Wyn Drabble: At the Vanguard of style

Wyn Drabble. Photo / Warren Buckland

Yesterday my eagle eye for car nomenclature spotted a Toyota Vanguard. I accept that Toyotas are one of the most reliable and trustworthy cars on the market today, but the fact that this particular model was called a Vanguard brought back some less-than-positive automotive memories.

You see, when I was only a few years old, the very first car my family had was a Vanguard, and I can still easily picture its unattractive, blobby, bulbous form.

It was, I suppose, like a very chubby, robust and pointlessly tall ladybird, but without the decorative dots - which, now that I think of it, would certainly have been an improvement.

It was too chubby to look aerodynamic and it gave the impression that it could easily roll over if it rounded a bend, something commonly found on roads.

There was, I should add, another car of the same era which actually looked more tippy-overy (I made up that word); this was the early-fifties Ford Prefect, which was quite high and very narrow (my memory suggests it may have only been two feet wide).

But back to the Vanguard. I don’t remember what colour ours was, but darkish green keeps hovering in my memory. I am more certain about the interior colour; the cloth was fawn.

On the insides of the door it billowed and shuddered as you drove, in the manner made famous by scrim and wallpaper on bare boards during a howling southerly.

I’m pretty sure the steering wheel was very large and made of Bakelite, and it needed to be used with caution because of the car’s aforementioned tendency to tip over. The column gear shift was very floppy.

Another vehicle I remember as an atrocity was the Triumph Mayflower (1949 – 1953), which was so chiselled and angular that it looked to me like a geometry experiment.

Apparently its looks were matched by its performance; in 1950, a Mayflower tested at the Brooklands racing circuit by British magazine The Motor had a top speed of 62.9 miles per hour (101.2 km/h) and could accelerate (I use the term loosely) from 0 – 50 mph in 26.6 seconds (but could take up to a week).

One of my school teachers drove a Renault Dauphine, which I have seen described as “a rickety, paper-thin scandal of a car”. I’ve also heard that “if you stood beside it, you could actually hear it rusting”. Slowness was a feature, and the Dauphine pretty much matched the Mayflower on performance which, according to one source, “you could measure with a calendar”.

In 1959, along came another contender for the angular award, the Ford Anglia. It wasn’t a pretty car, thanks mostly to the reverse slope of the rear window. Its looks were what experts would call... awful. It also managed to look pretty tippy-overy.

The ‘bubble car’ was another interesting piece of automotive history and, if my memory serves me correctly, entry was gained by opening the front. It was rather like opening a fridge door, but way more comical. A fridge door, you see, doesn’t have a steering wheel attached to its interior.

So, all it took was a model name on a recent Toyota to bring back all these memories. But to show I also had positive feelings in those times, I should mention my favourite car from those days - a car which remains a firm favourite to this day.

My choice does not belong in the rare and classic category (Cord, Auburn, Duesenberg and the like), but was a very common luxury vehicle in its time. I remember the British police even used it.

Yes, the Jaguar Mark 2 remains at the very vanguard of my automotive affections.