THE OCTANE INTERVIEW
Dubbed ‘king of the lock-ups’, this self-made tycoon has built up the largest collection of classic cars in the UK
Car collector extraordinaire, Rodger Dudding
WITH HIS UNRULY mane of white hair and toothy grin, there’s something of the ageing rock star about Rodger Dudding; a combination of Brian May and Roger Daltrey, all rolled into one burly frame. But Rodger has built up a fortune that would put most rock stars’ in the shade. And he’s spent a good portion of it on building up the largest classic car collection in Britain, about 500 vehicles so far. To put that into perspective, the British Motor Museum at Gaydon numbers about 300, and the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu claims around 280.
Why so many cars? ‘I’ve always liked cars but I don’t really know why I started collecting them, other than that I like their designs,’ he muses at his HQ in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire. ‘I’d held onto my father’s Morris Minor, and the Jensen FF that was my first “proper” motor in the 1960s, and then I just started buying the odd car that appealed; an Anglia, a little Lotus. It wasn’t about the monetary value, I just liked the way they looked.’
Rodger wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He had a middle-class upbringing in Gillingham, Kent, as the son of a naval officer, where ‘even though it was a reasonably affluent street, we were one of very few households that had a car. My father served in the convoys during World War Two – he had two ships go down beneath him – and would tinker with an old Clyno on the rare occasions he was home on leave. Then, after the war, he ordered a brand-new Morris Minor.
‘By then he’d advanced to the rank of lieutenant, so he was allowed a driver and a big Humber Hawk, and if the weather looked like rain he would summon the driver with the Humber rather than get the Morris wet! He
cherished that car and I honestly think it has been out in the rain only three times in its life.’
At his father’s instruction – ‘his word was law’ – Rodger also joined the Navy as an apprentice engineer, but his career was ended by an accident that severely damaged his back. ‘I was sliding down a companionway, a ship’s ladder, that hadn’t been properly bolted down, and we both fell into the engine room. I was not quite 21 at the time and just about to finish my apprenticeship, so the Navy allowed me to qualify and then discharged me. I was SNLR – Services No Longer Required.
‘The one thing I wanted when I came out of the Navy was a car, and the best way to get one was to become a salesman – so I took a job with Rothmans, the cigarette company. I was very proud to be allocated a Ford “sit up and beg” van, with a huge model of a cigarette on the roof, but when my father saw it he was apoplectic! Looking back, I can quite understand that because he had worked so hard to elevate himself through the Navy.’
Rodger’s ebullient nature made him a born salesman and he soon got involved with the PR side of Rothmans’ business. One day the big boss of Rothmans’ South African parent company, the Rembrandt Group, turned up in his office and invited Rodger to work for him in
Africa ‘at double my present salary and with the company car of my choosing, up to a value of £2000’. That was Jaguar money at the time, 1962. Rodger worked for Rembrandt until 1967, when he was tempted away to join an American company called AMF – American Machinery and Foundry – that had developed a new tyremaking machine. Based back in London as deputy to the head of sales, he has fond memories of the firm’s director, a naturalised American called Alfred Eaton Clark.
‘“Eaton”, as we called him, was a lovely man,’ recalls Rodger. ‘One day I was asked to deliver some papers from his office to his home, and while trying to find them I discovered a citation for his service as a “Pathfinder” Lancaster pilot during the war. He was quite cross when I asked him about it, and told me never to mention it again. In this respect, he was just like my father. Men of his generation rarely talked about what they did in the war.’
It’s clear that Rodger has enormous respect for the Armed Forces. He owns two current-model Rolls-Royce Wraiths: one was offered to him by a dealer at a price he couldn’t refuse but the other was being auctioned to benefit his favourite charity, the Fly Navy Heritage Trust, which maintains historic naval aircraft. The fact that this meant paying significantly above list price for a car he
‘RODGER OWNS TWO MODERN ROLLS-ROYCE WRAITHS, ONE SIMPLY BECAUSE IT WAS BEING AUCTIONED FOR HIS FAVOURITE CHARITY’
didn’t need – albeit a unique model commissioned as a tribute to Beatles producer Sir George Martin – mattered not a jot because the charity is a cause dear to his heart.
Back to the 1960s, and Rodger’s new position with AMF allowed him to buy a nearly-new Jensen FF. ‘I had seen the technical write-ups and was fascinated by the Maxaret anti-lock braking technology, derived from aircraft. I managed to keep hold of the car when I set up in business for myself and I still have it, although it needed a full restoration about 20 years ago.’
The 1970s were when it all came good for Rodger. First, he developed the ticketing machine – ‘take a number and wait to be called’ – that’s found in public offices, post offices and deli counters around the world. He called it the Lonsto system, simply because he was dividing his time between London and Stockholm.
