Rob has bitter-sweet memories of his morale-boosting pantomime performance that achieved a surprising outcome
A brief reference by Cliff Chambers’ in a recent Unique Cars Market Watch feature to an E-Type Jaguar coupe immediately caught my eye.
Standing out from the rest of the paragraph as if set in bold type were these words: “delivered new in 1962… in Fiji… 61 years later still in original ownership”.
E-Types have always made me sit up and take notice. Even with the first examples still on the water from the UK in 1961 the press was running headlines with attention-grabbing messages like: “NEW 150MPH JAGUAR COMING”.
For some teenage petrolheads like me the 100mph mark (160km/h), the magic ‘Ton’, was always on your mind.
You knew you really needed to do it and you’d get there one day, whether down on the tank of a quick motor bike or behind the wheel of a powerful car. You knew it was achievable, and it was up there aspirationally with losing your virginity.
Against that background the publicity about a car with 150mph potential was gobsmacking. Clearly totally out of reach, but gobsmacking…
Then the E-Type landed and it looked amazing, oozing performance DNA inherited from the multiple Le Mans winning D-Types.
My limited technical knowledge at that stage meant that a detailed appreciation of its design excellence was beyond me, but that understanding came eventually.
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My envy-meter swung off the scale when Alan Jones (yes, that one…), like me too young for a Victorian licence, turned up socially in my neck of the woods driving an E-Type.
Word was that as a Victorian kid he had managed to score a South Australian licence (available then at age 16).
The enduring memory I have of Alan accelerating away from a venue into the night was the whine from the spur gears of the Moss gearbox sounding louder than the howl from the twin exhausts.
Now to the personal significance of the Fiji-delivered coupe: Before I got my licence I saw a lot of Australia by thumbing lifts. So a younger mate from school who wanted to learn the hitch-hiking ropes proposed doing a Sydney trip with me.
The incentive offered was that his Sydney rellies were very hospitable and they had a 1958 Ford Thunderbird.
“A T-Bird! Wow! Deal done!”
The trip up the Hume was a piece of cake ahead of a fabulous week’s stay and auntie, bless her, even flicked me the keys to her big ’Bird for a quick spin around her neighbourhood.
However the trip home was a tough one – long waits between short rides meant that 20 hours in we had been stuck at a Tarcutta servo for hours without even a sniff of a lift.
With young mate losing faith and getting cranky I decided a positive-thinking demo might lift his spirits. When an E-Type coupe sporting Fiji number plates rolled in from the gloom around 3.00am the exotic machine’s arrival gave me a perfect opportunity for positivity practice.
Sure, zero chance of a lift in the amazing Jag – but hey, great practice.
My approach to the driver, with the apprentice at my side was along the lines of: “Lovely car. Congratulations. The gloss has worn off this hitch-hiking adventure for my young friend and he’s at his wit’s end. It would be a wonderful gesture if you could give him a lift south, perhaps to Albury. At least it will be daylight there and he will stand a better chance of getting a lift home to Melbourne.”
You could have knocked me down with half a brick when the reply was something like, “Okay. I’ll do that. Put your rucksack in the back son, and jump in.”
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| Room with a special view. |
Long story short – junior adventurer climbed out of the E-Type at home in Melbourne in time for breakfast while I got stuck on the tray of a slow old truck that took all day to get to Melbourne, while I sheltered from the summer sun under a tarpaulin, staying alive munching over-ripe tomatoes from the crates stacked around me.
With Cliff Chambers having agreed with me that the chances of more than one E-Type arriving in Fiji in 1962 are zilch, I take this belated opportunity to salute the man now identified as the late Ian Richardson, at one time an Australian sugar-mill chemist in Fiji, whose passing in July last year resulted in his one-owner ‘Fiji’ E-Type going to auction.
From Unique Cars #481, Jul 2023
Photography: xkedata.com