Car Restoration Projects
Seventy years in solitary
A fellow named Michael approached us at a classic car show in 2009 and said: “Do you think anybody would be interested in a 1927 Armstrong Siddeley in a sad state?”
It turned out that he was a Sydney builder who went to survey a job at an old house in the western Sydney suburb of Campsie. He had to knock the old place down, to make for some villas.
When he opened the dilapidated wooden doors of an old shed at the rear of the property, he found an old car. He asked the house owner what was to be done with it was told: “I don’t care: bury it if you want.”
Knowing that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure he thought that this piece of motoring history should be preserved. He asked the owner if he could have the car and the answer was yes.
On Michael’s invitation we went to the property and took these photos. The car had originally been bought new by the house owner’s grandfather and parked there when he’d gone off to fight in WWII in 1939. He’d died in the war and the car hadn’t been moved since.
We offered to place advertisement in a classic car magazine at the time, along with Michael’s phone number. However, by the time it appeared in the magazine the house owner had sold it without notifying Michael.
Sadly, all we could find out is it went to someone in the Bankstown area.
It would have been good to follow it through, so as to complete the story and establish if this interesting time capsule had been restored by its new owner.
Does anyone out there know what happened to this wonderful old car?
