It all started for Adrian Travers on the pub crawls around his Essex hometown.
On Friday nights in the 1980s, a mix of age groups would get together and go from pub to pub before splitting off into their own friendship groups and pubs of choice.
“It was good, because the younger ones like us – about 18 or 19 – were with the lads in their mid to late 20s and everyone knew each other,” says Adrian, known by everyone as Travers.
“Some of the older ones used to go Bug Jam, so we started going too, and that’s how I got into Volkswagens.”
“Car freak”
A self-confessed “car freak”, Travers, now 55, cut his motoring teeth on a Mini 850 he bought when he was 16 and was in a real hurry to drive.
“I’d booked my test, but on my 17th birthday I phoned them up and told them I was going in the army abroad and could they get me a test date sooner?” he says. “I got a test that week. I wasn’t going into the army – I was on a YTS at Tooks Bakery – but it was a good way of getting a test!”
Travers then went for a job on a building site wearing a suit and a nice pair of shoes.
“They said to me, ‘there’s a ton of sand in the entrance, if you move it you’ve got the job’, so I shovelled it in, making a mess of my shoes and my suit,” he laughs. “They paid me a bit more than the YTS, or ‘young, thick and stupid’ as they called it, rate of £25 a week.”
After his driving test stunt, Travers also liked to make sure he stood the best possible chance of getting whatever job he went for.
“The Job Centres weren’t online, you went to a shop in the town and you had all the cards on the boards,” he says. “So I used to find the jobs I wanted and take the cards. I’d go back a couple of days later to make sure they hadn’t put them back up again. I always took the job, so I wasn’t doing someone else out of it – they might just not have got as good an applicant as they wanted!”
Savage Cortina and souped up van
But back to the cars and, after the Mini, a 17-year-old Travers had a Mk2 Cortina Savage with a broken engine he bought for next to nothing from the side of the road.
“A friend of mine who was a mechanic knew of a scrapyard up the road with a 3-litre engine, so we chucked that in and drove around like that for a while,” he remembers.
“Then came a Mk4 Escort van with an RS Turbo engine, which I swapped for a Dutton Phaeton 2 with a Fiat Mirafiori engine.”
And then, aged about 20, came his first Volkswagen – a Splitscreen camper without an engine.
“There was a fella called Murray who used to race a really special Beetle at Santa Pod back in the day, and he had a bus they called Strawberry Split because it was a pinky colour,” says Travers.
“Murray’s mechanic said they’d swap it for my Dutton, and I was well up for it. I got the mechanic to build me an engine, which didn’t sound like a VW at all.
100mph splitscreen
“It was a VW engine, but it sounded like a 2-litre Ford Transit, and this little Splitscreen ended up doing 100mph – it would go right off the clock, and the steering had about three inches of play either way…”
The bus, which Travers painted green, was his daily driver, and clocked up a lot of motorway miles before he bought a Bay window crew cab – again without an engine.
“When I had the Splitscreen, I stayed at my mum’s in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, and used to travel backwards and forwards to Essex every weekend in it,” he says.
“I used it all the time – it was so reliable.”
Travers, a member of the SX Dub Club, was a regular at Bug Jam and similar events, and again utilised his connections to help with getting the crew cab up to scratch.
“All the brakes were full of mud, and Murray’s mechanic sorted them out for me, and chucked an engine in,” he adds. “The next one I had was a ‘55 Beetle that had been hanging up in a barn in Sweden or somewhere, in bits. Someone had put it back together and brought it over, and I bought that. It was running and rolling but needed a bit of work to get it back together.”
Several more campers
Over the years, there were another couple of Bays, a ‘67 Splittie bought and sold back to the same man in Cornwall, and another ‘67 Splittie that, until recently, was sitting in Travers’ garage while he uses his latest buy, a double cab pick up, for the weekend trip to Beetle-Juiced in Suffolk.
After spending two years restoring the ’67 splittie, it was hit by a drunk driver in October 2024.
“It was repairable, but after restoring it, I didn’t have the heart to do it all again, so I sold it,” he says.
Pension pays for double cab pick-up
Travers says he’s spent a large chunk of his pension money on the double cab pick-up.
“I would rather enjoy my money in something I can sell when I’m older,” he adds. “I was trying to find something that I think will always have value.
“The bit that’s worrying me is, when electric cars come in, how difficult are they going to make it for us to drive the petrol and diesel? At what point does that become worthless because fuel is £10 a gallon?
“But with cars, I just can’t help myself. I’m a bit of a car freak really, it seems to have ruled my life more than anything else.”
The pick up is a Swedish import that arrived in the UK about five years ago and headed to Exeter.
It arrived at Travers’ home at about 1am on the Sunday morning before the Suffolk show, because “the fella delivering it didn’t get out of bed in time and left four hours late…”.
Having passed over a few single cab pick ups he didn’t think were worth the money, Travers saw this one advertised and jumped at the chance.
“Don’t buy it” – he bought it
“On this one you could see all the underneath, the welding, and you could see them doing it on the photos,” he says. “I thought ‘OK’, and it just clung to me. I sat there and thought ‘you shouldn’t be doing this, don’t buy it’, but it just wouldn’t go away.”
Powered by a 1641cc engine that will soon come out and be rebuilt, there have been a few teething problems in Travers’ first week of ownership.
“It turned up with oil all over the trailer, so I thought I’d better go and see how bad it is, so I went for a short drive,” he says. “There was no oil, then a longer drive, no oil. I put a board under it – no oil Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, then I got home on Thursday – a big puddle of oil.
“I was a bit miffed. I don’t understand why it’s dropping oil when it’s cold, so that’ll need to be sorted.”
As will a suspected fuel issue that manifested itself on the journey from Essex to the show at Jimmy’s Farm near Ipswich.
“I stopped for petrol and it didn’t really want to start again,” he says. “I somehow caught up with my friends, and they pulled over for me, so as I was approaching I pulled down the slip road and the van started spluttering.
“I got it going and carried on driving, then slowed down to 30mph and it just cut out.”
He made it in the end, and the pick up started up fine for the short drive to our photoshoot.
“I’m just going to love it”
Other than sorting the engine out, what other plans does Travers have for the van?
“I’m just going to love it, that’s what I’m going to do,” he says. “It’s got all the original de luxe interior in it, which is pretty rare. I’ve put blankets over the seats, which have rips in them.
“I don’t think I’m going to find somebody who can re-cover them like they should be, so I’ll just leave them and make sure they don’t get any worse.”
But more than anything, Travers is hoping to enjoy the Volkswagen scene like he always has done.
“I’m hoping that the VW scene picks up a little bit, because back when I was younger it was a great thing to be in,” he says.
“I think now the values are all over the place, some people have become money oriented and you get stitched up.
“I’m getting older now and I want to do something with my free time, I want to enjoy myself and go and party with my friends.”
