Many people regard motor vehicles as mere lumps of metal used for getting from A to B, but a visit to retired garage owner Tim Pearce's house will soon disprove that. He's got the entire biography of his beloved Anzani, built in 1924 – and quite a story it is too.
Now Mr Pearce is about to sell his beloved machine at auction, he's hauled out all the old files which show how the car was built in Thames Ditton and was driven on the hot plains of India just under 90 years ago. But what the photographs and files do not show is the tale behind his own involvement with the remarkable car.
He bought it from a Miss Rigg – a truly reclusive eccentric over 50 years ago – a woman so determined never to have anything to do with the human race that she even arranged for a secret coded door knock so that her cleaner could get in to the house without her ever having to come face to face with a stranger. One day, a young Tim unwittingly copied the secret rat-a-tap-tap, only to be confronted by the surprised eccentric. But it was an accident that helped him to buy the car.
Mr Pearce told me the story as he prepared for the Anzani to be taken away for auction next month...
"Miss Rigg was a customer of my father's. She lived at Holford not far from my father's garage which was in St Audries – and he used to service another car of hers. But he'd seen the AC Anzani in her garage and had tried to buy it. She wouldn't sell.
"I didn't know anything about it until my father died in 1956 and I got lumbered with taking on the garage when I was 16. Miss Rigg would write you a letter to say her other car needed servicing and the keys would be in the usual place. You never saw her – she'd leave the car keys under the door mat. You'd take them, service the car, and put the keys back. Which is when I spotted the Anzani.
"So I wrote to her asking if she'd sell this car – and she wrote me back a stinking letter saying: 'How dare you, young man, even consider trying to buy my brother's car!' It transpired it belonged to her brother who took it to India in 1925, but he died after about a year out there. So she had it brought back, put it in the garage, and it was never driven again.
"After a month she wrote to me again apologising for the tone of the first letter and said I could have the car – providing she could have the first ride in it. In brackets she wrote: 'But you'll never get it going'.
"During that time I went round to get her other car and I knocked on her door – you had to knock in a special code, rat-tat-tat, tat-tat. She was horrified to see it was me. Anyway, it helped me get the car.
"It was the first car I ever owned – I had a bit of a wild reputation as a rally driver so my mother didn't like me driving the firm's cars. She told me I had to buy a car of my own and gave me £15. She was horrified when I came back with the AC Anzani. But I thought it was something unique – I'd never seen anything like it. However, by the time the 1960s came along I was doing serious rally driving with Mini Coopers – and this one sat in the garage for years," said Mr Pearce, who now lives just a couple of miles from his old garage at St Audries.
But while he was still a busy businessman, the Anzani was spotted by a man who'd come to retire in West Somerset and he offered to do a complete service on the vehicle for the pure joy of it. It turned out he had been head engineer for Volvo in Sweden, and Mr Pearce still has the hand-drawn diagrams he prepared during the rebuild.
"He sent me this bill," says Mr Pearce, waving an old bit of lined paper. "He only wanted a few pounds for out-of-pocket expenses like petrol. I told him I couldn't have him doing all that work for nothing – but he insisted. So I said we'd go away at my expense for a nice weekend in the AC once the summer came. It never did come for the poor chap – he died a few months later. Just another part of this car's long story."
So, why the sale now after all these long years of owning one of the most unique cars in the world?
"I've hardly driven it since I retired," shrugs Mr Pearce. "It's not good in modern traffic – for example, it's got no brakes on the front. You have to think a mile ahead all the time. It's not good for the nerves. I suppose someone might buy it to put in a collection, which would be better than it being hidden away here.
"What's it worth? £18,000 to £20,000 maybe. Not a big sum. But it is rare – there are probably only about 20 ACs left in the world now running. But this is polished aluminium and, as far as I know, the only one left with a body like that – because it corrodes. The others have been painted.
"I shall be sorry to see it go," said Mr Pearce, before adding: "However, I won't be shedding any tears."
The AC Anzani will be put up for sale by Charterhouse Auctions on Sunday, July 21, at Charterhouse Auctions in Sherborne, Dorset.
