How it all began …

I suppose the Club really had its beginning in Alex MacKinnon’s Spit Hill Garage in Mosman, where a few of us were wont to gather most weekends to talk about cars, take off periodically on lap dashes round a circuit we had devised in local side streets and drink beer which the Oaks Hotel would deliver in quarts of draught (for 1/9) if you rang them in time on a Saturday morning.

It was in the days shortly before the Hitler war: none of us had much money, but things didn’t cost all that much really – cars could be registered by the quarter, petrol was 1/8 a gallon, cigarettes (if you used then) were sixpence for a packet of ten (the filthy rich smoked Craven A which were ninepence) and a threepenny tram ride would get you from North Sydney to Spit Junction. If you couldn’t scale the bit over the next section you walked.

There was even a time when we started to paint our cars the same (red with polished aluminium bonnet) and called ourselves ‘The Scuderia’. Alex had his Frazer Nash with AC six engine, Hal Stevens had his Fronty Ford with Ruxtell 2-speed axle and Hayes wire wheels, my future brother-in-law Maurie Rowe had a curious FIAT 501 coupe with long slinky mudguards, Frank Lyell had his SS1 (if the white ants stopped holding hands it would fall apart, he vowed), Steve McClay turned up frequently and told us about his AC 6: Rex Ellis bought the s.v. Aston-Martin clover leaf, a pretty car (later we were to give it an Alvis 12/50 engine) and there were others, but not regulars, with FWD Alvis, Talbot 105, Bugatti Brescia tourer, all good stuff.

My car was the ex-Mrs Jones 20/70 Crossley which I was buying on the never-never from a little corner car yard somewhere out St. Peters way (45 pounds; fifteen down and fifteen shillings a week). It spent most of it’s time in the garage at home being taken apart, cleaned and put together again, but I did manage to have it in one piece (and registered) long enough to transport us to Bathurst for the second race at Mount Panorama - of which I saw very little, as we had run a big end on the Golden Mile near Kelso so that I spent most of the day underneath taking out the shims so that we could get home again. One ticklish problem was that I had to let the sump down level to keep the oil (Castrol R for the sake of the smell) and get it back up again without losing any. Another was that we had brought sandwiches in the cavity behind the back seat, into which we had crammed as many tines of Spit Hill petrol as we could to avoid having to buy more. It was DPL, which had a proportion of power alcohol in it, and the smell percolated through our sandwiches, which were awful.

During this same period of registration, I hit a milk cart while returning home early one morning, destroying the Crossley’s radiator, top bits of the engine and of the cast aluminium firewall. Alex and I redoubled our efforts to buy, from a man living across the road from the Spit Hill garage, bits of a supercharged 4 litre 6 cylinder Mercedes bestowed round, under and inside his house, instead of in his garage, due to the fact his son had set fire to it playing with matches, causing significant damage to its limousine body and chassis. We were eventually successful, buying the bits for £20. Over the following several years, I mated the Mercedes radiator, engine, gearbox and rear axle to the Crossley front axle, steering gear, road springs and chassis frame. Our kids christened it ‘The Monster’, and the name has stuck, but that is another story. Meanwhile, I was busy earning a living, bringing up a family, working on VSCCA affairs, which left me little time and even less spare money.

All of which is beside the point for the purpose of this exercise, but it does go to show to a degree how the foundations were laid. In my own case the roots went deeper – some vignettes from my own early days include perving on a new 12/50 Ducksback (with polished copper exhaust) outside the Oaks Hotel while my old man and his mate from next door were inside one Saturday morning – being taken to hospital in next door’s Vauxhall 23/60 to have my appendix out – parents of one of the kids visiting our Moss Vale school in their new Lambda – the ex-Bluey Russell 4½ Bentley and the ex-Saywell 30/98 in a funny little showroom in Castlereagh Street (probably for all of a couple of hundred pounds each, nobody wanted those funny old cars with their thirst for petrol).

Anyway, the war came (not unexpectedly for most of us): most of the mob succumbed to the general hysteria and tried for one service or another R.A.A.F being the popular choice – some of us, including me, were knocked back on occupational grounds or for some physical disability (they could afford to be picky in the early days). Petrol and other things went on ration and private motoring more or less ground to a standstill unless you adopted extreme measures like a gas producer (horrible things) or a gas bag (John Crouch put one on an Austin 7 tourer and said the handling was quite individual in a cross wind).

