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Croft PrtrtWilliam Heaney, Part IX.

The Last Brand New Taxi and the Business Closes

Into the mid-’60s the taxi business continued to get busier and my father was employing temporary drivers on an ad hoc basis. During the restructure of the NI transport network through 1964/’65, one of these, a redundant Ulster Transport Authority mechanic joined the business on a sort of franchise/partnership basis with his own car. Initially “Big Norman” (20+ stones in his socks!!) had a Morris Oxford MkVI, similar to the Cambridge and 16/60, and then replaced it with a lovely Wolseley Six ‘Land Crab’ shortly after we got the second new A60. The ‘Six’ was all but a ‘Last Hurrah’ for Wolseley, as the brand was dropped by British Leyland in 1975 after a short run of the 18/22 ‘Wedge’ model. Wolseley had long been the ‘Luxury’ brand of BMC and British Leyland and like the 15/50 the Six had ‘proper’ carpets, sculptured front seats and walnut interior trim. As I discovered on the runs I did for Big Norman in the car it was quite brisk, having a 2.2Litre, Straight-Six OHC engine that delivered close to 100BHP. However, as with all the E-Series derived power plants the gear-shift was akin to stirring cooling porridge and the handling a bit walloway, mainly due to the bulk of thing and the characteristics of the hydrolastic fluid suspension, which became nicknamed – nickerlastic!!

Norman

A60 Cambridge – 798 VZ replaced the beleagured 7071 JI in the summer of 1968. My father ordered the car but I was permitted to add a couple of items from the ‘Options List’. The monochrome grey colour was a special order because the standard finish for a Cambridge had the body-line panel between the two chrome strips in a contrasting colour, usually ‘Old English White’. I was allowed to spec inertia-reel seat belts and Dunlop SP41 Radial Tyres, which I was pleased to discover lived up to the adverts of giving a more comfortable ride – something that a sceptical Fred even came to accept as true. In time I’d come to prove that the additional claim of better handling and road-holding was also genuine, even for such a relatively big car. Whilst the dealer was fitting the mandatory wing mirrors and fire extinguisher I had them install a natty little roof aerial above the windscreen. The radio and the Karobes Contoured Seat Cover from 7071 JI were fitted immediately. The A60, 16/60 and Oxford had individual front seats that were flat and wide to make it a bench as you can see in this illustration. Only the Riley 4/72 variant, the BMC ‘Performance Model’, had lightly sculptured front seats giving a nod to its supposed sportiness – our Scout Leader had one, so that’s how I knew. The Karobes cover was more heavily padded and provided something akin to a bucket seat and helped prevent you sliding around when more ‘spirited’ driving was being practised and certainly made the long airport runs less fatiguing.

A60 with Inter

Once I had my licence I got the majority of these long runs to Aldergrove, Dublin and Shannon with the latter being my favourite because my Godmother Helen lived on the outskirts of Limerick, so I got to visit her and her excellent cooking, fairly regularly. Her husband Hugh was a retired engineer from the nearby Ardnacrusha Hydro-Electric Station on the Shannon and on one visit he blagged me a tour of the facility. Originally having had desires to be a civil engineer, this tour was awesome for me. Over time I sussed out a cross-country route to Limerick because in the late ’60s there wasn’t that much difference in the quality of the main and minor roads in the RoI. I’d only use this on the trips to and from Shannon on my own, reasoning that the the paying customer wouldn’t be that happy on the ‘road sections’ and ‘special stages’ of this notional rally that I’d developed to make the journeys more enjoyable. My route also had the advantage of cutting about 20 miles off the accepted main road route, meaning I could do these empty runs in under four hours as opposed to four and half to five on the main roads, depending on traffic.

