Not many cars have the power to make grown men cry.
But that’s what happened when Mike and Kay Short took their Ford Granada to a car show in Great Yarmouth before the first lockdown.
“We were on the seafront at the Wheels festival, only we’d got there a day early when it was biker day,” says Mike, who inherited the car from his then-father-in-law in 1987. “One chap came up and was looking at the car, and he said ‘my dad had this, it’s fabulous.’
“I said to him ‘have a sit in it’, and he’s sitting there crying his eyes out because it brought back memories of his dad.”
The big Ford, a 1984 facelifted Ghia X model, gets more than its fair share of attention at shows across East Anglia, partly because so many people associate with cars of the era.
“It gets a lot of attention like that,” says Mike, 73. “We can be parked next to a Ford Model T, but the Granada will get more attention because people will say ‘I remember as a child riding in the back’, or ‘my auntie and uncle had one’.”
It means the world to Mike and Kay too, as well as their daughter Samantha, who attended many shows with them, and Mike’s children from his first marriage, Sarah, Emma and Simon.
He vividly remembers the day when he and his ex-wife Judi were summoned to visit her father, Gerry, who had the Ford as his company car before he was given it as part of a golden handshake on retirement.
“We were invited up from Weymouth to Sutton, in Surrey, one weekend,” he remembers. “We were told to come by train, not by car. We questioned it, but were told not to ask, just come. At Sunday lunch, he handed the keys across the table to us and said ‘the car’s yours’.
“Gerry had cancer and could no longer drive, so it was an emotional time.
“I still recall the drive from Sutton back down the M3 to Weymouth, sitting in this beautiful car, which had done about 22,000 miles. It was very sad because of the circumstances, and Judi’s father passed shortly afterwards.
“I was also thinking that we couldn’t even afford a wheel off this thing at the time. Judi had felt no need to drive when she was living in London, but was motivated by this to take lessons so she could drive her father’s car, which was very important to her.
“I’d first driven it when it had 10 miles on the clock – we’d gone over for dinner and he’d said ‘the new car’s downstairs, take it round the block’.”
When things didn’t work out between Mike and Judi, the car stayed with him to help when collecting the children for visits.
“All I had was a two-seater Hotpoint Escort van,” he says, joining the company as an engineer after a stint with the GPO.
For more than 35 years, the Granada has served as family car, wedding car, and now show car, its Cologne 2.8-litre V6 clocking up about 147,000 miles.
But despite the odd wobble, when Mike has toyed with the idea of selling up, the car is not going anywhere for a long time.
“I’ve blown hot and cold over the years sometimes,” he says. “‘That’s it, I’ve had enough, it’s got to go’, but I’ve been met with stiff resistance from Kay, and the kids reckon they’re going to bury me in it when I go.
“Other cars have come and gone, but that’s now part of the family.”
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Born in Putney, just south of the Thames, Mike’s father was a Thames division police officer who commanded one of the patrol boats at the start of the Boat Race.
“I remember, as a small child, waving frantically at the black and white TV screen while dad waved back from the rear of the police boat!” he says. “As the years passed, me and my friend Paul would go and meet my dad from work and we’d always manage to get half an hour out on the police boat, put the blue lights on and go for a ride in it.”
The family moved to Bexleyheath and then Feltham, with Mike settling in Weymouth with Judi and the children.
After starting off on motorbikes – including a Triumph Tiger Cub – Mike’s first car was a Reliant Robin.
Three Ford 100Es followed, plus a Fiesta S, Mini vans, Ford Escorts, two Mk2 Jaguars, a MK3 Cortina, and the Hotpoint van – before taking on the Granada.
It was through work that he met Kay, who was based at the Hotpoint office in Southampton.
“When I rang the office, there was one young lady I didn’t really get on with that much, and she didn’t like me that much,” smiles Mike. “But eventually we met outside work and here we are today.”
At their first meeting, outside the college in Salisbury, Mike rolled up in the Granada, which was painted all Strato Silver at the time.
“I think she thought pipe and slippers were turning up, and I turned up in this bog posh car,” he says. “I said ‘what cassette do you want? I’ve got George Harrison, Michael Jackson…she was expecting Mantovani and Beethoven.”
Kay refused to drive the Ford for a long time for fear of scratching or denting it.
“By now we were living together and, coming home one night, I pulled over into a layby with about two miles to go and I said ‘you take over’,” he remembers. “‘No, no, no, I don’t want to drive it.’
“I said ‘we’ll still be sitting here tomorrow morning then, won’t we?’ So she drove it and that was it – a lot of the time she drove, and I cooked!”
Mike and Kay would take Sarah, Emma and Simon on holiday in the Ford, towing a trailer tent around various sites in Devon and Dorset.
“It was only last year that the two girls said that the main memory they have of the Granada is the ‘80s music playing in the car,” says Mike. “They still play the ‘80s songs now, and so do we sometimes.”
They would also bring the car up to Norfolk to visit Kay’s parents, who lived in the bungalow next door to where the couple now live.
But before they made the move from Dorset to Norfolk, the Ford underwent a colour transformation in 2000 that confuses purists to this day.
“We were very friendly with the village garage chap – the garage was virtually opposite where we lived – and he used to let me go over there in the evenings when the garage was shut and use all the facilities,” says Mike.
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“The two front wings were doing the usual Granada thing, starting to show a little bit of rust, plus stone chips and supermarket dings.”
“Having put the new wings on and sprayed the necessary silver, we decided we’d spray the bottom half navy blue. Ford didn’t have a suitable blue, so we thumbed through numerous colour charts that Steve had, and we settled on Daihatsu navy blue.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time, and it’s proved to be a real eye-turner. We have confused people over the years, because the pre-facelift Granada had a Sapphire, which was navy blue on the top, and silver on the bottom.
