NICE AND BAD
Imagine a champion football team facing a season with no fixtures. Late last summer, with nothing in prospect to restore, Ken and Ray Walsh faced a winter of discontent.
They are of course old age pensioners. And share a belief that time – the aging process – stands still when you’re having fun. Which in their case means getting down and extremely dirty stripping wrecks to bare metal and restoring them for posterity.
Word soon got round their friends and collaborators about their plight.
‘What about this?’ ‘How about that?’ “But all the well-intentioned suggestions were rejected. ‘Not rare enough.’ Or ‘not sufficiently challenging.’ Or ‘thanks Pal, good try, but we’ve done one of those before.’
When the going gets desperate, the desperate get going. Night after night, Ray Walsh scoured eBay. Could this be it? He phoned Ken. “There’s a 1977 Morris Marina van for sale in Skegness. Weren’t Marinas rubbish?”
“Rubbish is always a good starting point,” Ken responded.
“But how rubbish is the one you’ve found? I suppose however good or bad it is, we’ve never done one – and I don’t even remember seeing a Marina van on the show and rally circuit. It’s probably rare. So that’s two boxes ticked. If the price is okay, and it needs a lot of work, go for it.”
“The three vans together offered ample scope for his talents”
