Every month Jeremy kindly personally writes a new episode for thisisholbech.co.uk. This month we present...

Sponsered by 'A Neat Little Town' by Jeremy Satherley.

1. Episode 1 - Holbeach History
2. Episode 2 - No more leaves on the line, at Holbeach Station
3. Episode 3 - Shall We Dance - for 12 hours non-stop?
4. Episode 4 - Keeping the wheels of Holbeach turning
5. Episode 5 - The Holbeach card players

Episode 4 - Keeping the wheels of Holbeach turning

In 1900, when seedsman and farmer Tom Lane of Serpentine House in Barrington Gate brought the first  motor car to Holbeach, servicing facilities were virtually non-existent.The vehicle  was an Argyll, of Glaswegian manufacture with a single-cylinder, quarter-litre engine –a far cry from the Ford Zephyr Estates later run by his son, Eric. Not surprisingly for a make that did not survive beyond the First War, nationwide dealerships and service facilities were unheard of. The owner, soon finding that few people could cope with the car beyond the limited attempts of the local blacksmith, sold the car shortly afterwards.

But gradually Holbeach got itself up to speed with the horseless carriage, with W O Dickens of Chapel Street as one of the earliest motor engineers in the town by 1914. He repaired, sold and hired out cars and cycles, dispensed petrol in containers and charged accumulators for lamps, as the town was not to receive mains electricity until the 1930s. Meanwhile, the First World War accelerated the reliability of, and need for, motor vehicles. On the farm the occasional tractor, in a form still recognisable today and typified by the Fordson of 1917, began to make its appearance.  So when hostilities were over, it was not surprising that several young hopefuls, fresh from their apprenticeships or military mechanical experiences, set up garage businesses to cope with the new demand.

One such was the Belle Vue Motor Works in the High Street, where the HSBC Bank is now located. Established in 1920 in what had been a private school by Honnor, Bettger and Clarke, it passed after financial difficulties in 1930 to Hugh Harrison, who in turn sold on the business to Edward Lefley, a motor engineer from Kirton, in 1939. The business was to remain in the High Street for another 30 years before the removal of the railway from the town enabled Lefleys to transfer to the old station site on the corner of Station Street and Fen Road. For safety reasons alone, this must have been a welcome move on Lefley's part, for their old High Street 'jungle vine' petrol pump tubing, so arranged to swing across from petrol pumps positioned on the pavement, had on one occasion entangled with a departing customer's bumper, rupturing the pipe and spraying petrol all over the place!

Life at the garage had its other humorous moments over the years, too, not least during the period when Lefleys serviced the council effluent lorries that emptied domestic cesspits before the town went onto main drainage. Pulling an unexplained handle at random on one these trucks once led to the son and heir of the business becoming covered with more than he bargained for…

Lefley's clientele was not lacking in character. One, a wealthy farmer from Boston Road, had all the badges of his Rover 90 removed so that his choice of car should remain anonymous, while another from Spalding Road, who repeatedly dented his Bentley, embarrassed  the panel beater with the instruction to 'just knock it out with a hammer and spray over it, mate'. This vehicle was driven for so long with a slipping clutch that when the mechanism was eventually fixed, the owner was unaccustomed to the immediate response and ended up through the front wall of Barclays Bank’s sub-branch in Sutton Bridge.

West End Garage

Lefley’s move to Station Street still left another garage business on the main west to east thoroughfare through central Holbeach, that of G F Walker & Son, – now West End Garage. George Walker had set up there after the Second War in what had previously been Jack Stennett's works, from where Stennett had operated since the 20s repairing motor cycles and light cars.  Even before that, these premises had been serving the horsedrawn wheel, as Bellairs wheelwrights and coachbuilders.

A native of Fitton End near Gorefield, George Walker had previously worked for Belle Vue in the 1920s before a spell as a mechanic at Saracen's Head. In the days before extended service intervals, expensive sealed units and diagnostic tuning, he, like many motor engineers of his generation, fettled anything that was thrown at him, whether it was a motor cycle, car or tractor. George became a distinctive local character and was often to be seen at the wheel of one of his vintage Rolls-Royces, a Twenty and a 7½-litre Phantom I, which might also be towing an equally venerable Willerby caravan at weekends in impressive mechanical silence. West End's forecourt was a lot more confined than it is today, with small houses occupying valuable space at each end of it. One, serving as the garage shop, was pulled down after foundation problems were discovered in the 1960s, while the house at the opposite end, with an unusual galleried interior belonging to a Mrs Bailey, was demolished in the mid-90s.

