1951 Show Updates

Updates from the 1951 Austin of England Car Show
(I have changed font colour to separate the updates)

Hi, Pat:
Your Austin car show inclusion is very interesting. Austins were "very big" in Vancouver and Victoria in the early 1950's. In 1954, I bought a used A-40 Devon (ubiquitous gray, of course) from a Chevvy dealer, but took it to a very good dealership at Alma Road and West 10th for servicing. That was Gordon Brothers; one brother ran sales, and the other ran the shop. They were tops, as far as I was concerned, and never overcharged on any mechanical work they did for me. Sorry, I don't recall the brothers' first names, nor could I identify them or the Deeleys from the photos. The little car was high-mileage when I got it, and was a real workhorse, as I was building a house way out at Horseshoe Bay and still lived in Point Grey. It towed a little trailer loaded with building materials, and carried big stuff on the roof. After two years of this, it lost its tranny and the brakes weren't too good either, so it got traded off. Should have fixed it, but I really needed a bigger car.
Thought you might find this of interest. A really super little car.
Cheers,
Don
Don wrote again:
Something else we spotted in the Austin fotos- The ambulance! Two of these went to Kamloops, and one is now being restored by the Kamloops Chapter of the Vintage Car Club as a group project. Fascinating!

re: Austin Ambulance Response:

Jack wrote:
The old ambulance was moved to a shop owned by one of our members and during the winter season of 2005/06, we dismantled the vehicle. The engine was removed along with the doors and front fenders. We separated the vehicle into three parts; chassis, firewall with the drivers floor and the wooden rear body. An old truck frame was cut into two parts and the front section was used to make a rolling dolly for the firewall/floor boards and the back of the frame was used to make a rolling dolly for the wooden body.
My crew is responsible for the woodwork so we carefully disassembled the wooden framework of the roof and patient compartment so we would have patterns to make new parts. The following winter (06/07) the frame was stripped, sandblasted, painted and various components (brakes, rear end , etc) were repaired, restored and attached to the frame. While this was going on my woodworking crew and I were making new replacement wooden parts for the rear body where required. Some old
pieces made very good patterns while others were rotted away and we had to guess. Quite a bit of the wood was replaced during that winter session of Thursday night workshops. My main co-woodworker and I each worked on these pieces in our own shops and then took them to the restoration shop on work nights and fitted them to the body. Sometimes the pieces went back and forth a number of times to ensure a good fit. To date we have replaced the entire roof structure(exceept the driver compartment portion), the rear door posts, the wheelwell framework on each side, some of the vertical and horizontal members and cut and fit new floor boards. We are currently working on the hanging of the rear doors and construction of the section below the rear doors which holds the fold out step in the centre and license plate and rear lights on each side. New steel door hangers (replacing the rotten wooden ones) are being fabricated and installed to hold the front doors. Once they are finished we can hang these doors and complete the roof over the driver compartment.
The skin on the rear body is heavy guage aluminum and is in fairly good condition. The lower parts have been stripped of paint and will soon be attached to the body when all the necessary adjustments have been made. The engine is currently being assembled with many new parts acquired from New Zealand and Australia.
The front fenders are being repaired where they were rusted through (steel fenders and doors). The dash is in 3 sections and requires major work as they are made from laminated wood and shaped to fit the compartment with much separation of the lamination and the face skin is in very poor shape. Have asked a friend to find me some real nice veneer that we can use to reface the dash, and then have to redo the various walnut pieces on the doors. With a little luck the project could be finished next year.I have lots of pictures from the moving out of my yard to the present day. One of the crew is chief photographer and takes lots of pictures each week. After the first 2 years he gave me a cd with over 800 pictures on it and it takes a while to sort through the cd to find something we need to see so we can do it right. We have photos of the restoration and two articles in the papers, this year about the progress of the project.
I looked at the pictures on the website and found them very interesting, particularly the one showing the ambulance. It is entirely possible that the one in the picture is ours as we have been told only 3 were imported to all of Canada.

Hi Pat,
The photos were taken by a Vancouver based Professional Photographer who was hired by Fred Deeley Motors, a Vancouver Austin dealership, to record the show. The collection came to us through his son. The majority of the pictures were taken at Seaforth Armouries. The stock room photos are believed to be of Fred Deeley's parts department at that time.
Regards Ian

I cannot add anything to the information you already have about the Austins. However, you may be interested to know that in 1980 I spoke to Horace Plimley, then aged 84. Plimleys car dealership was started by his father, who imported his first car in 1898. In the 1950's Plimleys had British car showrooms in both Vancouver and Victoria.
Horace Plimley said he had the Rolls-Royce franchise for five or six years, and sold at least two Silver Dawns (one of which S. Davis now owns), a Silver Wraith and a Bentley Mark VI convertible. I went to the Plimley showrooms on Broadway and was shown their photo archives. Unfortunately the copies of the photos of Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars that I took then are very poor. No doubt the archives are still extant somewhere (anyone know where?) and the photos could be scanned in more excellent detail.
Cheers - John Peirson.

Hi,
Came across your pictures whilst "surfing".
I actually remember these majestic old ambulances from the 1960's. There weren't many around, and they were classed as old and past their prime, what a mistake!
A local steelworks had one as an industrial ambulance, and neighbouring Sheffield city had them on their fleet.
I have taken the liberty of forwarding a few pics of an original Sheffield vehicle. I watched as it was lovingly and meticulously restored over many years in our service workshops on a voluntary basis, by our in house mechanics and craftsmen. These pics were taken at our long service award ceremony, where I received a medal. I am currently just in to year 32 with my Ambulance Service.
Hope you like the pics.
Best wishes - Phil

Thanks to Phil for the note and for submitting the photographs. What a wonderful restoration. Webmaster

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