Plenty of people are mad about their cars. And then there is Peter Manzoni.
His is a “clinical case”, a 53-year on-off affair with a pre-war Austin hearse called Ursula, a turbulent relationship that has both maddened and delighted him, not necessarily in equal measure.
Since buying the hearse as an 18-year-old, an unusual first car to say the least, it has cost him both financially and emotionally, starring in recurring night terrors lasting nearly five decades.
In the last 19 years alone, Peter says he has thrown £130,000 at the 1934 car in repairs and restoration, more than 10 times what it’s now worth.
“It’s like a sick joke”
“It doesn’t make sense at all,” admits the grandfather-of-two. “It’s like a sick joke, the whole thing. But I can’t say I regret it – it’s just something I had to do. And flying over the Severn Bridge in it in the middle of the night with those long springs – you won’t get that experience anywhere else.”
Peter paid £20 – a week’s wages – for the Austin Six in 1965, driving it back to London from Devon, to the horror of his mother and the distaste of the neighbours.
“My mother said ‘you fool’ for buying such a thing,” he says. “Whether she was right or not remains an ongoing historical debate.
“In the early days when I was living at home people would say ‘get that thing away from here’ if I parked it near their house.”
These days, the reaction to the hearse – built from a rolling chassis bought from Austin by renowned Rolls-Royce coachbuilder Alpe & Saunders of Mayfair – is somewhat more enthusiastic.
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‘Absolutely beautiful’
“It’s quite extraordinary,” says Peter, who now lives in Woodbridge, Suffolk. “People very often stop me, particularly women, and they always say exactly the same thing – ‘that’s absolutely beautiful’.
“This never happened in its past history, only since 2017 when it was painted and had its interior done.
“I drive through Woodbridge High Street in it and all the mobile phones are flashing. On Southwold High Street the traffic actually stopped.
“It feels as if the whole of this nightmare thing and all the rest of it had a purpose – it makes so many people smile or even roar with laughter. They love it.”
And, despite everything, Peter, 71, clearly loves it too, coaxing the 84-year-old, 18hp motor up the hill on the necessarily short drive to our photoshoot location.
Following a 500-mile round trip to Wales in February, the ancient radiator became so hot that the limescale became loose in the water jacket, clogging the pipes and causing fairly rapid overheating.
It’s just another repair to be done, a little more surgery on the battle-scarred old hearse.
Born in Clapham, London, Peter was a student and earning money as a labourer for the local council when a friend who owned an Austin 10 spotted the hearse for sale while on holiday in Devon.
“He said ‘you want an Austin, well I’ve found one in a garage in Seaton’,” says Peter. “I wasn’t searching the market, it was just an excuse to go on a jaunt down to Devon in the little Austin 10 two-seater.
Lovely old car
“I never did want a hearse specifically, I just wanted this lovely old car. When I saw it I thought ‘that will do’.”
The car had been owned from new by a Mr Clapp, a filling station and garage proprietor who had rented it out to the local undertaker.
“It had been off the road for two years and it had become a bit of a nuisance and he wanted rid of it,” says Peter, who jokes that the BTA 938 registration number stands for “bodies taken away”.
Despite his mother’s misgivings and those disapproving neighbours, the hearse – at the time complete with dais, runners and drapes – proved popular with Peter’s student friends.
“They thought it was quite a laugh,” he remembers. “On one occasion we had 14 of us in the back of it.
“I used to sometimes go to college in it, or go out in it in the evenings. Friends would come round to go for hearse rides. We’d scrape 10 bob together for petrol and we would go hearse riding out to Kent or somewhere in the middle of the night at 3am. Weird!
“I also remember going to get the turkey at Christmas with my mother. We put this huge turkey in the back on the dais, like it was a dead body.”
Peter took the hearse, nicknamed Ursula by a friend (“because it’s an ‘earse”), with him to university in Southampton, where he studied English and Spanish literature.
And there this story nearly ended, with Peter selling the car to a woman who, many years later, would become his sister in law.
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The nightmares began
It was then that the nightmares began.
“As soon as I sold it I started having nightmares, and the nightmare was always that the hearse has been taken to bits and there are bits of it all over in different countries,” he says.
