British Historic Specials Register

Latest change: 22 March, 1998.
Created: October, 1996

Introduction

From their own material:

Back in 1960 an inaugural meeting of the Fairthorpe Sports Car Club was held in the Beaconsfield area and 7 people attended the first meeting. Such is the character of the club that at least two of the original members are still with us to this day, Barry Gibbs the Hon. Secretary and John Allan the Club's Chairman. Originally the club existed purely for owners of the Fairthorpe marque. Over the years the club started adding further marques - Turner Cars the first. A few years elapsed and the work of Rochdale Motor Panels began making appearances - a register was quickly formed. This remained the base of the club until Dave Malin's began slowly but surely to build a Tornado register and within a few years this was followed by the Ashley register, the Falcon , the E.B. and now the Historic Specials Register (HSR)
HSR caters for marques without sufficient numbers to support a register of their own. It is hoped that given time many will do so. The holders of the Historic Specials Register are:

Richard Disbrow
16 The Close
Blandford Forum
Dorset DT11 7HA
Tel/Fax: +44-1258-454-879

and Bob Daniels. Such cars as Watling, Autobodies, Super Two, Convair, Markham-Peasey, Speedex Martin, Jeffrey, Nickri, Watford, RGS, Shirley, AKS, Microplas and one offs.

I have a report about their meeting in 1996 at the Cotswold Wildlife Park. There was a turnout of over 45 vehicles.

The Honoured marque was Ashley and the following were represented:
2 Ashley 1172's, Alexis GT/Rochdale, Alexis trials car, AWR Special, 5 Bucklers, Dellow, 2 EB60's, 2.5 Fairthorpes, Falcon Bermuda, Falcon Carribean, The 1172 Gregory, the V8 Gregory, Howard Special, Hamblin Deluxe, 3 Rochdale GT's and 5 Olyimpics, Siva, 3 Super Two's, 1 Tornado Tempest, 1 Tornado Talisman, 4 Turners, TWM, 2 Watford Cheetahs, several Specials.

Now let's see some pictures and details about some of the attending cars. Most captions were taken from Chris Rees' excellent book, which has been mentioned at the British Specialty Cars opening page. Reproduced with permission.
A home-built one-off from the show Rear view

The cockpit and the back of another home-built car.
A hill-climb racer based on a Ford side-valve chassis

Austin 7 Special racer

Excell or TWM
These shells seem to be identical. Both were made in the '50s, based on Ford or Austin A35.

Gregory V8

© and Copy, 1996-1998: