Our journey began one evening when Sarah my partner was window-shopping on ebay for nothing in particular. After exhausting all the things that her and the children might or might not need she had moved on to items that interested me, which broadly boils down to two things, beer and Morris minor vans. As beer is best found at our local brewery beside the railway station in Ludlow, the search had to be for a moggie van.

We had looked before a few times and had seen the occasional shell half rotted into the ground, entitled ‘restoration project’, but as I’m not really handy with anything other than wood I would be needing a van that was running and ready to go. Mostly when we looked we just got a lot of dinky toys, actual vans seemingly are few and far between. But that evening our luck was in, there it was, from 1967, beige and with a full MOT. The listing was an auction, with 5 days to go, the price was at eight hundred and something, Sarah clicked on ‘watch this item’ just to see what it would go for in the end, and navigated away from the page, “no, go back, I wasn’t finished with that” I said, and she reluctantly backtracked so that I could drool over the photos and read the blurb in full. I noticed at the bottom of the page it had had over 1000 page views, so I knew it wasn’t just me and a few others looking.  

  The van as it appeared advertised on ebay.

A few evenings later once the children were settled I got Sarah to look again, I’m not sure how to turn the darn thing on. The price had risen, but not to anything like what I was expecting. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, there was no way she’d let us have the van – 3 vehicles on the road would be too much. I said casually “The colour’s good, it would look great all sign written”, this must have planted a seed as then the next evening when the auction was due to end she was back on ebay unprompted looking to get an update. It was still very affordable, I quickly told her about the small amount of money I had saved which my late mother had put away for me. We decided to put a bid in for what we could afford, which confusingly she didn’t do, Sarah had gone back to the furniture quote she’d been working on. I wondered what was going to happen next, maybe she’d had second thoughts, I suppose there is a little more to owning a vintage vehicle than just buying it. Where were we going to keep it? How much would the insurance be? What sort of condition would it actually be in, it would probably need work doing. We sat silently for a while, she knew how badly I wanted another moggie van. I’d owned two previously, the last being 20 years ago now, and curiously they are the only vehicles I go back to longing to re-experience the drone of the engine and clatter of the doors.

“Are we going to bid then or what?”, “not yet” she said “It’s too soon”. Five seconds before the end she put my bid in. I saw the bid confirmed and close, the auction was over. We both knew that what we had bid probably wouldn’t bag us the van, and that there would be a higher bidder out there – it was going to be good practice though, for when we’d saved up enough to really buy one. Two minutes later she announced that the van was ours! (My apologies go out to the person/people who didn’t get it).

I could not believe what I was hearing – I was in shock. Out of the kitchen window I could see the light was on in the garage we use as a painting workshop. Our good friend, neighbour and part-time employee was working late painting kitchen cabinets for us. This called for a celebration, I disappeared off to the shed with beers in hand to tell Richard our good fortune.

The van was down in Portsmouth, and coincidentally we had already planned to visit relatives near Winchester a fortnight later, so we arranged to pick up the van when we were going to be down in Hampshire for the week. The vendor, a nice friendly chap, admitted that there was something wrong with the water pump and offered to change it for us before we picked it up, and so was happy to wait a fortnight for us to collect as it would give him time to get this done.

Wasting no time, Sarah looked for a sign writer who would traditionally hand paint the lettering to advertise our furniture making business on the van. After searching extensively in our own area, she found a professional sign writer who did things the old way in Liphook, which wasn’t too far from where we would be staying. Perfect; we could pick up the van and take it straight over to the sign writers.

I felt incredibly apprehensive the day we finally went to collect the van, the water pump change had also led to a hose failing and needing replacing, which had delayed the collection somewhat. We arrived in our Renault Kangoo with 3 children in the back, all ready to go off to the seaside after we’d dropped the new van off at the sign writers. I didn’t know what to expect, I’d bought a vehicle I hadn’t even seen, paying more for it than we’d spent on our family car – it seemed so unreal.

After the paperwork was completed, we had a short journey, through some country lanes and up the A3 to Liphook. I took our eldest daughter (age 6) for the first ride in the new van. The questions were endless…