“I have to find all those bits and put it back together again, dealing with all sorts of dodgy people along the way. It went on and on all through my adult life.”
Peter’s peace of mind was hardly helped when the new owner’s then husband turned the car over and “completely smashed it to bits”.
“He was drunk, something came towards him, he swerved and went up a bank,” says Peter, who returned to London after graduating from university and was reunited with the crippled hearse in 1972, three years after he’d sold it.
“I had no need to buy the hearse back as a wreck – it was given to me, just about towable with wings, headlights, radiator and bonnet piled onto the dais.”
It didn’t stop the nightmares, and now Peter had a new problem – finding work and somewhere to live, eventually ending up squatting, with his girlfriend and up to 12 others, in a five-storey mid-terraced building on Winchester Road in Swiss Cottage, Camden.
Remarkably, Ursula came with him, spending 18 months bricked up in the disused downstairs shop while Peter nursed her – and the building – back to health.
“The ground floor had been an old Victorian shop front which had become dangerous, so the local authority took it out and bricked up the whole thing, leaving two doorways,” he says. “We prepared everything for a Sunday so no-one would notice, then widened one of the doorways, pushed the hearse in backwards, and bricked it up again, all in a day.
“I had to shore up the floor of the shop from the basement upwards to take the weight. While it was in there, I was able to take the front scuttle off and rebuild the ash frame. Everything had to be rebuilt because of wet rot, and I also re-covered the roof.”
Peter also took to partially renovating the building, “to keep a roof over my head”, and sent in progress reports to the chief executive of Camden Council, hoping his work would earn him a tenancy on a council flat.
Resurrected hearse
“That’s when I discovered I was a builder,” he says, turning the now-resurrected hearse into a works van when he finally got his council flat after much legal wrangling and six years on Winchester Road.
Ursula came out of the squat the same way she had gone in, and lived outside his £9-a-week council flat beneath a tarpaulin that caused “more damage getting it on and off than it protected it”.
“I remember lying under the hearse when the clutch needed replacement, in a London street in the rush hour, slowly lowering the gearbox down onto my chest not knowing if it might crush me,” he says.
“There was never a garage for it and so it was twice vandalised, and a stray cat lived in it outside the council flat.”
This was the late 1970s, and Ursula was soon stripped of her funeral paraphernalia, painted bright blue and then bright green and pressed into service carrying building materials and period fireplaces that Peter would supply and fit.
“It wasn’t looking much like a hearse by then,” he says, using the vehicle throughout the 1980s until, by 1990, the drum brakes, operated by rods and cables, had given out.
“It was really unusable, and somehow I got it down to my mother’s in Norfolk, and there it stayed for most of the ‘90s.”
And still the nightmares continued, even after the six-cylinder, 2.5-litre Austin was brought on a trailer to Peter’s new house in Suffolk in 1997.
“By then it had all come to bits,” he says. “After a couple of years, it went to Wales where I had a friend who lived in the woods and has a lot of space.
“That’s when we got down to some serious work on it. We took the engine out and had that rebuilt. I remember for the first time since I had owned it, it had a set of tyres that are the same size. It has 16in wheels, but the tyres had varied in diameter considerably, causing the car to run crabbed. I bought a set of tyres made in Poland for £40 each, and they’re marvellous. You could notice a difference driving it.”
Various restoration companies had a stab at bringing Ursula back to her former glory, with varying degrees of success.
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Sheer waste
“Some of the people who say they know what they are doing have done the most dreadful things,” he says. “Probably 40 per cent of everything I’ve spent on it in the last 20 years is sheer waste, stuff that’s had to be done again and again.”
When Peter’s mother passed away in 2014, leaving him a large part of her estate, the rate of work – and spending – accelerated.
“I had all the rest of the work done,” he says, including new carpets, drapes, a respray and a renewed oak veneer ceiling in the rear compartment.
“I’ve never really been totally happy with it, because of things not done right and always this unending greed for more money.
“But in May 2017, it was done – and the nightmares stopped. I now feel I’ve let go of a burden I’ve carried for decades, and it’s a great relief.”
There will always be more work needed on such an old car but, after £130,000, there will be no more major projects.
