AT THE HELM

Dealers and manufacturers are always amongst the first to find reasons to celebrate, and there is nothing quite as exciting as the release of an anniversary model. It may come as no surprise that the Mini saw a lot of these!

First in line was the 1100 Special that came out in 1979 to celebrate the Mini’s 20th birthday, followed every five years by a brilliant series of cars... the Mini 25, 30, 35 and 40.

As well as these standard anniversary cars, there were special editions to commemorate anniversaries in specific markets and the Mini Jubilee of 1975 was one of these. Dreamt up in The Netherlands this Mini was created to mark five years of British Leyland there.

For BL, reaching the five mile mark didn’t exactly come easily. As was the case for many countries, the Dutch had seen a number of concessionaires dealing with different British manufacturers up until 1970. Austin and BMC’s commercial vehicles had been imported to Rotterdam for a while by then, and there were other importing companies for