‘I’d been into a shop that used plastic counters to avoid queuing and thought I could improve on that, so I quit AMF and spent two years knocking on doors. Eventually I persuaded the boss of Green Shield Stamps to install my machines in all their redemption offices, and through that I got a meeting with a director of Tesco, Ian MacLaurin. I suggested using our machines on their deli counters, which led to a meeting with then-chairman, Jack Cohen.
‘Jack said to me: “Boy, what an effing stupid idea; why are you in my effing office?” But Ian stood his ground and I got into a couple of Tesco stores – which eventually led to being in the other major supermarkets, too.’
Rodger’s second moment of genius was in realising that there was money to be made from buying lock-up garages and renting them out. His property empire grew so enormous that he was dubbed ‘king of the lock-ups’, and his tally now stands at some 14,500-15,000 garages.
Not surprisingly, clearing out vacated garages has led to several discoveries, not all of them pleasant. ‘We’ve found several bodies, including not just suicides but murder victims, some of them dismembered. But there were amusing finds, too.
‘We had a rule that tenants needed to keep their garage doors closed when they weren’t present, to prevent damage from a gust of wind catching the door. One morning, quite early in the business, I was at one of my sites on Belmont Park Road in East London – I still own it today – and saw that one of a pair of double-doors was open. But there was a brick wall just behind it!
‘I pulled the other door open, and the wall continued but with a house-type door built into it, with a doorbell… So I pressed the bell, and this enormous gorilla of a man
opened up and asked me what the eff I wanted. When I explained that I was the landlord, he said that I’d better come in – and I found the garage was equipped as a knocking shop, with a double bed and a rather blowsy blonde in it! The chap muttered that he supposed I’d want him to vacate the lock-up, but I said “Why? As long as I get my rent, you can invite all your mates to do the same thing!” It made me chuckle.’
About 15 years ago, Rodger’s incipient car collection was causing his then-wife Gloria to mutter about the driveway of their house looking like a used-car lot, so he bought an old tram shed in Potters Bar to house his rapidly growing fleet. Known as Studio 434, this is still the collection’s headquarters, but the bulk of the vehicles are now housed in a modern warehouse a few miles away. Ever the entrepreneur, Rodger has added a couple of purpose-built film studios to the building – during
Octane’s visit, TV chat star Graham Norton was filming there – and the collection is rented out for TV and film work on location, with credits including Peaky Blinders and the Brad Pitt movie Allied. There’s a full-time mechanic and an apprentice to keep everything running.
The collection is as eclectic as you can imagine, ranging from immaculate examples of popular cars such as a Mk3 Escort XR3i up to the inevitable Ferraris and Bentleys, but also many rarities, including the 1989 Railton F29 Claremont featured in Octane 198. This William Towns design is complemented by a pair of his wooden-bodied Hustler six-wheelers, and by the Towns-penned Aston Martin ‘wedge’ Lagonda. Not just one wedge, however: Rodger has an incredible 24 of them, despite being well acquainted with their foibles.
‘I bought my first Lagonda new, and it was great at getting us from A to B, but not so good at returning to A again. Gloria and I got stranded outside a pub in Cornwall one evening when it refused to start, with a crowd of people having just watched us get into it. Aston Martin found out later that the fuel cut-off switch had somehow become activated while it was parked outside the pub, but they had to strip out the dashboard to access the switch!
They sent me a bill for about two thousand quid – I still have the letter – and I told them to get stuffed.’
Gloria, sadly, died in 2013, after a marriage that lasted 53 years. But more recently Rodger has found love again with a lady called Emma, who he happily admits is less than half his age. ‘We’ve been engaged for three-and-ahalf years,’ he says cheerfully. ‘Yes, maybe it will sound wrong to some people, but so what? The fact is that she makes me giggle and I like taking care of her. Plus, Emma’s a brilliant driver – she has an intuitive sense of car control.’
Despite having more than 500 cars at his disposal, Rodger himself has trouble driving these days, not because of his age – he is 83 – but due to back pain that’s a legacy of the accident he suffered while in the Navy. Not that he’s taking life any easier as a result, it seems. What may yet turn out to be the biggest expression, literally, of his free-spiritedness is yet to come.
‘The house I’ve lived in for over 40 years was built for Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, but it’s had so many additions over the decades that it’s past its best. It occupies a double-plot in an expensive part of London, where the houses typically sell for £5-10million, and the logical thing to do would be to knock it down and build a couple of mock-Georgian houses – yeuch!
‘A few years ago I had this dream of building a castle there instead. A proper medieval castle. I had several discussions with Lotus racer and architect friend, David Morgan, about how to go about it – you have to order the stone two years in advance, because it’s not like buying bricks – but, tragically, he went and died on me, so nothing further came of it then. But we’d talked with bodies such as English Heritage and they loved the idea! So maybe it will yet happen. As long as I can put baked beans on my toast for breakfast, I’m happy to spend the rest of my money on building a medieval castle.’
A castle for the king of the lock-ups – how fitting would that be?