1974 VW Bay Window Westfalia camper a life-changer for Gary

Growing up in Barking, Gary Costello was naturally drawn to Fords, the local hero built nearby at Dagenham.

They were the aspiration of many an east London teenager, and he was no different, buying an Escort and a Cortina before he could legally drive.

“I was very much a Ford man, and we all aspired to own an Escort or a Capri,” he says, owning an ever-changing roster of cars in his late teens and early 20s.

“You hardly saw me in the same car twice. I was always into cars and got bored quickly, so I was always looking to change.”

But it’s five Volkswagens, and not Fords, that are now arranged on Gary’s lawn for our photoshoot.

Eventful early days

Before we delve into how and why everything changed, it’s worth looking at his early forays in motoring, which were somewhat eventful.

After leaving school and going to work in a bank, at 16 he had saved up enough money to buy a Mk1 Ford Escort, which was regularly ‘borrowed’ by his dad and brother.

Gary would often accompany his older brother and his friends in the car when they went to play football in Dagenham, but one such trip was to lead to its downfall.

“I hated football but, as he was taking my car, I was going too!” he says. “I couldn’t drive it on the road but I could sit and polish the car and, after the game, there was a dirt track that went round to the changing rooms where I could drive it, pick them up and drive back to the car park.

“I watched a whole football game, which I hated, just so I could drive the car 400 yards.”

After one game, at the changing rooms, Mark said to him ‘you drive it back to the car park, we’ll walk across’.

“Eager to show what a good driver I was and how fast I could get to the carpark, I lost control, hit a bump and flipped it from corner to corner and came back up the right way,” says Gary.

“I jumped out of the car and was screaming at my brother, who looked over and thought, as the car was facing in the opposite direction, ‘he’s spun the car round and frightened himself’.

‘You’ve written it off!’

“But when he walked over and looked at it, he said ‘oh my god, you’ve written it off!’

“I was getting hysterical and, not knowing what to do, started running. Mark ran after me and rugby tackled me to the ground, and shouted ‘pull yourself together’.

“It was a real shock because if Mark had got in the car with him, he’d have probably been seriously injured, because the roof on the passenger side was caved in and a metal support bar was poking into the seat.

“The crazy thing was, we all got back in the car and drove home. It didn’t have any windows in it and was smashed to bits. How we never got pulled over by the police was beyond me.

“We got some really funny looks from the other road users and everyone was giving us a wide berth.”

Gary sold the car off in bits and managed to get his money back on the purchase price, only to get a knock on the door about a month later.

“We had just got rid of the shell when the police turned up and said ‘do you own this car?’ It turns out I’d bought a stolen car. Had I not written it off, they would have taken the car, but because I’d sold it all there was nothing they could do.”

Next, an Mk1 Cortina

Next came the Mk1 Cortina, bought a few weeks before his 17th birthday.

“It was parked in a friend’s garage in Barking and at 11pm on June 11 – my birthday was the 12th – I walked up there with a full driver to get my car,” says Gary. “At 11.59pm I was starting it up and on the stroke of midnight I was out of there and on the road. I think I was out half the night – well, until I’d used all the petrol “

He had his first driving lesson the next day, and passed his test exactly one month later, his love of cars only growing as time went on.

“Me and my brothers were all into cars and still are,” he says. “I remember Mark getting a black Ford Capri 3-litre JPS. He couldn’t afford the insurance so my dad insured it in his name with any driver on the condition that if his younger, 18-year-old brother wanted to use it, he could,” remembers Gary.

“I used to sit up waiting for my brother to get home. He used to walk in the door, drop the keys into my waiting hand and then I’d be off for as long as my few quid of petrol money lasted, which was never long enough.

“We used to spend all day cleaning our cars back then to take them out on a Saturday night. I remember one Saturday borrowing the wheels and spotlights from my brother’s car and turning my basic 1.3 Escort into something resembling a road rally car, just to cruise down Southend seafront and stop at the all-night burger joint on the way home, then spending all day Sunday putting them back onto my brother’s car.”

Gary found life in a bank “boring as hell”, and started working weekends at a hairdressing salon, eventually working there full time.

