No gloom
Sir,
How pleasant to find Motor Sport bashing the prophets of doom!
My motoring days began in the mid-fifties with a completely reliable BSA Bantam which carried my own 13 stone plus my wife’s 7 stone, agonisingly slowly, for over 30,000 miles before I progressed to a 250-c.c. C 11G from the same works. Despite my comparative poverty in those days I always enjoyed reading your publication month by month, dreaming of the 4-wheeled specials I might one day own, which were—and still are—so lavishly represented over the pages of the important end of Motor Sport. As a pre-teenage lad before the war I well remember seeing Motor Sport now and again in my father’s small garage where the family Raleigh 350-c.c. combination was stored and regularly worshipped by myself as a small boy, so he may be blamed as the originator of my early addiction to your magazine!
Since those days I have owned a mixed bag of vehicles—A35 vans and saloons, Morris Travellers, Land Rovers, Minis, Spitfires, a magnificent Daimler SP250, a motor caravan, and a veritable chain of MG-B roadsters, together with many motorcycles, including a 1929 BSA Sloper (my age!) and a frightening 1947 Vincent Rapide. From these machines I have given and received a great deal of pleasure and thousands of miles of near trouble-free motoring. I still run an MG-B Roadster and ride a Triumph Bonneville when the weather is right, and still enjoy camping trips to midgy Scotland and the sun and rain-drenched Alps. If Ernie plays ball, I plan to drive across Australia one year and Canada the next! I still buy and read Motor Sport each month and now ponder how I can afford a vintage Bentley or a spanking new and preferably red V12 Jaguar E-type or something even more exotic, like a Porsche! I enjoy my motoring. It’s nice to be encouraged in my pleasure by Motor Sport.
It seems that my motoring fun and that of thousands of similarly minded folk of both sexes and all ages is soon to end, or at least to be severely curtailed. What with salt in the winter and taxes all the year round and the world’s supply of oil rapidly failing, we will all be getting around by batteries, steam, horse or by walking! However, there is still petrol in the pumps down the road and I intend to buy it and use it to the last drop, and let the spreaders of gloom enjoy their own forms of pleasure.
I hope that Motor Sport thrives for many years to come, and when Swanmore are selling steam cars and John Britten’s “fun advert” lists Morgans running on sewage gas—I’ll still be reading and enjoying it, if I am still around! Good luck for the next twenty years!
K.I. Francis – Kirkby Stephen.