For the last 20 years, the business has been owned by the brothers John and Paul Beeken. The workshop, built by Walker post-war, strikes a characterful note, with festoons of wheeltrims hanging from the walls, and is still adequate for today's busy throughput of cars, be they Pete Clement's cherished 1935 Austin Ten, or a visiting German Fräulein's Trabant. There are still two pumps on the forecourt, although these had to be concealed with sacking during the September 2000 petrol panic, when queues of motorists blocking Spalding Road refused to believe that the Beekens had finally run dry!

Holbeach Tyres

More recent members of the Holbeach garage trade include Holbeach Tyres, in business since March 1969 when they set up in the old laundry in Battlefields Lane –where J T Ward's Joinery Manufacturers is now situated. They soon extended into the adjoining fish-and-chip shop before further expansion moved them into what is now Bryan Thompson's offices in Boston Road – originally extensions to the Boston Road school. But from 1993 trading took on a new dimension from purpose-built premises nearer the String of Horses, on a site that in the last century had housed a wheelwrights, the Central Drainage Board, Parkers Fireplaces and finally an unsuccessful development company.  John Tinn's family business, now run by son David and daughter Suzanne, has an 11-strong team specialising in a drive-in, while-you-wait service for exhausts tyres, MOTs and general servicing, and also goes out to surrounding farms requiring replacement tyres and batteries for agricultural vehicles.

Massey O' Brien and Bettinsons

Just across the road, Massey O' Brien Cars, as it has been known since 1978, began as H B Massey and has carried on a Ford dealership that goes back to the original occupier of the premises, the ubiquitous Percy Bettinson.  Any town's history is so much the richer for its more flamboyant characters and Percy is well remembered by the older generation as someone who had aspirations to become the foremost entrepreneur in Holbeach, touring the district in his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce.

With a background in agricultural engineering sales, he first came to prominence as an ambitious employee of Levertons in Spalding, when he was sent to the USA to secure a Caterpillar franchise for the firm. What he actually returned with was a UK-wide contract that was unsuitable for Levertons to handle, and which had to be shared out with Jack Oldings in the South.

This led to Percy parting company with Levertons, but financed by a consortium of farmers and a solicitor, he came to Holbeach and set up his own foundry and agricultural engineering business in Boston Road. Other business interests included ironmongery and hardware, a building enterprise and a tailors, Fletchers, in Long Sutton. The foundry was kept busy between 1939-45 on war contract work, while another product of this period was the Bettinson potato lifter. Advertising itself in the early post-war years as 'Manufacturers of Quality Farm Equipment and Agents for all Good Farm Machinery and Massey-Harris Distributors and Ford', P B Bettinson & Co staged regular shows of farm machinery featuring the latest innovations.

In February 1953, the firm was offering single front-wheel conversions for both old and new Fordson Major tractors, while two new models of a high-speed rotary cutting machine for potato haulm destruction and topping attracted 'special interest'. The firm nearly sold its service station premises to the East Elloe Rural District Council in 1954, when the latter body, having established its own work force from 1948, was looking for somewhere to keep its service vehicles. While £8,250 was not considered an unreasonable price, the Council preferred to centralise operations around Mattimore House, so the deal did not go through. Percy Bettinson carried on with the Ford dealership at Boston Road until 1960, when H B Massey Ltd took over the garage side.

On two wheels: Gordon Woodman, Watson & Garwood, and Terry Rudd

Motor cycles, too, were catered for locally at a time when the bike, and often the sidecar combination, was still essential transport for those who could not afford a car –especially during the petrol rationing periods of the 1940s and 50s– rather than the sort of mount ridden more for pleasure today. In premises now occupied by Morriss & Haynes undertakers, BSAs and Nortons could once be heard revving up at Gordon Woodman's, who dealt in 14 other makes of famous British names now long lost to the Japanese, such as AJS, Ariel, Douglas, Francis Barnett, James, Matchless and Watsonian, with up to 18 months of 'easy' payments available. Woodman was a genuine enthusiast himself, having been Clerk of the Course at Bell End Speedway in the Thirties and secretary of the Holbeach & Spalding Motor Cycle and Light Car Club. It was all quite a contrast to his beginnings as a newspaper roundsman, when one family at Star Cross nicknamed him 'Rupert', after the famous bear featured in the copies of the Daily Express he delivered. His other line, right at the forefront of technology in 1953, was TV sales, with an exhortation to 'Instal for Coronation Year', although with prices starting at £50.8.0. (£50.40) for a Bush nine-inch table model, you had to be a wealthy royalist to do so, and expect several eager neighbours to be hovering for an invitation to watch your set.

