On an unseasonably warm late September afternoon, Justyn Goff and Sam Bishop are causing quite a stir among the dog walkers and boaters on the north Norfolk coast.
After all, it’s not often you get to see the world’s last remaining factory-built Volkswagen splitscreen ice cream van.
Sadly, with the festival season all-but over, there are no ice creams on sale today, but it’s enough to get a close-up look at this piece of automotive history, ordered by a German ice cream company on November 26, 1963, for a price of 9,055 Deutschmarks.
Justyn and Sam bought the van, along with The Splitscreen Ice Cream Co business, in April 2021 from TV producer Dan Dimbleby.
He had bought the van in 2009, heading off a bid from the Volkswagen Museum in Wolfsburg, before restoring and refitting it, painting it an ice creamy VW Sea Green and Pearl White, and using it at festivals across the country.
“Dan told us that he and his wife were at a festival with their Volkswagen and he thought it would be cool to have luxury scoop ice cream at festivals instead of just the Whippy kind,” says Sam. “The Whippy ice cream vans sit on their diesel engines all day long, and his idea was to build this and combine the classic VW with good quality ice cream.”
Mimi the ice cream van
He called the van Mimi after his grandmother, a name it retains today.
But the Covid lockdowns changed everything, both for Justyn and Sam, who were working as an electrician and in education respectively, and for Dan.
“Lockdown made us realise how much we enjoy spending time with each other,” says Sam, “so why are we working for other people?
“Justyn was online scrolling through businesses for sale, trying to find something we could do together.”
“My family, who worked in newspaper distribution for Robert Maxwell, all retired at a young age, and I’ve always been looking for something to benefit the family but also to give us time out,” adds Justyn, 43. “My work could be quite intense in hours, leaving the house at 5am and maybe not getting home until 8pm.”
He had just returned from France, where he had been looking at the possibility of buying a campsite (“my dream”), when he saw The Splitscreen Ice Cream Co for sale on Rightbiz.
“I’d actually seen the van up for sale on its own and I didn’t think anything of it, but then I noticed the whole business was being sold as a going concern,” he says.
Sam was immediately alerted, and she remembered buying an ice cream from them at Volksworld “way back when”.
“Justyn said ‘we need to go and have a look at this’, but it was the end of the Easter holidays and it was going to be full-on back at school,” she says.
“He just said ‘too late, we’re going, I’ve already told him’.”
First sight of Mimi
The couple made the long trek west from Holt, in north Norfolk, to Bath, and Dan opened the barn doors where the splitscreen was stored, along with a 1977 bay window ice cream van and a 1962 Cummins ice cream trailer.
“It was like ‘oh my God, we’ve got to do everything we can to have this business’,” remembers Sam.
“Dan was so reluctant to sell it, but during Covid he got to spend all summer at home with his young children, and his whole family wanted him to spend more quality time with them. That was his reason for selling – and our reason for buying was because we wanted to spend more time together.”
Driving away from Bath, Justyn sounded a note of caution.
“I was saying ‘I don’t know, it’s a lot of money’, but Sam said ‘no, we’re having it’,” he says, “which is a real role reversal because she’s always been the one who puts the brakes on and says ‘let’s just slow down, think what you’re doing’.”
“In the end, Dan sold us the dream,” says Sam. “We just knew we had to have her.”
The couple were no strangers to the Volkswagen scene, running the Dubs at the Hall event at Holt between 2011 and 2016.
And Justyn’s story goes back much further, to his childhood when his parents would take him and his brothers away on holiday in their bay window camper.
Passion for Volkswagen
“After that, we had a Beetle, which unfortunately caught fire, but it all gave me a passion for Volkswagen,” he says.
“I was desperate to get a Mk2 Golf for my first car, but unfortunately it ended up being my second car, a 1989, which came after a Fiesta XR2, which I absolutely loved.”
The couple got together in their teens, and had son Corey, now 25, before they hit 20.
“I remember we were walking round a car boot sale, and there was someone sitting there in a splittie,” says Sam. “Justyn said ‘we’re never going to be able to afford to have one of them’, and I said ‘don’t say that, maybe one day we will’.
“From that point on we saved and saved and saved every penny we could, and we bought a 1964 11-window splitscreen in the early 2000s, which we had shipped over from California.
“Unfortunately, we had a nightmare trip out in it when it broke down, and we decided it wasn’t quite right for us, so we sold it and, using the money, we got another one shipped over from California.”
Justyn had found another 11-window splitscreen for sale on The Samba website, but was contacted by a friend of a friend in California about a month before it was due to be shipped.
“He said the whole yard where they’d been stored had caught fire and he wasn’t 100 per cent certain if my van was there or if it had already been taken to the docks,” he says.
“About four weeks later a van turned up at my house but it wasn’t actually the van I’d bought. “Instead of an 11-window, it was a 13-window deluxe sitting on the back of this trailer, which is not rare exactly, but it’s more rare than an 11-window.
“So it was just ‘keep your mouth shut’, and that was the bit of luck which has spiralled into owning The Splitscreen Ice Cream Co really, because it was worth more money.”
Having spent just £3,500 on the splittie at a time of favourable exchange rates, the couple spent another £12,000 doing it up in red and white.
After a while, however, Sam found it hard to reconcile having a valuable splitscreen parked outside and convinced Justyn to sell it for a deposit to buy their first house together.
“A banker who worked in London came to look, fell in love with it, paid £24,000 for it, and drove it away that day,” recalls Sam.
