I own a 1940s police car - it was found in a scrapyard - video Dailymotion

Lancashire Post

Meet a 1940s re-enactor who owns an authentic police car from the era - despite the vehicle once being found abandoned for scrap.  Jim Stott displayed his war-time vehicle at the Blackburn VE80 festival at Witton Park, and video journalist Lucinda Herbert went to learn more.  This segment is taken from Episode 4 of Motor Mania. Watch the full episode here https://www.shotstv.com/watch/vod/52918978

Transcript

00:00It was a police car with Northamptonshire Police. It was found in a scrapyard in around 1970,

00:121971 with a seized engine. I'm a reenactor, we reenact 1940s, used to do Royal Navy a lot.

00:22I got into doing the police, because a friend of mine did police and he said it's good fun,

00:30and it is good fun with the kids and that. I'm no longer married, we split up after 25 years,

00:38so I have no financial manager. So we're doing police, I thought, I want the car to go with it.

00:48So I hunted high and low, high and low, and I finally found a police car.

00:59I bought it, I spent several thousand pounds more on it, to get it into the condition that it's in.

01:07In fact I just spent over two thousand pounds getting the seats free upholstered.

01:14There you go. I no longer have a financial manager telling me what I can spend and what I can't.

01:20The person that found it spent two years putting it back on the road, finding an engine for it,

01:26putting it back on the road.

01:28How many owners it's had since I found it, I don't know. I bought it off a gentleman in Garstein.

01:41Since then, like I said, I've done several jobs on it, including getting it resprayed and everything.

01:49You've got it to do. Big boys toys. Underneath it's like a new car. It's 80 odd years old and it's like a new car underneath.

02:02Well it's just the police car of the era, 1940s. It's a 1938 car. It was police car of the era.

02:11You've got to remember in those days, there were very few cars around. Most policemen were on foot.

02:19If you were lucky, you had a bike you took. There were no hot pursuit. There were no motorways.

02:28You had cobbled streets and gravel roads. The fastest thing you were chasing would probably be somebody on a push bike.

02:38So this would be something that the inspector would be driving around in or somebody like that.

02:45I started reenacting in 2004. We went across to Normandy. I had a kit car at the time, like a Lotus 7.

02:56It was the 60th anniversary of D-Day. And then my son, my daughter, my son-in-law and everybody started getting involved.

03:08And we started doing Royal Navy. In fact, we used to put displays on for World War II Royal Navy.

03:16We had about, oh, 20 odd uniforms between us, different uniforms.

03:21Met a lot of veterans. I spent a lot of emotional times with the veterans.

I own a 1940s police car - it was found in a scrapyard

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