After Gordon Woodman's death, two of his employees, Messrs Watson and Garwood, set up their own motor cycle business, initially at the back of Geoff Parker's garage but later moving into the former Wesleyan chapel in Chapel Street for a while, in the days before Hawkins' expansion. 'Wally' Garwood, incidentally, had been a prisoner-of-war under the Japanese, an ordeal from which he never fully recovered.

Spiritual successor to these businesses, just outside the town on Fen Road, is Terry Rudd Motorcycles, established 1981 as Honda agents from the start, and developed in the grounds of the detached house that stands on one of the last sweeping bends into Holbeach. It is now the longest-established business of its kind in the town, even if Terry Rudd has had to rush off occasionally in the middle of dealing with a customer,  during   his   20-year  spell as a retained fireman – a risky secondary occupation for which he was well fitted, after a decade of road racing with sidecars! The Rudd competitive spirit lives on in Terry's sons' love of motocross racing, while just across the forecourt, Lee Rudd's popular L R Signs & Designs service has been in existence since 1997.

Geoff Parker and the Electric Filling Station

Soon after coming to Holbeach in the 1920s to repair motor cycles and bicycles, Geoff Parker switched his attention to four wheels on Fleet Road shortly afterwards. His new garage was the first electric filling station in the area, at a time when petrol in rural districts was more usually bought in cans, or at best dispensed from pumps worked by hand. 

The garage on Fleet Road became a fascinating local landmark, with a proliferating Tudor theme that eventually enveloped the whole forecourt.  First evidence of this, at the beginning of the war, was the ornate workshop, built without foundations around an earlier one which was then pulled down from the inside. This creation, in spite of its practical use, was a thing of beauty, especially the interior, and later served as the venue for Mr and Mrs Charles Ingamells Patchett's golden wedding celebrations in June 1946. For many years afterwards, their commemorative gold horseshoe, left behind after the party and still with a ribbon attached, remained nailed to one of the beams above the room, where it had kept company with the inevitable reindeer's head. It was a sad day when this building, its by now sagging roof profile reminiscent of an aged dachshund, finally disappeared from the Branches Lane secene in the mid-1990s.

With a restriction on car use during the war, Geoff temporarily closed the business and went to work for Bettinsons in between his Air Training Corps and Home Guard duties. But on opening up again, more rustic embellishments appeared over 1948–50. A sturdy wooden canopy, both ornamental and practical and reminiscent of the Arts and Crafts style, was added over the pumps. This was also the era when the familiar knight statue made its appearance. Happily this distinctive effigy lives on in careful storage in Fleet, as a respected family heirloom.

Complementing the forecourt's ambience, a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost breakdown truck stood at the ready. Before its demotion to a towing vehicle, this had plied London's Park Lane many times in the 1920s as the property of a titled owner. In Geoff's hands it was worked hard for many years, pulling boxy Austins, Morrises and other errant vehicles out of dykes. On one occasion it delivered a huge iron fuel tank, dangling precariously from the hook at the rear, to the bus depot (where the Factory Shop now is), and after business hours, lifted redundant millstones from Whaplode and Kilby's Mill to serve as Geoff's garden ornaments. It was disposed of in the Sixties to an enthusiast in the North East.

Geoff continued with the garage business until 1961 when, eager to be released to his many creative pursuits, he handed everything on to his daughter and son-in-law, Jenny and Brian Paul.

A new venture at this time was the acquisition of the Fir Cottage site on the opposite side of the Branches Lane junction, to include a showroom for the Wolseley, Singer and the French Simca agencies. Popular with local car buyers in the 60s were the Wolseley 1500, Singer Gazelle –an upmarket version of the Hillman Minx– and the Simca 1301 and 1501. A stray cat adopted the Pauls on the day the first Wolseley Hornet version of the Mini arrived in the showroom, so Jenny named the animal 'Hornet' in commemoration! Another novelty at the garage, to the dismay of the competition, was the introduction of Jet low-price petrol (four gallons for £1).