“The guy was very good to me when I was doing Fridays and Saturdays, but when I was there full time he became a complete and utter knob,” laughs Gary. “So I told him where he could stick his hairdressing job and left. I was unemployed, much to my parents’ horror.

“My friend’s mum then asked me if I could cut her hair and I said ‘don’t be stupid, how can I cut your hair, I’ve done six weeks in a salon?’. ‘I cut it myself’, she said, ‘you cutting it’s got to be better’.” So he did…

Buying a VW camper nicknamed ‘The Colonel’

The private work grew, and it was around this time that Gary and his friend Louis bought a VW camper nicknamed ‘The Colonel’, with plans of touring Europe and seeing the world.

But then he got a job at a salon through the girl he was seeing at the time, soon moved into management and, ultimately, he bought the salon.

“The camper disappeared with Louis, along with his dreams, and I’ve never seen either to this day,” he says, the following years filled with running a new business and getting better cars as more funds were available, eventually getting a new XR3i Convertible, while also playing with a string of Minis when time allowed.

A shared love of VWs

He didn’t see the inside of a VW again until 1999, a year after he met his partner Graham, the couple sharing a love of cars.

Graham’s mum had owned a Beetle, Gary had (briefly) owned a camper, and they bonded over their shared interest in Volkswagens, and decided to buy a 1974 Bay Window Westfalia camper – nicknamed Basil.

But it goes much deeper than that for Gary, right to the heart of self-acceptance and the inner struggles of coming out as gay in the 1990s.

“I didn’t even know myself until I was in my mid-20s, and it was quite a shock,” says Gary, now 57. “I really struggled coming to terms with it and I still do have my moments.

“When I was growing up, people’s views were very different, but even today, now that attitudes have changed so much, I still struggle sometimes with myself.

“When I met Graham, he was keen for us to do things as a couple, but I felt uncomfortable and had issues with that.

“I saw the camper van as a way I could be with my partner without the judgement of others and blend in. As it turned out, the VW world was a very accepting place and, looking back, the world probably was too but I just never saw it.”

Having bought Basil for about £2,000 after spotting an advert in Loot, they drove to Gary’s parents’ house to clean ready for its first trip.

The very next day they went to the Cotswolds, where tourist information directed them to a ‘campsite’ that was basically someone’s back garden.

“Laughing so much”

“We were just laughing so much – we could have stayed at my mum’s and done that,” says Gary. “We’d packed the van with alcohol and food and everything you could possibly need, bar a saucepan. All the shops were shut and although the lady at the house offered to lend us one, we went to the pub instead and laughed all the way.

“That night we sat in the van, and thought it was amazing, fantastic – it had a little gas fire in it and it was a very cozy real home from home.

“We went to bed, shut all the windows and pulled the pop-top down, and woke up the next morning soaking wet. ‘Oh no, it leaks!’ The next day we drove to the next village, a bit downhearted because we thought our camper van leaks and we’d bought a dud!

“We then drove to this little town in the middle of nowhere that had one shop with a sub post office in it, and the owner was a real VW camper enthusiast, selling all sorts of spares and camping accessories.

“We ended up buying all these bits off him and were telling him the story of the leak, and he just started laughing. ‘What are you laughing at?’

“He said ‘you don’t shut them up, they need to breathe, you’ve basically shut it all up and it’s like breathing into a plastic bag – leave the pop top up, crack the windows and it’ll be fine’.

“We were so relieved that our van was a good one after all.”

“Real VW nuts”

They started going to Volkswagen shows, learning more about the cars, and became “real VW nuts”.

Part of the learning curve, of course, is breaking down, and Basil is now on its third engine since they bought it.

“I blew the first one coming back from Scotland doing about 90mph when a conrod went straight through the case – granted, it was downhill on the M1 with a tail wind but the speedo still read 90,” says Gary, “and the second one we melted in Wales towing a caravan.

“We’ve learned our lesson engine-wise – it’s now got a speed restrictor on it so it can’t go above 70mph!”

The camper came with a full Westfalia interior, with “more cupboards than you can shake a stick at”, but after the second engine change they decided to strip the interior to create more space.

