Lorna Mahoney will forever be grateful to her great uncle, Charlie Brown, whose Mini became her first car. “I always loved Minis when I was young and I really wanted my first car to be a Mini,” she recalls. Charlie had owned the maroon 1974 Mini 1000 saloon from new: “He was getting older and wasn’t driving and we decided that it would be ideal for my first car. I remember the first time I saw it in a garage and realised how lovely it was.”
It was in 1987 that the Mini was bought from Uncle Charlie by Lorna and soon became such an important part of her life: “I used the car so much – long journeys, camping trips, with children in car seats in the back, it did everything. I used to have a job cleaning vans and I would put a set of stepladders across
