Every summer, David Green and his wife Suzanne would pack their four children into their ‘72 Volkswagen camper and head for Cornwall.
They would leave in the evening, when David got home from his job as a bus driver, and drive through the night to the south west.
“I’d fold the middle seat down, put all the cushions down and they would sit however they wanted to sit, or lay down – no seatbelts obviously,” he says at his home in Colchester.
“At some point I’d get tired, pull into a services or at the side of the road, lock the door, lean on the steering wheel and go to sleep, with the kids all over the place asleep in the back.
“I’d wake up in the morning and everything hurts. We’d get on our way again with the kids asking ‘how many cars did you pass, dad?’ ‘Ooh, hundreds of them – they were all parked in the motorway services’.
All about the journey
“They knew that 50mph was fast in that – the journey is what it’s all about, not being there the quickest.
“At 7am, we’d get the Cornflakes out, the milk out of the fridge, put the kettle on and make some tea and toast.”
That was in the late mid to late 1980s and the children have long since grown up – some have their own Volkswagens – but the Devonette Bay window camper remains.
“It’s part of our family history,” says David, 73, “and our eldest Paul said to me recently that he can still remember the smell of the van from those holidays. The kids loved it.”
But when the van was starting to look “a bit rough” on the front end about 15 years ago, David mooted to Suzanne the idea of selling it.
“She said ‘what? If you get rid of the van you’ll cry’,” he adds, “and then she bought me a new front panel for Christmas!”
Long restoration
It was the start of a long restoration that just needs some work on the handbrake and fettling of the engine to get the camper back on the road.
“My daughter Sarah said ‘we’ll all go out when you get it on the road’,” says David. “The four kids and mum and dad, we’ll all go out and make a cup of tea, take some sandwiches and go down to Mersea.”
Born in Colchester, David moved to Chingford for work, and met Suzanne on his first day as a trainee manager at Freeman Hardy Willis shoe shop.
“She was a sales girl, and I fell up the stairs with my giant suitcase, which made her laugh,” he says.
Their first car was a bright yellow Ford Popular 100E, followed by a series of Zephyrs and Zodiacs, a brief dalliance with a VW camper, and then a Cortina that was used for the family’s first trips to Cornwall.
“That was quite amusing,” says David. “In the late ‘70s we had four young children all squashed on the back seat – when one moved, they all moved.”
There was also a Volkswagen Variant Estate, which David remembers for a trip to Longleat to see the lions.
“Because of where the engine is it’s warm at the back, and I remember driving around Longleat on a nice hot day with the boys sitting on top of the engine to get the best view of the lions,” he says.
“We were stuck in traffic, obviously no power blowers for cold air, and the boys all had sweat running down them.”
Large family, more space
It was the couple’s large family, with sons Paul, Steven, and Michael, and daughter Sarah all getting bigger, that prompted David to look for another camper van.
“You need space,” he adds, “and a car doesn’t really fit four growing children.”
He bought the ‘72 Devon, which was then orange with a white roof – the first of many colours – for about £1,100 from a place in Harold Hill.
“At the time it was quite a bit of money, but it was ready to go, a back seat, middle seat, two-ring burner,” says David. “It was my daily driver, every day to and from work, and used for holidays and days out all over the place.”
At the time, he was working for London Transport as a bus driver based in Walthamstow, making the 10-minute trip to the depot in the Volkswagen from his home at Woodford Green.
It was at work when he hit upon the idea of the van’s first of many colour changes.
“I went into the garage at work, saw the painter and said ‘can I have some red paint to paint my motor?’” he smiles. “He said ‘yeah, course you can mate’, and gave me a can of London Transport red paint.
“Parked outside the house where we lived, I got my Black and Decker sander out, sanded down the lower half, wiped it all around, and put some Dulux red undercoat in a roller tray and rollered it all the way around.
First of many colour changes
“Then out came the London Transport red in the roller tray, and I rollered the red on top. On another day, I brush-painted the roof with Dulux white gloss.
“I went to work one day and the foreman said to me ‘oi, you’ve got our paint on your motor’.
“I said ‘no, mate’ – ‘yes it is, I know our paint, don’t you come back in our garage again!’.”
As well as the annual holidays to Cornwall (timed to visit Busfest on the way home), David also took the family from Woodford Green to Suffolk for the RAF Mildenhall Air Fete.
