Peter Jibb had been getting to work on a little Honda Camino moped when he got fed up with riding in the rain.
It was 1979, and he remembers one particularly wet week.
A colleague had a ‘57 Austin A35 for sale, and he thought “I’ve had enough of this”, and decided to buy the little car for £200.
“It had three months MoT, but once I got it and started to look round it I was amazed at the condition of it,” he says, chatting at his home of 50 years in Stamford.
“I began to think ‘well, hang on a minute, this is worth saving’, it was too good to use as a daily driver, so when the MoT ran out and the weather got better I went back to the bike.
“I wasn’t necessarily thinking I would keep it for a long time…”
But here we are, 45 years later, and Peter and the A35 are still together, and more inseparable than ever.
“It’s just me, and I will never let that one go,” he says. “I would be a bit lost without it. I don’t want to spend all my time gardening, I like to be able to do things with the car.”
Peter, now 79, started his motoring journey in a sit-up-and-beg 1949 Ford Anglia aged 18, before upgrading to a 1953 Ford Zephyr 6, “very powerful but too expensive to run as a young lad”.
The more sensible replacement was a Mini, first a van and then a car, followed by a Vauxhall Viva after he met his wife Pat, who used to drive it to work, leaving Peter to ride the Honda on his shorter trip to Newage Engineers (later Cummins Generator Technologies).
After its three-month job as a commuter car, the A35, with its 948cc engine the more powerful successor to the popular 803cc Austin A30, was taken off the road for a restoration.
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Apart from some body rot, it was in pretty good condition, and after 22 years and 34,000 miles it still had its original sills and floorpan – and it still has.
“I put two new wings on the front because at the time you could still get them, although they are wings from the A35 van,” says Peter, also fixing some corrosion on the near side rear wing.
“The old wings weren’t actually that bad, so I repaired them, sold them and it financed buying the sun visor.”
One respray and four years on, and the Austin was back on the road and ready to give Peter, Pat and their two children, Richard and Alison, years of loyal service.
Having joined the Austin A30/A35 Owners’ Club early in the rebuild, he quickly became heavily involved in club events in Lincolnshire and across the country.
“I’m a guy who likes to be doing something,” he says. “I’m not really one to be sitting watching TV all that much, and I find that the car is an interest, something to do other than watch TV.
“When you join the owners club, you meet people, you get friends, you go out and get together and it becomes an enjoyment, meeting people with the same vehicles.”
Among the trips were a visit to Longbridge arranged by the club in 1984 (pictured), and national club rallies as far north as Blackpool and as far south as Brighton.
“You could go to something every weekend if you wanted to, there were that many events,” says Peter. “Some meet ups were just for a meal, and we used to go round a lot of the museums in Lincolnshire, to East Kirkby where the Lancaster bomber is, things like that. It was a good thing to do, because we could see different things.
“Even in the winter we’d meet for dinner once a month and, because most of the Lincolnshire members are based around Lincoln, we always had the longer drive to get there.”
Driving the little car long distances was rarely a problem.
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“It’s comfortable, and even four up we used to be able to do 70mph,” says Peter, “although there’s a very steep hill at Uppingham that would be a bit of a drag.”
Only once was there a problem, which resulted in a slight upgrade to the car.
“When we went to the national rally at Winchester, the roads were very busy, and the car was not built to be in queues of traffic,” he explains. “It was very close to overheating. We pulled up in a layby to let it cool down for half an hour before we carried on.
“It had a two-bladed cooling fan, which was standard, but after that I changed it to a four-bladed fan. Lots of people put electric fans in, but I like to keep them as they were if I can.”
The interior, for example, is all original, with the only recurring problem some wear to the beading band around the bottom corner of the seat swab.
Over the years, Peter has collected more than a dozen trophies for best in show, all the more impressive given the car has been used in nearly every one of its 67 years.
“I’ve had lots of wins with the car,” he says. “I’ve got that many cups upstairs I don’t know what to do with them.
“And I know every mile I’ve done with the car, and everywhere I’ve been – it’s all written down in a notebook.”
The A35 has now covered a little over 66,000 miles, and the original engine has only given real trouble once, for which Peter blames his former next door neighbour.
“Every so often I used to open the garage door and keep it running, because you can’t just leave it standing idle, and she complained about the fumes,” he remembers.
“At the time I was changing the antifreeze and I was running it up to get all the air bubbles out of the system. I should have told her to go away but, trying to be a good neighbour, I switched it off.
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“Half an hour or so later she had disappeared, so I took it up the road. I hadn’t got all the air out of it, and I blew the head gasket. I took the cylinder head off, and there was a hole in one of the pistons.
“So I had to drop the sump and put another piston in, but it was always a little slower after that.”
That prompted an engine rebuild in 2014, Peter taking the A-series unit to Kings Cliffe Garage a few miles south of Stamford.
“I didn’t know how long the clutch was going to last,” he says. “It had been in since the beginning, so I decided to change that at the same time. I also had the cylinder head done to run on unleaded.”
By this point, Peter had completed an even longer, and considerably more difficult, restoration project on a rare Austin A35 pickup.
He was alerted to the vehicle by a fellow club member in 2002, and travelled to Caterham in Kent to see it.
“Once I’d seen a pickup, I wanted one,” he says. “Two other people had looked at this one and thought it was too far gone, but I decided to take it on because it was so rare.
“It had been standing derelict for 25 years in a tin shack with no doors, and it was in very poor condition.”
Peter paid £600 for the wreck, with his first job to get the pickup on four wheels because the wishbone had rotted away (pictured).
He bought two A30 donor cars because, although it’s called an A35 pickup, its body panels come from the earlier car.
Plenty of new panels were required though, plus a replacement floor that Peter says was a factory reject off the production line.
The engine was replaced with a unit from someone in Leicester who had abandoned a kit car project, but Peter has rebuilt the original unit which now serves as a spare.
On the inside, the seats were rebuilt, and copies were made of items like door cards, with a new cover for the pick up, beneath which is a plywood dickie seat.
After a respray in its original grey and, 10 years on, the pickup was finally back on the road.
“It was good, a real sense of achievement, and lots of people have not seen one,” he says, with only 49 believed to be on the road.
He and Pat now alternate between using the saloon and pickup, which has also picked up its fair share of prizes.
“I still try to get to the national rally, and the last one I went to was at Beverley, in Yorkshire, where the pickup came away with a first prize,” he says.
“I’m still in the owners club, but we are getting a bit thin on the ground now because we have lost quite a few members over the years, and there are fewer events than there used to be.
“But they are both still used regularly, and when we’re out people will come and have a look, smile and ask questions.”
Having said he would never sell the saloon, what about the pickup?
“There are times I think I’ll let the pick up go, and some people would sell to get the money back, but money doesn’t matter,” he says. “No, it’s what I’ve done, and I enjoy it. It’s nice to look at them, and when you get both of them in the garage parked facing the same way and you see both grilles, they look fantastic together.”
As for the more distant future, would Richard – an MoT tester who helps his dad out when he really needs it – be interested in keeping them on?
“He was very interested in the beginning, and he doesn’t show it but I think he’s a bit attached to them,” says Peter.
“I don’t think he’d let them go.”
