Martin Buckley Backfire
Stewart Imber, like Dorian Gray, must have a picture in the attic because he looks and sounds just the same as the day I first met him 15 years ago, when he brought his beautiful Mercedes 230 Universal on a photoshoot. I still cringe when I think about a later encounter with that car. We’d just come back from doing a feature in Germany on Stewart’s equally lovely, ex-lulu 280SE 3.5 Coupé. It was a successful trip, but I put the finishing touch on proceedings as I reversed my own (misty windowed) Coupé out of his garage, looking behind with the driver’s door held open… but without looking at the edge of the door, and thus administering a deep gouge along the immaculate flanks of the blue estate with my (much less immaculate) door.
Mr Imber was much more of a gent about it than I would have been; in fact, he had too much class to ever mention the incident again.
Since then the Universal – probably the best in the UK, even after my assault – has been sold. By then he’d already parted with a 600 and a beautiful 3.5 Convertible. Gradually, Stewart’s focus was moving on to automobilia, although he kept the Lulu Coupé and (until recently) his well-known ‘Ponton’ and ‘Fintail’ racers.
Not a man to do things by halves, Imber had already amassed some great Merc automobilia pieces but, once he started dressing the sets at Goodwood (from 2005), the collection exploded and before long it had developed into a business called, not unreasonably, Themed Garages.
Anyway, the point of all this is that Stewart invited me to see his stock as a precursor to selling 140 lots at Cheffins on 21 April. By the time you read this it will all be over, but he’s now got his head around the idea of having a cull so, in time, more from his 40-plus years of prudent collecting will be coming up for sale. He admits that he’s having as much fun selling it as he did buying, but is by no means flogging the lot, and he gets more satisfaction than ever from doing the much-admired Goodwood set-pieces.
I won’t even try and do justice to the dizzying array of signage, petrol pumps, oil cans, grilles, hubcaps, literature and more that I struggled to take in as Stewart guided me around four outbuildings. It was hard to know where to look: clusters of those open/closed oil signs that spin in the breeze; enamel signs for anything carrelated you can think of; old radios and Gpo-era telephones; plus a wonderful recreation of a ’60s garage, one of many familiar Revival favourites.
After a while you develop a sort of snowblindness, but I particularly liked a mid-’60s electric heater (it reminded me of a Smiths lyric about an old man who ‘had an accident with a three-bar fire’) and a print depicting a not-quite-right E-type that you’d probably have found in BHS c1964. At the more glamorous end was a replica 250GTO nose for your wall, and there were illuminated showroom signs for everything from Jaguar and MG to Wolseley and Wartburg.
I also spotted a giant BMW roundel (double sided) that I’d have killed for, and was pleased to learn that the Rolls-royce sign my better half bought for me in a prosecco-fuelled moment at Beaulieu Autojumble is now worth a lot more than the £700 she paid. It struck me that automobilia is a good game to be in: if you’re going to collect something for fun, the fact that it rises in value over the years is a nice bonus. And while you might not be able to drive a ’50s garage sign up the M6, they give a lot of pleasure and cost a lot less to store and maintain than an old car.
Nostalgia is big business, fuelled by increased demand from American collectors for ‘dressed’ garages to go with their cars. That’s not my world – or yours perhaps – but it keeps my friend off the streets in his golden years, and keeps him young. I don’t like to ask his age but if Stewart really is the 55 he looks, he must have bought his 3.5 Coupé when he was about 13. It seems that pictures in attics – or indeed giant illuminated signs in sheds – must be good for you.
‘Nostalgia is a good game to be in: if you’re collecting for fun, the fact that it rises in value is a bonus’