Web Page 3091 5th January 2024 Cars First Picture: Mendac Car Coat

Second Picture; My first Car a Standard 10

Third Picture: Driving Gloves

Fourth Picture: Tiger tail

Here is a page for the lads looking back at our cars of the 1960’s. At this time cars came with very few assessories and we had to buy the add ons ourselves. Very few cars came with built in radios and we had to rely on our portable transister radios with an ariel socket in the back if we wanted music in the car. To make the radio work properly we had to rely on either home fitted ariels fitted through the wings of the car or rely on an ariel that clipped onto the window of the car but this meant a wandering lead inside the car. One of the most popular assesories was the home fitted wing mirror I can remember fitting them myself, one of the major suppilers of wing mirrors was a firm called Wipac. Very few cars came with efficient heating systems or a windscreen demister although a small unit that could be attached to the screen using couple of rubber stickers. This unit was often wired directly into the car battery, not an ideal situation. As time went by the keen motorist could purchase a consul that could be fitted between the front seats and over the handbrake, these units provided an area for the motorist to store small items. There were also units that could be fitted to the car doors to provide storage for cassettes, however these had the big disadvantage of rattling away as the car moved or the door was closed. Another item that seems to have disappeared over the last few years is the undercar paraffin overnight heater. A unit that could be slipped under the engine during the winter months to try to keep the engine warm. Motor clothing was very different, most motorists carried travelling rugs and road atlas’s. My father always insisted on wearing a car coat which he always bought from a company called Mendac. The smart set at the time would never have thought of driving anywhere without wearing string backed driving gloves, I even had a pair at one time for a short time. This was the time when the car accessory shop came to the fore. Shops such as Halfords and Cosham Car Accessory’s were popular and most things for the home motor repairer could be bought there. I remember buying a engine decoking kit many years ago. I squirted the liquid into the spark plug ports and left, as instructed, them over night. The next morning the car was a job to start and it covered the back garden in noxious smoke but made very little difference to the performance of the engine. This was the season for novelties and many of us had comic stickers in their cars along with little triangular stickers stating that we had been to Bideford or Southend. However one of the cleverest advertising programmes came to us via Esso petrol and its put a tiger in your tank campaign. This became so popular that practically every other car that you saw around in the 1960’s had a synthetic tiger tail attached to its filler cap. Life has moved on since those days. Cars are more comfortable with all sorts of built in gadgets including mini tv cameras. At one time I did most of my own maintenance, as many of us did, but today I lift the bonnet of my car and are faced with a mass of engineering which I do not understand anymore. I fondly look back upon the days that with a little ingenuity we could keep ‘old bangers’ on the road for miles and miles. Stay in touch Peter gsseditor@gmail.com