Within my school year group, my 17th birthday in March 1971 was rather late compared to my peers. Many others had passed their driving tests by the time I was eligible. This was an almost unbearable delay to me, desperate as I was to escape from the farm and hit the roads. I had been entertaining other plans involving motorcycles and Heinkel bubble cars – both of which one could drive aged 16. Thankfully my parents resisted – otherwise I probably wouldn’t be around to write about it. In the 1970s road deaths among young people, and young farmers in particular, were common. A farming family that sat opposite us in church consisted of two sons and a daughter. First one son, then the other were killed in car accidents and the father wore a black armband to church from that time onwards. I used to watch him dozing through the sermon beside the two women and wonder how he had borne the loss. My older cousin, also a farmer, liked fast cars and had come within a whisker of disaster on a few occasions.
Obviously such considerations of mortality meant nothing to me as I was convinced, like all young men, of my skill and invulnerability. I was sure I would survive. My father started out teaching me but having driven cars on single track roads and fields since age 11 I was prone to drifting into the middle of the road which unnerved him and an instructor was engaged. He said I was clearly competent but years of unsupervised driving had left me with a lot of bad habits to unlearn before the test. One habit I kept quiet about was secretly driving on public roads long before it was even legal for me to hold a provisional licence.
The day of the test came and I sat it in the family Hillman Hunter Estate. During the test we passed our business offices in Ayr road. My father came out just at that moment and waved to me. I remembered that waving to people during the test was a fault and ignored him. I passed at the first attempt.
At 1500cc the rear wheel drive Hillman was lacking in power but could be put into a very satisfactory and predictable sideways slide on corners if you threw the back end out then steered into the skid. I also double de-clutched in rally style – something I actually had to do on the milk tanker I drove because it lacked a synchromesh gearbox. We started going on very long evening expeditions all over the county instead of doing our homework. We discovered pubs we thought no one would know us in and played darts and drank beer without fear of detection by parents or police. We thought.
My friend Davy had met some girls at the ‘French Summer School’ for music and language students held at West Linton. The summer after passing my test these girls turned up at a similar event in Cumnock and Davy thought we should take them to Ayr and show them the bright lights of Ayrshire. On the way there we were overtaken in humiliatingly easy fashion by a Jaguar saloon and feeling my honour impugned I set off after it as fast as the Hillman’s 1500cc could manage. Even with the accelerator flat to the floor we were struggling to keep the Jaguar in sight – then I noticed an odd noise and smoke began to rise out of the footwell. I had succeeded in blowing the engine. We walked to a phone box and summoned assistance from home. Later dissection revealed I had melted the shell bearings onto the big ends. With a fleet of milk lorries to service and maintain we had a large garage on the farm and three mechanics: the head engineer Bill Bunce, a second in command and an apprentice. Bill had three daughters and I had an absentee (for business reasons) father so we had spent a lot of time chatting in the garage and going on fishing expeditions together. The Hillman had to go to the garage and have Bill rebuild the engine.
Undaunted, we borrowed a milk lorry and used that for the next evening’s excursion. Some locals spotted two youths and two girls crammed into the cab and called the police assuming the lorry had been stolen. Fortunately the police didn’t find us. The upshot of the blown engine was that my father was without his everyday practical farm transport and he decided that I should have my own car to avoid this happening in future. I began looking through the papers for a likely candidate and found a 9 month old Mini 1275GT for sale in a garage in Kilmarnock. Dad was too busy as usual so Bill and I set off to have a look at it.
Bill was a massively built Londoner with a matching large personality who loved everything mechanical. He also loved dogs, guns and fishing. He walked into the showroom and announced to the startled salesman, “Is this where you get the bargains?” We looked at the mini. It was white, had the Clubman grille with red ‘go faster’ stripes and ‘1275GT’ running along the sides. The seats were black and the interior smelt strongly of stale cigarettes. It had belonged to a salesman and had done 15,000 miles in just 9 months. It was priced at £750 and I loved it. Bill had a look inside the engine compartment and did a couple of circuits inspecting the bodywork. He said it was very high mileage and we weren’t interested at that price. To my consternation he turned and walked away. At that the salesman dropped the price to £730 and we did a deal.