However when sewerage transformations took place, closing the road for long periods and affecting trade, Brian and Jenny decided enough was enough. They kept the Elizabethan-style machine shop next to the house, but sold the rest of the concern to Burmah Petroleum, who installed Georgie Baines as manager. The business passed through several hands, including those of Mr Laws of Sycamore Farm, Mr Wing and Mr Turner. Fleet Road Garage, as it is now known, specialised in Skodas from the mid-1980s on: the reason why many Holbeach motorists drove Felicias, Fabias and Octavias while the franchise was in full swing.

Pete Coupland Autos

Quite a few others drove Mazdas, as a result of the dealership held on the Fen Road by Peter Coupland from 1976 until he retired in 2000. Peter's original intention was to be a car body repair specialist, but with so many people asking him to find them 'a good car', he felt obliged to offer vehicle sales as well, eventually extending into the paddock where, in his later years, Eric Bowser used to visit his pet cows. The planning department's resistance to his business developments, on the grounds that they could not take place amidst a residential area, was mollified when Peter showed them photos of a general dealer's next door ('Stop -Look Around- Good used Clothing, Furniture & Ornaments Bought & Sold'), C E Storey's Motorist's Shop in Barrington Gate (later Roy's, now demolished), Ernie Johnson's ex-slaughterhouse yard in Park Lane full of A40s, Minors and Renault Dauphines (in a life before Mondemont Close), Power Motors in Fleet Street (the old Retreat, then featuring old sash windows upstairs with false shutters, and now Holbeach Heating), H J Doktor's Texaco garage on Church Street (now Lynas Vokes) and Turners Motors in Barrington Gate in the present Secondhand Land premises. But the ensuing neat and tidy appearance of the Coupland premises, showed that the planners need never have worried. The buildings have since been converted to residential use, and nowadays Peter pursues a busy retirement, which includes his continued fund-raising activities and long-term treasurership of the Holbeach and East Elloe Hospital Trust*.

N E Gray & Sons

A few doors away from Peter Coupland on the Fen Road, Norman Gray opened his garage business just in time for the Coronation on 1st June 1953, as a sequel to his original partnership with haulier Ted Coward on the same site. Norman and his wife occupied the house next door (clearly dated 1952 on its frontage) for some years, and from 1959 to 1971 the firm dealt in Rootes Group cars –Hillman, Humber, Singer and Sunbeam– but after an interval of used cars only, took on its longest-running agency to date after 1978, selling and servicing Mitsubishi vehicles with a proficiency that earned N E Gray & Sons the ‘Dealer of the Year’ title in 1996, and ‘Southern Dealer of the Year’ in 2002. Aided by agricultural rationalisation, long gone are the many typical farmers of the 50s and 60s who bought Super Snipes and Gazelles, replaced by a general customer preference for four-wheel drive models, particularly the extended-cab pick-up. But beneath it all, and with David Gray currently at the helm, assisted by his wife and son, N E Gray & Sons remains very much the family business it started out as in 1953 –even down to the steel framework of the original garage, hidden in the structure of the smart showroom!

Holbeach Motor Auctions

At one time, car sales were not just confined to garages. The alternative was provided by Holbeach Motor Auctions, conducted by Franks & English, who once a fortnight held sales of venerable vehicles outside the Exchange Inn.  In 1952, with estimated prices of a 1932 Rover Ten at £60, a 1938 Morris Eight for £300, or a 1937 Vauxhall 14 at £250 as part of a typical Saturday line-up, one hoped in those pre-MOT days that the bargain would at least get you home to, say, Gedney Drove End before expiring in a steam cloud or careering brakeless into a dyke.

While on the subject of careering, one cannot help thinking what the legendary police sergeant Lown, who once ruled Holbeach law and order with a rod of iron, would have made of today’s local boy racer, emerging from Chapel Street with spinning wheels in a hot hatch thundering with bass notes and body-kitted like the modern equivalent of a medieval jousting horse. For in 1930, Lown once booked a lorry driver in Holbeach for exceeding 12 mph…