If cars could talk
AN UNPOPULAR opinion, maybe, but I’ve never been especially passionate about early Jaguars.
Being born in the late 1970s and developing my passion for cars in the Thatcher era of yuppie excess, the Jaguars I admired while growing up were the big XJ saloons from the 1970s, sleek XJ-Ss and the thrusting new XJ40, which evolved in more recent times to a well-documented passion for the Ford-era cars, which I appreciate don’t appeal to everyone. But nostalgia is a very personal thing, right?
The cars I aspired to in my late teens and early 20s are the ones I’ve been lucky enough to own two decades later, when they became affordable enough for someone who could never realistically afford a £50,000 car.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’ve always admired the likes of XKs, E-Types and Mk2s from a distance. I totally appreciate their appeal and also their massive influence on Jaguar’s history. I’ve always regarded them as proper classic cars – models that had a major influence on the UK’s automotive landscape and were rightfully regarded as some of the finest ever made, but I had no desire to own one.
THE FORD-ERA CARS, WHICH I APPRECIATE, DON’T APPEAL TO EVERYONE
But a couple of weeks ago, I was asked to go and photograph a car for an auction house. The car in question is the 1958 XK150 in the photo, and apart from the vendor (a Jaguar specialist, who has been using it as his daily transport for the past four years) it has had just one owner from 1962, who had bought it as a used car and driven it for the best part of 60 years, from the age of 30 until he died in 2019.
A car like that is something very special indeed, and what made 8000 NO even more appealing was that in all of that time it had been maintained regardless of cost, but never restored.
There are XK150s on the market that are gleaming, beautiful concours restorations and they’re lovely things, but this one was a lot more special than any of them. Having never left Essex from the day it was registered in Chelmsford until I photographed it in Brentwood, the car was the most original and glorious XK I had ever seen.
Not completely shabby, but far from perfect, the paint was cracked and faded in places. The chassis and floors had been repaired previously, but the upper paintwork and interior not at all. At some point in the 1970s, a radio-cassette had been installed and if you craved originality you’d take it out, but to me it had every right to be there. It