Ardnacrusha

Our business was licenced as ‘Private Hire’, meaning we weren’t supposed to ply for hire in public but had to work from a base, our house, providing the service for customers calling at the door or making telephone bookings. However, on one trip to Shannon as I was off-loading my fare an American voice behind me asked – “Are you a taxi?”. Cheekily I said yes and they asked if I could take them to Mallow in Co.Cork and I agreed. I ‘boarded’ them and beat a hasty retreat from the airport before any of the local taxis noticed. I explained that I wasn’t local and had planned to visit my Godmother, if they didn’t mind a short detour. At that point we were approaching Bunratty Castle and they excitedly said they’d like to vist it while I went to see Helen and Hugh, so that’s what we did. A couple of hours later I picked them up and, having checked the map I always carried, I took them to Mallow and found the wife’s family home. After a couple of rounds of tea, scones and cake at their insistance, I was asked if £20 was enough to cover my detour and reckoning who was I to bargain and possibly cause offence, I accepted. At this time the Shannon fare was £20, Dublin £15 and Aldergrove £12 from Strabane, so £20 for a 50 odd mile detour was very generous and he was an American Tourist after all. I got a bollicking from Fred when I got home because my action could’ve gotten us banned from doing any more Shannon pick-ups, but it had gone un-noticed and he let me keep a tenner!
An A60 could hardly be considered a “Babe Magnet” but it did have attractions to female aquaintances, especially when I revived my father’s exercise of letting me steer sitting on his knee. I realised that there was enough space to have a young lady sit on my knee and steer the whilst I operated the other controls. As many as six from Church Choir and Youth Club were introduced to driving in this way on back roads around the area and it wasn’t an unpleasant experience for me either. They would all pass their driving test first time and one of them actually went on to run a taxi business with her husband. I accorded three or four of my younger male friends the same advantage, but it wasn’t quite the same!!
Inspired by articles in mags such as Cars and Car Conversions and Hot Car, I set about further personalising 798 VZ. I’d taken a college pal to a scrapyard to get something for his Prefect and whilst there spotted a wrecked MGB. I bought the rev-counter and fuel guage from it and the oil and temperature guages from a Mini. For a long time afterwards I wrestled with the thought of whether or not I should also have bought the the leather steering wheel from the B, although I finally reconcilled myself to the fact that it would have been a step too far, making do with a stitched leather cover on the original wheel. I purchased an ammeter and an instrument binacle from the motor accessory shop in Derry, made up a bracket in a Tech ‘tin-bashing’ class and mounted the four instruments on top of the dash, a la Cortina GT. The rev-counter replaced the original three-instrument array alongside the speedo and this PaintShop mock-up illustration gives you an idea what it looked like – I’ll leave the verdict up to you. A pair of Lucas 100 driving lamps that Big Norman had on the Oxford replaced the rather naff Wipac square lamps I’d bought for 7071 JI, thinking they were ‘cool’ at the time, and the standard headlamp bulbs were later replaced by the exciting new Tungsten-Halogen type. The final flourishes were a door mirror that clamped neatly on the quarter-light frame, and was much more effective than the wing mirrors, and a pair of rectangular reversing lights that fitted neatly below the rear light clusters.

A60 Dash

By 1970 the work from the Bru began to reduce. The Claims Inspector now had his own car and with the impending introduction of BankGiro payments, the Out Office rota was scheduled to be cut in half, at least. My father was now 80 years of age and would have had to take an annual Driving Test to retain his PSV Driving Licence. He had sternly told me some time previously that he didn’t want me to take over the business, but that I should pursue a professional career with regular hours instead, with the words – “Be an engineer son, folk’ll always want things made”. Thus it was agreed that when I completed my full-time course, the taxi business would be wound up and I did the last job in mid-July, having taken my OND Finals a month earlier. This last job was a civil marriage ceremony in Belfast City Hall, I took the Groom and Bestman up from the Donemana area and then took the wedding party on to the hotel on the seafront at Cultra for the reception, afterwards. Of course I wasn’t to know then how significant this stretch of road was to what would come in to my life in the 21st Century – Cultra Hillclimb!!
This photo is from the 1908 event and the hotel where that final wedding reception would take place was between the two houses on the left and I think its now a Nursing Home.

Cultra 1908 s

More from William and into the 70’s next week, same time, same place.