The Mistress
POWER IS my mistress,” said Napoleon Bonaparte once. “I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me.”
It wasn’t power that the friends and family of John English described as his mistress, rather a red E-type Series 3 open two-seater. But he still worked just as hard caring for the car as the French dictator did in securing his position. Says John’s daughter, Susan, “The car was his pride and joy; my mother, Mary, used to joke about him getting rid of her before the car would ever go.”
John was born in Esh Winning, a few miles outside Durham in north-east England during the second world war, later moving south to Doncaster with his family. After enrolling in night school as a young man, he achieved a first class chief engineer’s certificate and for the next 28 years worked as the chief engineer on oil tankers
