05/06/2010 - W de Forte remembers when Woodies were a common sight on the high street

Between Wars One and Two, one of the most useful vehicles on the farm in Bales was the family's hard-working Jennings-bodied shooting-brake. Modelled on the estate cars father had seen coming into fashion for carrying guns, rods and bods on Scottish sporting estates at the time, it sported a timbered utility body built onto an accident salvaged Rolls Royce 20HP limousine chassis bought cheaply from a scrapyard in Stafford (its first owner, I recall, was the crash-prone pioneer motorist and aviator, Sir Roderick Cholmondeley-Ker).

Part van, part bus, part car, this marvellously practical machine was used for taking us away to school, running errands in the village, carrying hay and equipment around the farm and, at various times, transporting sickly or injured creatures to Spates, the town vet. And, after a cursory clean-out, it also often did duty picking up visitors and their luggage from the railway station in Shrewsbury.

The first shooting brakes were open horse drawn carriages used to convey shooting parties into the countryside and when motorised versions followed, wood remained the principal material of manufacture. Seasoned ash was the timber of choice due to its splendidly springy properties, strength and light weight. Station wagon, of course, is an American term coined to describe hotel courtesy transport used principally to ferry guests to and from railroad stations.

Station wagons of this type gained in popularity on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the 1930s and became known as Woodies. Incidentally, the correct singular spelling is Woodie. A Woody is a woodpecker or an eccentric Hollywood film director, not a motor car! In time, mass produced Ford V8 Woodies imported from Canada introduced the concept to the British hoi polloi and soon even modest Morrises and wee austere Austins were being rebodied as 'estate' cars to provide utility motoring for the many.

In the Second War, many vans, ambulances, and suchlike conveyances were needed on the home front and the cheapness and availability of timber made Woodie conversions commonplace. Furthermore, commercial vehicles attracted a decent quantity of Mr Pratt's petroleum. And to get hold of the precious juice, many more perfectly healthy saloons were pushed into coach-building and joinery shops by their civilian owners to have their rear portions cut off and replaced by wooden hindquarters, after which they were driven smugly home.

Most Woodies were made to order and individual customer specification so there was a great deal of variation in design. Long-established coachbuilding firms deployed time honoured skills in the manufacture of many finely crafted creations, but crudities and bodge jobs also abounded. My good chum Algy Tomlinson commissioned a wartime Woodie on a Daimler chassis from Tom the village carpenter who, it has to be said, was not a bright fellow. Left to his own devices while Algy was away fighting the goons, the lumpen nitwit made the body frame and panelling entirely from mighty English oak.

The car certainly looked natty enough, but it weighed two tons and drove like a stinker! Held rigid and unable to flex at all, the once benign and accommodating Daimler chassis frame took on handling and road-holding qualities of unsurpassed dreadfulness. My sainted aunt! It was a complete deathtrap. Like all young ripstitches home on leave, Algy drove with the loud pedal on the boards (he would have done better to have heeded the blanket 30mph speed limit applied to all 'commercials') and it seemed the rebodied beast would kill him more surely than the sausage eaters.

The tyres slithered and fought for grip, there were no guiding sensations through the steering wheel or seat, and the back end of the car often broke away completely without warning. Fortunately, while bouncing wildly along the track to visit me at the farm one summer's day, the rigid body snapped the chassis clean in half. The inglorious creation was later broken for scrap, its body remaining on the farm as a hen hut.

Nevertheless, as a motor car it outlived Pater's poor 20HP which he had given to the RAF for the duration. While parked on the perimeter of a fighter aerodrome somewhere in Norfolk, having just dropped off some visiting bigwig, Jerry came low along the main runway and dropped a land-mine straight through the sunroof. The dear old thing was blown to smithereens but amazingly the mascot survived intact and was returned in the post. It sits on the mantelpiece in the dining room at Bales to this day.

Punitive post war purchase taxes, from which 'commercials' were made exempt, and the continuation of rationing made utilities even more attractive in peacetime and, until legislative loopholes were closed in the mid fifties, there was a Woodie manufacturing boom. Pent up demand for new cars could not be satisfied due to steel shortages and compulsory export quotas, so to circumnavigate the rules many folk purchased rolling chassis from car manufacturers and had them bodied in wood by a coachbuilder of choice.

Additionally, several established motor car manufacturers including Alvis and Lea Francis, supplied large numbers of chassis to approved bodyshops and then listed their factory endorsed shooting-brakes alongside the saloons in their sales blurb.

But as the 1950s wore on, better times saw the end of tax breaks for utilities and an easing of restrictions on the supply of standard cars. This, coupled with the motor industry's move to unitary construction (no more separate chassis on which to build alternative bodies), brought an end to the Woodie story. Apart, that is, from a post script provided by the hugely popular Morris Minor Traveller. Built originally for travelling salesmen, this once ubiquitous wooden framed motor car was manufactured from 1953 to 1971 and a quarter of a million were sold.

Remaining Woodies deserve to be preserved, but very few have survived. Wood is quite possibly the worst material with which to build a motor vehicle body and in the first half of the 20th century, effective preservatives had not yet been developed. Woodies' exposed wooden frames needed revarnishing every couple of years to stop rot taking hold. Unsurprisingly, this tedious task was rarely carried out and consequently most Woodies never saw the 1960s let alone the end of the millennium.

Woodie survival rates are pitifully poor and wooden bodied utilities found slumbering in sheds and barns tend to be woodworm eaten, crumbly and semi-collapsed with coachwork completely beyond effective restoration. And the few that have continued to be driven are often held together by myriad tie rods, screws and angle irons.

But happily there is a club keenly dedicated to restoring and recreating these characterful and individualistic motor vehicles. Formed ten years ago, the Woodie Car Club has its own website, and a fine book entitled 'British Woodies from the 1920s to the 1950s' has been written by club chairman Mr Colin Peck, to whom I am indebted for the use of the photographs on these pages.

Reading Mr Peck's book I was astonished to discover there is only one roadworthy Austin A70 Hampshire still in existence. These sweet little utilitarian shooting brakes were used by television companies as outside broadcast support vehicles as well as by motor racing teams and I well remember interviewing young Graham Hill in one in the paddock at Silverstone one rainy day in the 1950s. Bread and butter jobs they may have been but I'm sure many older readers will have similarly fond memories of these once popular commercial vehicles from a bygone age. It really would be a pity for this small but significant part of our motoring heritage to be lost forever. Good luck to Mr Peck and his friends!