‘Motor Sport’, of which we were enthusiastic readers (in Swains on Saturday morning if we couldn’t afford to buy it), kept the fires burning for us – later on, we elected Bill Boddy as our first Honorary Life Member and Bob Shepherd drew one of his inimitable G.P. Bugattis as a presentation piece for the revered W.B.

It was largely thanks to “Motor Sport” that we determined that, if things ever looked like returning to normal, we would try to start something along the lines of the Vintage Sports Car Club which always got good press in the magazine. Cars of suitable type were fairly readily available (those which had escaped the scrap drive) and at prices which were quite reasonable (I think Ted Ansell started the rot when he advertised a 12/50 in the S.M.Herald for 250 pounds)

(One of the things that disturbs Phyl and me more and more as time goes on is the increasing number of names of old friends that we have to prefix with “The Late”.

For the purposes of this exercise I propose to ignore this prefix.)

Spreading the word

As the war ground wearily to its end, we spread the word by one means or another – word of mouth, handwritten notes left under suitable wiper blades, friendly letters to people who should be interested; every time someone thought of a name we would try to get in touch. John Crouch was a tremendous help with his suggestions. The word even spread interstate and our place was more of less a home from home for people in the services who were temporarily far from home. I remember particularly George Brooks, stationed in Sydney for a while, who in fact came with me to the Mater Hospital to visit Phyl on the afternoon of our No2 son, John, was born.

The Steering Committee

We established what nowadays is called a Steering Committee – Steve McClay as President, Frank Lyell as Club Captain, Alex MacKinnon as Treasurer and me as Hon.Secretary. These offices were confirmed at the inaugural meeting of the Vintage Sports-Car Club of Australia which was held at our place on the 15th September 1944 – second Tuesday of the month, and coincidentally my birthday (28th).

Founding Members

Those present were the Founder Members of the Club, and they were:

C.R.McClay -President (A.C.Six),  F.J.Lyell – Club Captain (Austin, SS1),  A.K.MacKinnon – Treasurer (Frazer Nash),  R.B.Pritchett - Secretary (Mercedes Crossley),  J.A.Jeffery (Bentley Speed Six),  W.D.Chadwick (Vauxhall Fifty Bob),  P.Williams (Vic) (30/98 Vauxhall OE235),  O.Platt-Hepworth (Salmson),  R.G.Shepherd (Associate),  C.S.(Jim) Perry (Bugatti Type 40),  J.F.Crouch (30/98 Vauxhall OE238),  G.H.Brooks (S.A.) (Bentley 3 litre etc.),  R.A.D.Hood (Vic) (30/98 Vauxhall OE276),  E.J.Read (Read Spl., Riley Imp)

And that’s how it all began. There’s more – Once the fire was lit, the Club grew quite strongly – by April 1945 there were 45 members, quite a few of them interstate, so that before long the Victorian and South Australian Divisions took off. Originally, though to some extent autonomous, they were tied pretty closely to N.S.W, but eventually the South Australians became to some extent the Vintage part of the Sporting Car Club of S.A., while the Victorians went their own way and I think that, nowadays not a few of their members would be surprised to find that the movement started in N.S.W.

First Opening Rally

We put our first Opening Rally on the 14th January 1945, on the Esplanade at Bondi (just imaging trying to do that nowadays). It was a pretty lousy day, wet and blowy, which kept quite a few people who had said they’d be there away – present were Steve McClay, the AC absolutely resplendent (as they say in the railways, it was newly off-shop); John Crouch’s 30/98 Vauxhall, Harold Tattersall’s Wensum 30/98 OE226 (ex Jack Saywell), Owen Platt-Hepworth’s Brescia Bugatti and John Butler’s JFull Brescia. Frank Lyell transported the rest of the Committee in the SS1 (the white ants holding hands like anything), but we were so impossibly pure-minded in those days that we wouldn’t let it near the real cars.

Cover design for the Vintage Car

Volume 1, Number 1 of the “Vintage Car” was distributed to Members in March 1945 – its stencils (and envelopes) produced on a vintage typewriter (Underwood, I think presented to the Club by the amiable Cecil S Crouch (John’s father), and cranked out on an equally venerable Gestetner duplicator which cost the Club 15 quid. We got Bob Shepherd to design a cover for the Bulletin – a car which is the essence of the Vintage sports car, but not an identifiable make, ‘please Bob’ we said.

The cover has stood the test of time.

This article was later revised, corrected, enlarged and reprinted in the 2002 VSCC Vic Book: “Racers and Rascals”.