Adrian, a friend of Davy’s, had been trying to remember the name of David Coleman as in Sportsnight with Coleman (https://youtu.be/2Im_FnXiCHg) and groping for the right word, came up with ‘Sportsnight with – Faceneck’ for reasons known only to him. I suppose it was his version of thingummy. The ridiculous name stuck in Davy’s mind and we ended up calling the car Faceneck. It amused us at the time.
By today’s standards the car was not fast, taking about 12 seconds to reach 60 mph and it struggled to get over 90 mph tops. However the sensation of your backside barely clearing the road and a driving position that forced your knees up round your ears was fun. The gearbox was awful, like stirring a box of rubber balls with a stick – and the engine would overheat in summer. You could get round this to an extent by turning the heating up full blast and opening the windows. My father reluctantly accepted this fait accompli and phoned up his insurers to discover that fully comprehensive cover for me was going to cost £250, about a third of the price of the car. His detachment from the whole process was such that it was only when he borrowed the mini to take our cleaning lady home that he discovered its performance. “You be very, very careful in that car,” he warned me afterwards.
Faceneck featured a ‘racing handbrake’. Basically there are no ratchets until the brake was fully on making it a pull-on pull-off brake. A binary bake. This allowed you to do handbrake turns. You threw the wheel right or left and pulled on the handbrake sending the car into a huge spin, doing a 180º to face in the opposite direction. You then pressed the button on the handbrake which instantly fully released it. I garaged the mini in one of the free bays in the hayshed behind the house. The shed is visible in the front view photograph filled with hay bales. One night in the early hours after the usual late night chat with pals I decided to practice handbrake turns on the tarmac surface in front of the shed. It was all going brilliantly until on the fourth or fifth attempt my headlights picked up my pyjama-clad father furiously signalling me to stop. It was apparently difficult to sleep through handbrake turns.
At age 17 such a vehicle was intoxicating. I drove everywhere as fast as possible at the limits of adhesion and timed myself over various regular routes. My father now had his estate car back but very soon the mini was in the garage. I started in a low-key way, skidding on ice and ending up in a ditch on my way home from rehearsals for the school play. My cast-member passenger was very understanding. Things progressed from that point onwards. I went through fences, over fences and finally rolled the car over completely having gone up and embankment on a tight bend. That repair involved Bill ordering an entire new body shell from British Leyland and reglazing the windows. My mother once borrowed the car to go shopping and while parked the Dowager Marchioness of Bute reversed into it with her Rolls Royce. As a result, when I sold Faceneck, the only original parts left were the seats, the engine, the wheels and one of the doors.
Amazingly, I was allowed to bring the car to school and park it with the teachers’ cars. As I had done throughout my school days I always went home for lunch. On returning for the afternoon session I did get into trouble for demonstrating to my fellow pupils how I could generate wheel spin changing from first to second gear as I entered the playground.
Eventually even my father’s patience and detachment ran out and I was told the car had to go. His exact words were, “You’ve had your beard, you’ve had your long hair and you’ve had your sports car. It’s time to settle down.” I was 20. At that time I was sharing a flat in Watson Crescent with Hans Kubon a Norwegian dental student. The cost of living was so high and the exchange rate so extremely weighted in favour of the Krone that Norwegians could buy cars and even flats with their grants. Hans wanted to buy Faceneck. Accordingly, we arranged to travel together on the ferry from Newcastle to Bergen. After a pleasant holiday staying with Hans and his parents in Kråkenes, I left the car behind.
In 1989 I was completing my last Senior Registrar attachment at the Western General before taking up my consultant post. We had to go to the Northern General on a Friday afternoon to do the plain film reporting. As I was leaving one evening I noticed a white Mini Clubman approaching the exit. I checked the number plate: it was SCS 730J. The car was waiting in a queue to join the traffic on Ferry Road. I rushed over and tapped on the passenger window. The woman driver reached over and wound it down. “Sorry to bother you,” I said, “But where did you get this car?” “I bought it off a Norwegian dental student when he went back home,” said the lady, who turned out to be a nurse in the hospital. “This was my first car!” I exclaimed, overcome with excitement, “I sold it to that dental student.” The lady beamed. “I’ve had it ten years. My husband hates it but I love it!” At that point the queue moved forward and she had to say a hasty goodbye. I watched Faceneck disappear down Ferry road.
The Bohemian Waxwing 