“We didn’t use half the cupboards, and they were a pain in the butt,” Gary explains. “Once you pulled the bed out there was such little room to get changed. We only needed one cupboard for storage, so we took all the others out, cut off the bulkhead behind the passenger seat and then made that swivel so it could face the other way when parked up, giving us much more room.”

The old interior was sold for £800 to pay for the refit, while the bodywork also received some attention, which would later prove questionable to say the least.

The VW camper had undergone dodgy repairs

Some years later, when some little bits of rust reappeared, Gary took the camper to a repairer.

“He started picking at it and said ‘you’d better come down and have a look at this’,” he says. “The first restorer had pushed in the old metal and put new metal over the top. Although the van looked immaculate and the outside metal was good, it had been rusting from the inside in.

“The whole six inches at the bottom of the van that we’d had done some years previously all had to come off, and he had to cut into the floors, the outriggers and everything. It all came to £10,000!”

“If I’d have known it was that rotten, I’d have got rid of it. So now you’ve got to bury me in it.”

He admits to a love-hate relationship with the van that has carried him and Graham all over the UK, from the Outer Hebrides to Cornwall, but can’t see himself ever being able to part with it.

“There are times when I’d gladly set the thing alight, when it breaks down, but there are other times when you look at it and go all a bit gooey and a bit ‘aaah’,” he says.

“Most of my family have slept in it, or been in it, or had dinner from it. We used to take my cousin’s kids on holiday every year. The van is full of memories for Graham and I.

“It still gives me a thrill to drive Basil and then sleep in him or make your dinner in him. The fact that it’s nearly 50 years old now, you can drive all the way to Cornwall in him, have your dinner and sleep the night.”

Enter the white Golf GTi cabriolet

After the camper, next came the white Golf GTi cabriolet, spotted for sale in a Tesco car park when the couple were food shopping for a barbecue.

“Graham’s aunt owned one and he always used to talk about it, and it was very cheap so we had to take a look,” says Gary, the car becoming Graham’s daily driver for several years until back problems made it difficult to use a manual gearbox on his daily commute.

A handful of Beetles have come and gone, starting with a 1303 bought because Gary wanted something to drive when the camper was garaged over winter.

“Unless they’re garaged you can watch them rust away in front of you, but I used to get a little bit sad when it went away,” he says.

“Come October, November, we’d do our last trip out in the van and you knew it wasn’t going to come out until after the last of the salt had gone off the road, in March, April time. I wanted something to use all year round.

“We were at a show and Graham was reminiscing about how his mum’s Beetle was so nice and he used to drive it when he first started driving, and how he wished they’d kept it.

“I then saw this 1303 for sale and started talking to this guy. He was telling me how he bought it for his son as a project and they’d done it up through his son’s later childhood.

“His son wasn’t interested in driving the car and wasn’t interested in VWs. He’d grown up and moved out and it was sitting in the garage. They called the car Lego, because they were always taking it to bits.

“But it was immaculate. We decided we had to have it. After driving it home we got all precious about it. We bought it to use every day but it was in such good condition we didn’t want to ruin it and it became ‘oh, it’s raining, can’t take it out today or we can’t park it there…

Not getting precious over a 1302 Beetle

“So then I bought a second Beetle, a 1302, in really good original condition and I thought ‘right, that one we are not getting precious over, we are just going to drive it’, and I did, summer, winter, whatever.

“I really got to like it, I liked the flat windscreen rather than the curved one of the 1303, and ended up selling the 1303 to a good friend.”

By this time, Graham had moved on to a new automatic Beetle Cabriolet (“he loved the retro styling”) as he needed something more reliable for his commute to London.

“This got me thinking ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have an old original Beetle cabriolet’, so I started looking,” says Gary.

Scouring Auto Trader in 2008, he found a rare 1302 Karmann cabriolet automatic in Wimbledon. After two abortive trips to view the car that simply wasn’t there when he visited, he gave up, thinking it wasn’t to be.

But a few months later, the owner phoned up out of the blue and said he’d bring it over.