“The work never stops, that’s fair enough, but when the money runs out you just can’t carry on,” he says. “If I had money again there’s no limit to what I could spend. I would just want it in perfect running order and cleaned up and marvellous.
“It has been a nightmare, both figuratively and in reality, and I would advise anyone never to do such a thing.
“What I do not understand is why I was so deeply motivated for decades, struggling sometimes against almost impossible odds when I really had nothing to gain.
“I could by now have bought a modest freehold house with what it has cost me.”
With Ursula fighting fit at last, Peter opted to drive her the 500-mile round trip to Wales, in February, for a friend’s funeral rather than take the train.
The hearse started to leak
Arriving unscathed, the return journey through incessant rain was somewhat less smooth, as Peter recounted in a letter to a friend titled “I could a tale unfold would harrow up thy soul”.
Battered by rain and pounded with spray from passing lorries, the hearse started to leak around the windows, one of which was cracked on the driver’s side.
“I had to wipe away the water flooding across the dashboard with a chamois leather, periodically wringing that out through the gap above the broken window which cannot be moved,” he wrote. “The cactus plants (on the dash) got over-watered, as did my legs.”
Next, the bonnet catches started to work loose after about 80 miles.
“The bonnet began to lift up and was evidently about to fly right off. I stopped and found one of the catches had fallen off and the other three were open. This happened again after another hundred miles.”
An ageing, out-of-date sat nav extended Peter’s journey by tens of miles, while a faulty fuel gauge, which flickered from full to empty and back again, added to the drama.
“I assumed the petrol tank had sprung a leak and pulled into another service station, whereat the gauge reverted to full.
“Thereafter the fuel gauge did as it pleased, leaving me with no idea how much petrol I actually had. There were 10 litres in the petrol can so I went on until we sighed to a halt in the middle of the road. I put in the 10 litres and guessed my way to the next filling station.
“Laughing and jeering, Ursula went up to the highest speed she has ever achieved: a hair-raising 65mph.
“I wrung out the leather through the hole over the driver’s window and in so doing swerved into the next lane. A frenzied roar of horns sounded and blasted out as fists were waved.”
A most mournful death
Just five miles from home, Peter reported that “the engine died a most mournful death and there was to be no further progress”.
“Love her I do: trust her I never can, so I waited for the AA, turning on the original interior lights moulded in the form of glass roses, to make myself more visible. Of course I switched on the flashing hazard lights; of course the illuminated knob on the switch fell apart in my hand, rendering the hazard lights useless.”
Fearing a fuel issue, Peter asked the AA engineer to tow him to the next filling station.
“He had told me to keep the sling taut by using the brakes so as not to run into the back of him. I did that, which is why the brake pads over-heated to the point where smoke was pouring out of the front wheels.”
By now, Ursula’s battery was dead, as was the AA man’s battery booster, so a further recovery lorry was called for.
“When the recovery lorry arrived Ursula and I saw eye to eye again,” Peter wrote. “I knew she would feel humiliated by arriving home on a lorry so I asked the recovery man if he had a battery booster with him. Five minutes later she drove into my drive as if we’d just been down the road for a bit of shopping.
“I’m so glad I did not come by train. Next time I shall come by train.”
Peter describes the gruelling, 10-hour slog as the car’s “last grand journey”, at least under his ownership.
One day, the car that’s been both his friend and his foe will pass to his son, Jaime, and daughter, Mnemone.
“They’ve known the car since they were born and are quite enthusiastic about it,” he says. “My daughter only ever knew it when it was in poor condition and didn’t like getting in it because her clothes got dirty – it’s all right now because it has new leather.
“My son is enthusiastic about it on my behalf, he came to Southwold with me in it last year, but I don’t know he would want to take it on, and he hasn’t got a garage for it.
“It’s a very specialist burden to take on. It’s all very well being enthusiastic about it but that’s no good on its own unless you’ve really got the money to put behind it.”
But before then, Ursula will have one more job to do for her long-suffering and devoted owner.
“I intend to go to my own funeral in it,” says Peter. “I’ve made inquiries, and there’s an undertaker called Hunnaball in Ipswich who would be quite happy for me to use my own hearse. They recently did a builder on his lorry.”
It will be the final act in a motoring marriage made in heaven, and hell …
Photographs by Simon Finlay.