“We’d get out of the bed at silly o’clock, chuck all the stuff in the motor, get the kids in and off we’d go,” he says. “We’d be there by about 7.30am so we were near the front of the queue.”
Disaster struck on one day out to North Weald Airfield, near Epping, when the engine ground to a halt on arrival.
“My brother-in-law towed me back home with his Ford Consul, a metal bar tied to his towbar and connected to the front of mine,” he remembers.
“At times, I got too much speed and couldn’t slow down quick enough, so the only thing to do was move out, and the front of my motor was almost level alongside the back of his car.”
With the van back home, a colleague at the bus depot who also owned a VW camper came to the rescue.
Engine out
“He helped me take the engine out in my next door neighbour’s garage, we took it apart and found that a valve seat had gone, and the valve had sheared off and gone through the piston,” says David.
“We got a new valve seat, a valve and a piston, and he put it all back together. I turned the key, and away it went.”
The camper van was never quite big enough to comfortably sleep six, so over the years it has towed a trailer tent, a caravan (which it didn’t like), and then a folding caravan, all big enough to sleep everyone.
With 100,000 miles already on the clock when he bought it, the weight from towing, and the journey to the south west increased when the family moved ‘home’ to Colchester in 1988, it was perhaps no surprise when the original 1600cc engine finally needed replacing.
“It started blowing lots of white smoke, so I decided I’d get a reconditioned engine from VeeWee, with twin Weber carbs to give it a bit more oomph,” says David.
300,000 miles!
“I can remember we’d had the van for about 10 years and we were travelling from near Perranporth to Newquay and I saw the numbers were going to click over from 99,999, which would have been 200,000 miles.
“So I got my camera out, chugging along and on the tenths now, one knee over the steering wheel, and took the photo as it turned to all the zeros. It’s done another 100,000 now, so it’s up to 300,000.
“In that time, it’s had all sorts in it – three piece suit, bedroom suite, bed headboard, side tables, everything. It’s moved anything and everything, blocks, bricks, other building materials.”
Over the years, David could never quite make up his mind what colour to paint the Volkswagen, the bus red followed by purple, dark green, and most recently a sage green.
“When I rubbed the bodywork down and went right back to metal, you could see all the different colours,” he says.
The current paintwork was applied about seven years ago, by which time the vehicle had been off the road for about eight years, replaced first by a Volkswagen T4 Autotrail and then by a Ford motorhome.
The Devonette used to have a spare wheel attached to the front, which trapped water and caused some rust problems.
Digging reveals plenty of rust
It was saved by Suzanne’s decision to buy a new front panel, but once David started digging, it was clear quite a bit of work was required.
“I took the front panel off, and the floor wasn’t too good in the cab,” he remembers. “Then the front end piece of the chassis was a bit crispy, as were the two outriggers which come up under your feet.
“Then I saw that the chassis rail wanted doing. It was one thing after another, so I went down to Wesbroom Engineering and they cut me the length and width of the bits I needed. They just said ‘give us some tea money’.
“My son Michael did the welding – he practised on my motor, so the front end is not so good but the further back you go the better it gets.”
The front doors were changed, and the sliding side door has a new bottom piece.
“The doors look like they don’t fit, but they do – the new rubber is so rock hard it won’t compress, so I may have to get some softer rubber,” adds David, who retired in March after 47 years on the buses.
One accidental finishing touch is what should have been whitewall tyres.
“We were going to the Isle of Wight one year in the VW motorhome and I saw an advert for whitewall tyres,” he says. “They were down near the Beaulieu museum, so we picked them up on the way back. I don’t know why, but they had some blue on them that protects the white, and I can’t get it off, but my boy said ‘they look a bit green to me, they match your van’. So I’ve got greenwall tyres…”
Daily driver once more
Once the final fettling is done, David is planning on using the van as a daily driver once more, with grandson Oliver set to be one of the first passengers.
“He hadn’t seen it until today,” he says. “It was on the drive this morning when I took him to school. He went ‘ah, can we go in that one grandad?’ Not yet, but soon!”
David admits he is unlikely to make any more pilgrimages to Cornwall (“it’s a long way…”), but is now delighted that Suzanne bought him that front panel for Christmas.
“Oh yeah, she was definitely right,” he smiles. “I’ve restored something to almost what it was, and it was the right thing to keep it.”