“When he arrived it broke down, so I used that to my advantage in the bargaining to get the price down,” he says. “One of these in an automatic, which meant Graham could drive it too, was like hen’s teeth so I didn’t want to miss the opportunity of owning one.”

It did, however, need work, including a new hood, a respray in its original Gemini blue, followed in time by a reconditioned engine and a reconditioned gearbox.

“The gearbox was split up and went off in about five different directions, because no-one knew how the auto boxes worked,” says Gary, who bought another Beetle cabrio, a 1303, from a car restorer who was emigrating to Australia.

“It was just too good a deal to be missed. The idea was to sell it on and make a profit, but I ended up keeping it for several years and my brother Ian would drive it to events.

Kitting out the Beetle with a Jaguar interior

“One of the great things about it was its Jaguar interior. It was so comfortable and, as the standard Beetle interior is not that comfortable, I ended up putting a fully electric Jag interior from an XJS in the 1302, which meant welding plates onto the Beetle seat frame to make them fit.”

In 2013 another convertible was to join the stable of VWs, a red Golf Clipper automatic found on eBay – Gary is never far from an eBay purchase.

The main attraction was that Haynes had rebuilt the car 10 years earlier for a Golf Mk1 restoration manual, and also upgraded it in the process – there was a fully documented rebuild in the book, with the car photographed throughout.

It would be fully sorted, right? Not quite.

“They took a Clipper convertible, put a GTi engine in it, added power steering, an electric power roof, and put a leather interior in. It was ticking a lot of boxes for me,” says Gary.

“I’m thinking ‘it’ll almost be like buying a new car, or at least a 10-year-old car, because they’ve taken that apart and put it back together’.

“It turned out, on winning the bid, that the car was in France not the UK and I had to get it couriered. To my surprise, it wasn’t that expensive, and thinking I was covered by eBay rules I went ahead with the purchase only to later learn that eBay had recently changed their guarantees on vehicle sales.

“When the Golf arrived I was so disappointed. It had not been well looked after since its rebuild and some of the rebuild was questionable too.

“There were so many things wrong with it, so many things that weren’t quite right. The front panel had rusted through, the body panels were different shades of red, which resulted in a full respray, and the hood had seen better days and was eventually replaced.

“I had just got it to where I was happy and the gearbox gave up on me. By this time, I was so invested I had to get it done.

“It’s still got a few engine issues, but it runs OK now and is a very usable classic. I love driving it.”

Rarely used ’66 split screen

The most recent addition is the ‘66 split screen, bought a couple of years ago and yet to see much action.

“My brother Ian has always wanted one for as long as I can remember, and I blame him for that purchase,” says Gary. “I much prefer my Bay to drive, so Ian needs to step up and start using it as I can’t drive them all!”

There are other cars in Gary and Graham’s garages and carports – an MGF and an MG TF, a Mini cabriolet, a dusty VW Trekker, and two small Japanese SUVs, not to forget their “escape pod, Jellybean”, a two-seat Smart car.

“I was a little shocked when 6ft 4in Graham wanted to buy a Smart car, but soon grew to love its design and economy and nippiness – it’s the only car we have both got a speeding ticket in,” laughs Gary.

This stable of cars is because no one car does everything they’d like it to do.

“We would like a four-wheel drive convertible sports car camper that does 60 to the gallon,” he smiles. “There isn’t a car out there that will do everything, and we just really like getting in different vehicles as the wind takes us, and I like the older vehicles because you’ve got to drive them.

“I think it makes you a better driver. In modern cars you’re in a cellular pod, people feel safe and drive them like idiots, as if they are indestructible, diving about and switching lanes relying on their brakes and acceleration.

“In an older car you can’t do that, you have to check your mirrors (that are not very good), and think ‘have I got enough power, or enough time to brake?’ That, in turn, makes you a better driver in your modern car.”

Of all the cars, which one would Gary keep if someone held a gun to his head?

“You’d have to shoot me,” he laughs. “I’ve tried to answer that a 1,000 times myself, because you can’t keep them forever. As you get older, you’re not going to use them – driving to Cornwall in the camper is tiring! But how do you get rid of them, with all the memories?”

We strongly suspect that Basil, the camper that started it all, is going nowhere any time soon…