John and Mary have never been into the VW ‘scene’.
Their ‘75 Devon Eurovette and ‘70 Beetle are clearly not show cars, the evidence of a combined 300,000 or so miles of fun plainly visible on their sun-faded bodies.
These days, the camper is barely used, and the Beetle has taken permanent residence in the back of a garage crammed with vintage and modern bicycles.
- John with the ‘retired’ Beetle
But for decades, they played a pivotal role in the carefree life of a family who thought nothing of heading off in the Devon camper with no particular place to go.
“Often it was completely unplanned,” says John, chatting in his kitchen and occasionally interrupted by a screaming cuckoo clock. “We never booked a campsite anywhere and we didn’t know where we were going to stop. Sometimes we might be heading to Cornwall, hear a weather forecast and then go in the opposite direction.
Camping trips were chaos
“It was chaos, which is very much me. My mind is chaotic!”
John, 73, got into Volkswagens almost by accident when searching for a new car after marrying Mary in 1970.
He’d sold his first car, a slowly rusting Mini, and was getting about on pushbikes when he walked into the VW dealership in Norwich.
“I didn’t go looking for a Beetle, and tried other cars like Hillman Imps and that sort of thing,” he says. “But I just thought it was so fantastic so we bought it for £684, brand new.”
- The Beetle in its younger days
An engineer and draughtsman by trade, John was sold on the VW’s mechanics as much as anything.
“When you looked underneath the Beetle at all the mechanics, it seemed so much better than the other ones,” he explains. “If you look at how the engine was designed, they were really beautifully done.
“I always preferred the Beetle”
“They are nice and smooth to drive. They rattle away and the engine’s making no end of noise, but you put your hands on it when it’s running and you can’t feel anything – there are no vibrations, everything is balanced. Being an engineer as I was, the boxer engine seemed an ideal way to do it.
“I used to drive a lot of the firm’s cars, from Granadas down to smaller ones, but I always preferred the Beetle.”
A passionate cyclist since his teens, when he competed in time trials and mountain biking, John would usually bike to work, with the Beetle mainly used for pleasure.
- John with the Eurovette
As well as trips to Derbyshire for holidays, John would strap a canoe to the roof and head to the north Norfolk coast.
“There used to be no end of people camping and surfing at East Runton, 20 to 30 at any one time in the water,” he remembers. “I used to go surfing in my canoe, which was superb as a surfboard because you could surf continuously by paddling back through the smaller waves and riding in on the big ones. Later on, I designed and made my own sailboard, and I used to go miles on that.”
While his friends at work were buying new cars every year or so, John stuck with the Beetle, despite once dallying with a Volvo.
“We did think of getting rid of it and getting something like a Volvo, but I didn’t really want to and my daughters didn’t want to see it go either,” he says, Rachel and Becky arriving in 1973 and 1975 respectively.
Don’t sell the Beetle!
“We looked at other cars and they thought they were horrible things so I just kept it. Rachel was saying ‘no, no, you’re not going to get rid of that’.”
The Beetle plugged away until 1996, when it was partially sidelined by a six-year-old Scirocco, but not for too long.
“I fell and hurt my leg and I couldn’t really drive the Scirocco, so I drove the Beetle because there was more room for my feet,” says John. “As soon as I started driving the Beetle again I realised I liked driving it much more than the Scirocco.
“I’m not interested in driving modern cars – compared to the older cars they’ve lost all the feel.”
Back to 1984 and John and Mary, who had occasionally hired static caravans for family holidays on the Suffolk coast, started looking for something that would give them more freedom.
Hunt for a VW Type 2 camper
After passing up the chance to buy a Ford camper van, John and Mary scanned local newspaper ads for a VW Type 2.
They found one for £900 that needed a new gearbox, so headed to the Norwich VW Centre to find out the cost of such a repair.
While there they looked at a year older camper available for £2,600, but were approached by another customer.
- The well-used camper interior
“This chap came up to us and said ‘I’ve got one for sale, do you want to buy mine?’” says John. “He was emigrating to Australia and had gone to the garage to see if he could sell it. We went up the road in it, liked it and bought it for £1,700. It was better than the one in the showroom, for about £1,000 less.
