Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

There were times when I found myself with my father on the road, just the two of us. Every time, he would drive his Wolseley 12 as if it was an MG sports car. He always boasted to anyone who would listen that the Wolseley had an MG engine.  In other words, we would always be wafting along at 50 mph on the road.

There was this particular day when we it was just the two of us again, driving to Glasgow to attend a wedding. My mother and my brothers were not with us. I think the plan must have been that we’d go ahead while the rest of the family would take the train or some other form of transport.  As usual, he was driving along the road pretending he had a car with an MG engine.

What we have to know about cars, is that most of the older models had fairly good road grip because they had a stiff chassis and a lot of weight over the back wheels; on the other hand, newer monocoque cars were lighter over the back wheels and could have dangerous twitchy rear ends. Our Wolseley was an old girl, however, it didn’t take kindly to being driven so hard.

So, we were on our way to the wedding. We had hardly driven two or three miles, just somewhere along Kenyon Lane, when I heard a loud ‘clunk’ from under the bonnet. All of a sudden, the car came to a standstill. My father immediately got out and lifted up the bonnet on one side of the engine. After a cursory inspection, he muttered something like, “It’s the big end.” I had no clue what a ‘big end’ was, but it sounded pretty serious judging from the expression on my father’s face. 

Regardless, I had a lot of faith in my father and his car. So it was a big surprise to me when he surrender and admitted defeat by the ‘big end’. At the same time, I also remember not caring that much about Wolseley. Secretly, I was more concerned about still recommencing our journey to Glasgow, a trip I had actually been looking forward to. But it seems like a ‘big end failure’ was like the car having a heart attack. So there was no trip – and no visit to the wedding! Of course with a broken car, we might have had to walk the mile or two back home. 

In retrospect, today you would just rent a car or take a plane, boat, or train⁹⁶. But in the 1950s, things were not so simple. So a car breakdown was a major event that could severely disrupt your life.  

Fortunately, when I was a teenager, my friends and I owned and drove a number of old ‘bangers’. When we bought an old car, the first thing we would listen for was a ‘knocking big-end’. But as technology advanced, engines were improved by the 1980s, so cars were not always on the point of collapse a short time after they had left the factory.

⁹⁶  The ‘trains and boats and planes’ society came later in the 1960s. See song by Dionne Warwick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuBumHuouug