Gary Griffin studies the owner's manual By Geoff Ellis
THE opening bid was a thousand bucks. Gary Griffin offered two. The first bidder came back with three thousand. Gary looked at the young farmer. “I’ve got deep pockets, mate.” He went to four. As the auctioneer paused for breath, his opponent looked at the layer of diesel and dirt on the Jag’s metalwork. He kept his hand down.
Gary Griffin has a shed full of cars he never set out to buy; they just came his way and impulse took over. All his cars start, when the batteries are charged, and Gary has resisted the urge to restore them.
THE opening bid was a thousand bucks. Gary Griffin offered two. The first bidder came back with three thousand. Gary looked at the young farmer. “I’ve got deep pockets, mate.” He went to four. As the auctioneer paused for breath, his opponent looked at the layer of diesel and dirt on the Jag’s metalwork. He kept his hand down.
Gary Griffin has a shed full of cars he never set out to buy; they just came his way and impulse took over. All his cars start, when the batteries are charged, and Gary has resisted the urge to restore them.
“It’s too much. That bumper bar would cost $800 to re-chrome. Then the grille. Then you’d have to respray the body. And then you have to worry about stone chips.” Gary keeps his cars running, he drives them; his cars are for the road, not museums or investment bankers.
Inside the shed the art deco hood ornament of a `39 Packard sparkles in a shaft of light. Packard was the aristocrat of American automobiles in the thirties and the Spirit of Speed was their crowning glory. This car came into the shed with the original owner’s manual and a separate manual for the two-speed differential.
Gary squeezes past the Packard to point at the Roller, as Arthur Daley would call it. It used to belong to John Laws. You can tell it was from Sydney, it’s the Rolls Royce with a tow bar.
And then there’s the Jag. After carefully opening the driver’s door, he slides into a leather bucket seat. The walnut dash houses rows of gauges and switches laid out like an old fighter plane. It fires up first go with that distinctive low bellow. The motor idles till Gary blips the throttle. You can feel Le Mans as the revs rise and fall. The badge on the boot reads 3.4 S.
The sound and the aroma is worth way more than the $4000 that Gary handed over at that clearing sale. The farmer was probably better off with a John Deere and Gary was surprised at how well preserved the Jaguar was, once he got it home and wiped off the farm grime.
There’s a fourth car in the shed but it’s heading to a new, interstate, owner once the borders are open again.
Walking up to the house, Gary tells the stories behind the cars, where they were, the deals that were done and the one that got away. That was a blue XJS convertible.
In the lounge room he holds out a Humber Snipe bonnet ornament. He passes on some of the RR lore, from the era when you went to a Rolls Royce dealer to buy a chassis then ordered the rest of the car to suit your need. Two doors, four doors, open top, closed, a brougham?
He pulls out a collection of newspaper pages from 1936. He found them under the lino of a house in Port Albert, salvaged the best ones and had them laminated. One page has an advert that proudly shows the Hindenburg flying above an ocean liner as testament to Veedol Oil. This was two weeks before that doomed Zeppelin burst into flames.
There are pictures of the fist Anzac Day held at the newly finished Melbourne War Memorial and another page includes a road test and an advertisement for the same model Packard that sits in the shed. The copy talks about love at first sight and a boy who longs to own a Packard when he grows up.
Gary’s cars are going to remain original while he’s their custodian. After that? “When I’m gone, someone will probably chop it into a rat rod. People want convertibles these days.”
He tells me his ’39 escaped a worse fate. When World War two started no one was buying new cars so a lot of ’39 models, even Packards, were scrapped for the war effort. It could have ended up a boat anchor.
He reckons he has all the cars he needs. Though he is planning a road trip to Drouin with a mate to ‘look’ at a Vanden Plas. A V-12, of course.