It looks like a regular Aston Martin Ulster – but this car and its previous long-term owner both had an unusually colourful past
Words Mark Dixon Photography Tom Kahler
‘Non! Non! There is a huge Tiger tank on the other side of the bridge!’ shouts the Frenchman clutching a rifle, as he crouches on the side of an advancing Churchill. ‘Wow! Then I’m getting out of the way!’ yells back the British tank commander. A Jeep pulls up and a British Major calls out to the tankie: ‘What’s up, chum? Had a breakdown?’ On being told about the hidden Tiger, he organises a daring raid to outflank the Germans without being seen. The Major and his companions discover that the Tiger is, in fact, an artillery piece on the back of a truck hidden in some trees, but they successfully round up the Jerries – only to get nearly blown up themselves when the Churchill looses off a round.
The story reads like a comic strip because it’s exactly that, run across the front and back covers of boys’ adventure paper The Victor, 13 November 1971 issue. But it’s based on a real event. The Major in question was Robert William Fenton ‘Tony’ Mellor, and he owned the Aston Martin you see here. Except that neither the car nor Major Mellor himself were quite what they seemed.
In the 1990s the Aston was restored to its current short-chassis Ulster specification, but it started life as a regular long-chassis MkII. It was owned by Major Mellor for half a century and in its early years they both led an extraordinary life. All this came to light when joint owners Neil Pickstone and Simon Isles bought the car a couple of years ago, and read through the huge history file that was passed on with it.
Neil was told by Tony Armstrong, the Aston Martin enthusiast who’d bought the car from Major Mellor, that Mellor claimed he’d used it for smuggling gold and silver out of pre-war Germany on behalf of Jewish friends. Intriguing enough, but it was only after Simon spotted Mellor’s wartime memoir Machine-Gunner for sale online that the pair felt compelled to research his career in earnest.
‘Major Mellor served with the Cheshire Regiment,’ explains Neil, ‘so we visited the regimental museum and by chance met the curator, who turned out to be a big fan of Major Mellor. He showed us Mellor’s Walther pistol on display, and he told us about Mellor’s wartime action being dramatised in The Victor.’ Sorting out Mellor’s history file also revealed a 1937 letter from Aston Martin director RG Sutherland, in which he states: ‘I remember very well how you