“Just to confuse matters, for a period of time, I had some genuine Sapphire badges, which I stuck on the wings. So at car shows, certain purists would come up, look at it and say ‘that’s not a Sapphire’.
“One man said ‘you shouldn’t put them on there’…’well, it’s my car, I can do what I want with it.’
“In the Granada club, there’s a proportion of chaps where it’s original or nothing, but they are appreciative of the fact that there’s another Granada on the road. I like it; we like it.”
The Sapphire badges are long gone, but other small tweaks to standard include chrome wheel arch trims and windscreen wiper housings, a wooden steering wheel, and a paint-stripped grille to reveal chrome underneath.
“The Ghia X’s grille was colour-coded, but a proportion of them were all chrome underneath and it was the luck of the draw when you started to remove the paint if you had chrome or black plastic. It was advisable to take a little bit off the back to see. We were one of the lucky ones, but it doesn’t look a great deal different because it was silver anyway.”
The only part of the running gear that is not original is the three-speed auto gearbox, which packed up in a multi-storey car park in Weston-super-Mare.
“We had to limp home in second gear, but thankfully my dear friend Paul had donated a scrap Mk2 Granada,” says Mike. “The only things of any real value were the steering wheel, and the auto gearbox, which was barely a year old. I swapped the gearboxes, and that’s still the one in there now. So thank you Paul…”
In April 2002, Mike and Kay moved to east Norfolk to be close to her parents, and the Granada came too.
“We couldn’t bear to part with it, so we decided to just hang on to it and buy something more sensible as a daily car,” says Mike. “Since we moved here she’s had an easy life in the garage on the carpet, in front of the boiler, surrounded by a whole lot of spare parts from the donor car.
“Fuel was becoming a little bit too expensive for long trips in it, but there are plenty of local car shows to attend.”
The cost of fuel is obviously increasingly relevant these days, and the Ford had become ever-more thirsty over the years.
“Way back, we were thrilled to bits when 25mpg showed up on the trip computer, but down the years that trickled down to 21 or 22,” says Mike. “I’m not heavy footed at all, and we don’t charge around in it. When it went last year for its MoT it failed miserably on emissions.
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“The chap was an ex Ford mechanic and he said ‘it’s really bad, would you mind if I have a little tweak of the carb to see if I can get it through for you?’
“He did, and she sailed through and from that moment she’s been hitting 24 or 25 to the gallon. “Coming back from a show at Culford yesterday we were praying for 25 but, as we got into the drive, it stopped at 24.9.”
Once in Norfolk, the couple were introduced to fellow Ghia X owners Tony and Kate, who they introduced to the show scene and became firm friends.
When Tony sadly passed away, Mike took on his Granada but, when the auto gearbox gave up the ghost, it was sold on – minus its original stereo.
“I had a spare gearbox, but I wasn’t prepared to use it on that – I wanted to keep it for mine,” says Mike. “I did take out the cassette player, which I don’t think had ever been used, to replace mine which had stopped working. So Tony’s car lives on in ours.”
The Granada had already served as a bridesmaid’s car at Mike and Kay’s wedding and, in 2018, Mike’s eldest daughter Sarah put in a request for her grandfather’s car to ferry her to her nuptials in Dorset, heralding a six-month battle to get the car fit for such an occasion.
“I completely stripped the car down,” says Mike. “I had the back axle out, the auto box out, I changed all the seals on everything, the bearings where necessary, the driveshaft. It suddenly had to do 600 miles minimum and the last time it had done a long trip was when we came up here in 2002.
“The starter motor fell to bits when I took it off – but there’s a place in Great Yarmouth that refurbishes them, while the radiator needed recoring. It was completely redone from front to back. That was the only time, and the last time, it’s had a rebuild.
“I think I know every last nut and bolt on it.”
The Ford cruised down to Dorset happily enough, but Kay was less happy in the car on the hottest weekend of the scorching summer of 2018.
“The air conditioning has long since stopped working, because it uses the old banned refrigerant,” says Mike. “You can modify and change the seals, but for the amount of miles it does we didn’t bother. Kay was with me, but we got as far as South Mimms and she said ‘it’s no good, I can’t sit in this car anymore’, so she jumped ship to our Jaguar X-Type that Samantha was following us in. That was the bridesmaids’ car.
“The wedding day on August 6 was 90+ degrees. It was the most fabulous wedding we’ve ever been to, and I’m not just saying that because it was my daughter’s.”
After two years of intermittent Covid-19 lockdowns, Mike and Kay are enjoying getting out to shows again, preparing the car a team effort with Kay cleaning the inside and Mike polishing the bodywork.
“Maintenance has become more difficult for me over the years,” says Mike. “Just preparing it for shows and having to polish it, and getting underneath and out again presents its down problems.
“The only question mark over its future with us is my advancing age – how I’m going to be able to continue to maintain it, but we will get there. Another problem will come if they get rid of E5 fuel, because we wouldn’t change it all to accommodate E10, which means changing fuel pipes, tanks etc.”
These, however, are worries for the future. For now, Mike and Kay are enjoying life with a car that’s been with them for more than 35 years, and will stay in the family long into the future.
“If it went anywhere it might go back to John, my ex father-in-law’s younger son, who drove it with a big smile and his ‘chauffeur’s hat’ on at Sarah’s wedding and is equally fanatical about cars,” says Mike. “It was his father’s car, and he’s currently in his late 50s. If it did move anywhere it would go to him, but not for a very long time.”
