THE WAY WE WERE
There’s no question that this south coast sea wall has been battered by plenty of storms over the years, but it’s the Avenger that’s looking by far the worse off here…
Dawlish is famous for its Brunel-engineered railway line running along the seawall and is often battered by storms, notably being breached in April 2014 when around 40 metres of the wall were washed away. However on this more tranquil summer’s day, as the 1968-built Class 50 diesel electric locomotive number 50 012 Benbow powers by, the most battered thing on view here is NLO 816P. This maroon Hillman Avenger 1600 GL may only have been ten years old but time, tide and traffic have not been kind to it. The dented front door and replacement wing have only added to the rust likely accelerated by its saltwater environment. Unsurprisingly, the Hillman had disappeared from the roads within a year.
There’s quite the line-up of vehicles with Rootes Group, um, roots here. Along from the Avenger is an example of the Alpine. This genuine Anglo-French collaboration was styled by Roy Axe in the UK and engineered by SIMCA in France. Its potential was evident pretty much from the start in that it won European Car of the Year in 1976, beating off stiff competition from the first-generation BMW 3 Series and Renault 30, even if it’s something of a forgotten classic today.
Our beige example, DWA 572V, was registered in 1979 as a Talbot Alpine, despite the Chrysler pentastar nose badge. Some dealers just re-badged the cars until the factory changes filtered through following Peugeot’s acquisition of Chrysler’s old Rootes and SIMCA holdings in Europe. This one managed to survive all the way through until August 1988.
Next up is a SIMCA 1100, the model that provided engines and transmissions for the Alpine range. Chrysler took the French firm over when it snapped Rootes up during the mid- Sixties. Rumour has it that the 1100 was one of several small front-wheel-drive hatchbacks – which weren’t that plentiful at the time, remember – that Volkswagen examined closely when it was developing the Golf.
There’s a brief break for the red Volvo 340, with its A-prefix registration denoting it as a 1983/1984 model. Estate and convertible prototypes were built but sadly didn’t make it into production. There was also the CS (Competition Services) one-off in 1977, which featured – slightly terrifyingly – a 2.7-litre V6 engine. That must have been quite a beast.
After the Volvo it’s then back to Chrysler with a vengeance in the form of Sunbeam hatchback (although, without being able to see all of it, it could be the Talbot successor). Two generations of Fords – a Sierra estate and Cortina 80 – end the row of easily identifiable cars.
Trains cont
