edge is an E-series Vauxhall, although it’s diffi cult to say from this distance whether it’s a Velox, Wyvern or Cresta.
Look carefully and you can also see BMC’s big-seller just making an appearance here – a Morris Minor, whose nose is just sticking out from one of the tents towards the back of this shot. Despite being a decadeold design, plenty of cash-stripped Brit motorists were snapping the Moggy up in the wake of the Suez Crisis – so much so that 1958 was its best-selling year, with 113,699 rolling off the production line.
A little further along the fence at the Dale End campsite there’s a Bedford CA setting up camp for the night, with its sliding passenger door open to let a bit of that Lakeland air into its otherwise-stuffy cabin – and then we’re onto two back-to-basics transport options for holidaymakers who either didn’t fancy (or couldn’t afford) the delights of a lightly-used Ford Pop with its single vacuumoperated windscreen wiper.
The motorcycle-sidecar combination was still a familiar sight on Britain’s roads throughout the late Fifties – and likely would have been a lot more fun than the oddly-sagging tent its owner appears to have brought along for the night. Then there’s the Glas Goggomobil towards the left of this shot, which looks us to like a T300. These German-built air-cooled microcars were popular among cashstrapped motorists at the time – its UK distributor boasted in period advertisements that it was the only small car on sale at the time with all-independent suspension and was capable of 55mph and eking 60 miles out of every gallon. You’d get all that for £503, or £512 if you were suffi ciently flush to stretch to the optional sunroof.
These days you’re more likely to see Land Rover Discoverys and Škoda Octavias coupled up to huge, satellite TV-capable caravans on this self-same site. And yes, Alfred Wainwright still would have preferred the bus…