“Heartbroken”
Justyn was “heartbroken” to see it go, but wasted no time in buying a T4 camper while looking around for another splitscreen.
Eventually, the couple picked up another 11-window splittie from New Mexico, and soon added a Mk1 Golf, a T4 Compass Navigator motorhome, and a Mk2 Golf for Corey, who was 18 at the time.
“We didn’t really have room to store these,” says Sam. “We didn’t have a garden, just a car park.”
Once they’d decided to buy the business, however, everything bar the 11-window splittie had to go to pay for it.
“If it wasn’t nailed down, it was sold,” says Sam, with Justyn’s mum also helping out with some funds. “Even then, we had a few weeks of living on beans on toast.”
As well as Mimi, the bay window (Minty), and the Cummins trailer, the couple acquired the company’s website, stock and freezers, a 2015 T5 and a trailer, plus a decade’s-worth of goodwill – not to mention invaluable advice from Dan.
“We’ve had a lot of support from Dan,” says Sam. “He’s really guided us and been really, really helpful.”
“We’ve taken on something that’s been built up over a long period of time,” adds Justyn. “It goes to big festivals, where you need to know what you’re doing. You can’t just turn up on your first gig there and think you can do it all.”
Westfalia ice cream van
Mimi, an SO (Special Order) 2 high roof sales flap van, was supplied with a windowless tailgate, factory-fitted Ambulance fans and bumper over-riders, and a sales flap, all of which have been retained.
First registered in Germany on January 31, 1964, it was pressed into service as an ice cream van on the streets of Westfalia.
Six decades on, it is believed to be the sole remaining original VW splitscreen ice cream van, and one of just seven SO2 Volkswagens left with a sales flap, which were used as various types of mobile shop.
Powered by a 36hp, 1200cc, air-cooled engine, it’s no surprise that the van is trailered to most festivals and events it attends, although it does travel locally under its own power.
“Its first outing with us was all the way over to Bristol Volksfest in August 2021,” says Sam. “It was absolutely chucking it down the whole way there, it chucked it down the whole weekend, and we made no money – but we loved it. We were so proud to have her out and show her off.”
Of course, festivals in the UK are as much known for their mud as their sunshine.
“In our first year, we went to the Tennessee Fields festival at Chelmsford and actually had to be towed into the festival site because of the mud,” says Justyn.
“We then got pulled out again, and we thought, ‘oh is this how it’s always going to be? This is a bit scary’,” adds Sam.
“At Nozstock 2023, near Worcester, it was beautiful getting there, but we had a downpour Saturday and another Sunday, and then it was just inches and inches of thick mud, it was awful.
“There was a slope leading down to the van, and we had to have woodchip to stop people sliding into us.
“But one thing that surprises us is the people who, when it rains, still queue for ice cream. You think ‘oh it’s raining, no-one’s going to want ice cream now, but we have queues and queues’. It makes us laugh.”
Running repairs
All this rain and mud takes its toll, as anyone who has owned a classic Volkswagen will know, and 60-year-old Mimi is no exception.
Last year the front section started to bubble up, and was repaired and resprayed at a cost of £4,000, and this autumn the left-side dog leg will undergo the same treatment.
“It’s a lot of money, but we haven’t just got a little box trailer that doesn’t matter – she does matter, and it’s important we keep her in good condition,” says Sam.
“For us, it’s not just about making money, it’s also ensuring we try to keep the van up to the standard she should be in.”
By May 2022, Sam had quit her job in education, and Justyn was also working full time on the vans from spring to early Autumn and working as an electrician between October and Christmas.
“I love it,” says Justyn, “it’s the best day job I’ve ever had.”
“The only thing I regret is that it’s ice cream and you can only really do it for six months,” adds Sam. “As much as I like time off, I’m always ready to get back into the van again come the spring.”
So what’s it like taking a truly unique ice cream van worth six figures to a festival…?
“Nerve-wracking as hell,” laughs Sam. “There are some events where I will stand there until the last person leaves the field – that’s how bad it is.
“I’m like a Rottweiler”
“I’m like a Rottweiler standing next to her at some events, petrified that someone’s going to damage her. We did have it this year at a music festival. Unfortunately a drunken lady went flying back into the van while dancing, hit the A-frame board straight into the side of the van, cracking the paint.
“We have the sign out explaining her history, but unfortunately when alcohol is involved some people don’t necessarily care.”
“That’s why the vintage festivals are better,” says Justyn. “We do an event called Twinwood and it’s 17 or 18,000 people and everyone turns up in a motorhome. Everyone dresses up in ‘40s, ‘50s or ‘60s gear, and there’s a lot of respect. They’re not there to get plastered.”
The couple have twice attended Glastonbury, but not with Mimi – the Cummins trailer has a larger ice cream tub capacity required for such a huge event.
“That first Glasto, I think I had sleepless nights for about three months because I was panicking about it, thinking I don’t know if I can do this,” says Sam. “But we’ve rocked up into Glasto and I don’t know if it’s the ley lines like some people believe, but for me it was like every worry just went: ‘we’re going to be fine’, and we were, we had a lovely time.”
As well as festivals, Mimi, Minty and the trailer attend corporate events, weddings, private parties, and television appearances.
Earlier this year, Mimi appeared on Alan Titchmarsh’s Love your Weekend TV show in a feature about vintage ice cream vans.
The future looks bright, with son Corey set to join the family business next summer, and a new addition to the fleet to be announced later next year.
“We’ll maybe try to get in a few more places, some bigger festivals, and do more local work as well,” says Justyn.
“Overall, this has been a dream for us.”