“As soon as I got in this Caravette I thought ‘this is me, this is’.”
A series of magical mystery tours in the Type 2 camper
It was the start of a new era for the family, with Rachel and Becky – and Sam the border collie – treated to a series of magical mystery tours around Britain.
The first trip was to the Peak District, and John remembers coming down the Winnats Pass, “sitting right at the front of the thing, with nothing in front of me, and to start with I really felt extremely vulnerable, though I liked the visibility”.
Mary, who has been hunting for old photographs, joins us and recalls another trip north, to the Manifold Valley region in the Peaks.
“We were going up a steep hill and we had to stop to let a car coming the other way pass,” she says. “To get going again, me, the two kids and the dog all had to get out.”
“It’s definitely underpowered,” adds John, of the 1600cc air-cooled unit. “But also the roads there are extremely badly engineered. There was this switchback and I couldn’t get round because it was more or less vertical on the inside, so you had to go round on the outside.
“Having stopped for a car coming down, it was difficult to get started again, but luckily once they’d got out I got it going.”
Wherever they went, Mary would cook for four on the little gas stove – two rings and a grill.
“We could stop wherever we wanted, pick places with a lovely view, and cook our meals,” she says. “We’d sit on the front of the quay or a canal and people would come past and say ‘cor, that smells nice’.
Kids loved it the VW camper
“The kids loved it. One slept up in the roof and one across the cab until she got too big for it and we got a tent.”
- Rachel (right) and Becky with the camper in the 80s
Often, John would leave work on a Thursday or Friday evening and the family would head to the New Forest, arriving late at Forestry Commission campsites late at night.
“It was such an easy journey there, but if you went during the day it was terrible getting down there because of the M25,” he says.
“We’d camp up, then we’d be up and away in the morning before the people came to the office at 10am, so we often didn’t pay.”
Mary quickly points out that this was “not on purpose!”.
The camper has proved remarkably resilient, with no major breakdowns despite the vast miles covered, the absence of a spare wheel on the front explained by a recent flat tyre.
- A spare wheel is missing…
“The brakes used to stick sometimes, and to free them I’d waggle the steering wheel,” says John. “I was driving along locally and thought it had happened again, so I waggled the wheel about, but it was actually a flat tyre and I ripped it straight off the rim.”
The couple could only remember one unhappy incident in all their years of camping.
Blow-up dinghy stolen from right underneath the VW Type 2 camper
“We only had one bad experience,” says Mary. “We were on the most expensive campsite we’d ever been on, and had a blow-up dinghy stored underneath the camper.
“In the morning, we were in a completely different place and it had been nicked. They must have pushed us, with somehow none of us noticing. John must have left the handbrake off!”
- Mary catching the sun in an old slate quarry
Then there were the gales, sometimes so severe that tents were blown across campsites into fences.
“We’ve been camping in some really awful weather, so bad that people in tents have had to go and spend the night in the campsite toilets,” says Mary.
“We were all right in the van – it was quite cosy,” adds John, the sight of the camper’s windows and canvas pop-top lit up like a “magic lantern” very welcoming when returning from trips to the toilet block.
Once the children were grown up, the couple continued travelling around the UK on camping trips until about five years ago, since when the T2 has been mostly retired.
The future?
So what of its future, and that of the Beetle?
“Rachel likes the camper and would like to have it, but her husband doesn’t think it’s safe,” says John, a self-confessed hoarder who has a garage, three sheds and a cellar full of push bikes and spare parts.
- John with some of his pushbikes
“He doesn’t like getting rid of stuff…that’s why we’ve been married for 52 years,” laughs Mary, who is not convinced her husband is serious when he talks about potentially selling both vehicles.
“I’m more into the bikes than the cars now,” says John, “so I ought to get rid of them. I need the space…I need some more bikes!”
Mary rolls her eyes, smiles, and we nip outside for photographs with the van that provided the “perfect” family holidays.
