I had 3 Vivas. The first was HDP 769E a green two door HB which I inherited as a company car on joining Huntley Boorne and Stevens in December 1968. It had been poorly looked after in its 25,000 miles since new and, on my first trip home, the electrics packed up on the A34 in Birmingham city centre at 8.30 pm on a Friday night. I arrived home totally knackered and unimpressed at 00.30 next morning, full of praise for the AA who had virtually rebuilt the electrics (new dynamo, fuse box and voltage regulator) at the roadside.
I had to keep the car until August 1969. It regularly had electrical problems - possibly due to some shorting in the looms - once breaking down outside Pilkingtons in St Helens when a traffic cop told me to put on my hazard lights. Apart from the fact I again had no electrics, the car wasn't fitted with such luxuries.
It was replaced by another HB which was brand new but was an oddity. Dark blue in colour and registered RRD 568H it was one of a batch of HBs for New Zealand. These were delivered as CKD kits but two had been built at Luton for some purpose and had never been run. Basil Tarrant the company MD (Chris's father) had some connection at Vauxhall and picked them up for a cheaper price than a new HB ex showroom. They were no different to the UK car except the engine seemed to have more "poke" than was normal for the 1159 and it had front disc brakes rather than the normal drum brakes.
I used to have it serviced at the Vauxhall dealers in Heaviley, Stockport and the mechanic there said that the output from the engine always showed up more bhp than expected for the standard 1159 cc and they suspected, especially given the disc brakes - though the documentation with the car didn't show it - that it may have been the "tuned 90" version of the engine, not as poky as the Brabham 90, but a bit more eager than the norm.
The car had covered 56,000 miles by the time I left it in the long term car park at Luton Airport to go on my honeymoon, 37 years ago today. On returning, we drove up the M1 and I was surprised to find the car unresponsive, noisy and sluggish. I put it down to some bad petrol but took it into the garage the following week to have it checked out and they reported that the valves were burnt out, one piston was sticking and the big end was badly worn. I duly reported this to Basil who sent me a stinking memo complaining bitterly about my standard of driving and accusing me of flogging the car.
I thought this was a bit much as he drove a round 10,000 miles a year in a Rover and expected me to cover the whole of the north of England in an 1159 cc Viva, a coverage that required over 30,000 miles a year.
Annoyance apart, something didn't fit. A new short engine was ordered and when the old engine came out, the engine number was checked against the documentation and was found to be different.
Vauxhall was contacted, given the other discrepancies with the car, and it was confirmed that the engine number given belonged to a 1966 HB which it turned out had been written off in a crash near Luton in March 1971. They also confirmed the Viva 90 status of the my car in its original condition.
As the car had been left unattended in Luton, the police were called in and an investigation was started. To cut a long story short, I left the company in June that year and the investigation finished in the November with a court appearance for a number of airport car park attendants and Vauxhall employees who had been running a scam buying older and written off Victors and Vivas and swapping engines and other under bonnet parts with newer cars, then putting the older cars back on the road. They were also swapping engines for "clients" with older versions of the models they could get their hands on. In those days you had to book your car in in advance for the long term car park, so they knew exactly what was due in, the year of the car and how long they had to remove it from the car park, do the job and return it to the same place. To avoid having to "clock" the mileage, they even had their own recovery truck. Most involved ended up with between 3 and 5 years at Her Majesty's pleasure.
The third Viva was an HC estate, in Silver, the second car I had with Dennison Mfg, my new employer. I picked up HYP 569K at a garage in Acton in January 1972. A good runner and for its size a good load carrier, when I was promoted in 1974 it was taken over by the company's northern engineer with 58,000 on the clock and he ran it for another 30,000 miles (his own HC of the same date having had a serious accident after which it always seemd to crab and certainly wore diagonally opposite tyres at an alarming rate).
The only real fault with mine was the paint never seemed to get hard. Every chip seemed to peel back paint. In July 1971 I had a chip on the front of the bonnet which I rubbed over with a sponge when cleaning the car and no less than a three inch strip of paint, at least an inch wide, came off. The bonnet had to be resprayed, after which it was less prone to damage but on other panels the paint seemed to wear thin and the whole car was resprayed in the late summer of 1974, after which it was kept at Watford as the office runabout, the engineer inheriting my banana yellow Avenger estate when I left the company.
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