Off the Wall

Always prohibitively expensive to buy, vitreous enamel signs are the brilliantly colourful 'Street Jewellery' of the English scene. Most of my collection was levered off walls in the seventies from the top of precipitously-leaning ladders. With the express permission of shopkeepers, of course. All very well and typical of long-haired designer fads of the age, but these days I somehow prefer to see them still up on the wall where everyone can enjoy them. How untypically egalatarian is that of me? So I was very pleased to see these signs still in their original position on a shop wall in Bluntisham, Cambridgeshire. The Brooke Bond tea sign was once one of the most ubiquitous, but what I like here are the two sizes of Sunlight signs. It's as if the soap rep turned up, got out the sign catalogue and the shopkeeper said 'I'll have one of each'. They all bring back a painful memory. A little shop in the Highfields district of Leicester was closing, and outside was a Player's Cigarettes enamel sign, complete with the Hero sailor in glorious colour. I asked the little old lady if there was any chance I could have it when the shop finally shut. It was promised, I was over-joyed. Returning a couple of months later I saw that the sign was gone, just the empty frame staring blankly at me. On asking for it the lady said 'But you've already been in and had it'. Not me I said, gripping the counter. 'But he had a beard' was the only reply I heard as I went out.

Sliding Doors

I'm sorry to be continuing this motor show fugue, but don't worry we'll soon be back with rusty Castrol jugs and phone boxes falling over. It's just that an eagle-eyed commentator has noticed a Bedford van in the background of my Husky photograph, and I just had to ferret-out this 1956 sales brochure to share with you. I have said elsewhere that I thought the illustrations made the van twice the size, which I can now see is untrue, but it is still a remarkable coincidence that the street scene contains nothing but other Bedford vans and a token Vauxhall Cresta from the same Luton stable. This is the first vehicle I ever drove, an uncertain and under-age passage down a Northamptonshire lane with my Uncle John leaning over and wrestling with the steering wheel and column change gears in tandem with my own nervous efforts. Gripping an untipped Player's in his teeth.This was a wholesale paint delivery van, but the brochure tells of many variants including personnel carrier, canopy pick-up, milk float, gown van and of course the ubiquitous Dormobile. Many colour variants are shown, my favourite being a duotone mid-blue and cream. The picture shows a uniformed man delivering red tulips to a lady standing in the porch of a posh house. Heavy wistful sigh.