Bradford recollections

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From: Alan Bunting, Harpenden, Herts

Bradford recollections

Dear Sir,
I read the feature about Harry Larcombe’s Jowett Bradford ice cream van (CVC, October) with particular interest. In my impecunious early motoring days of the mid-1950s I owned two second-hand Bradfords, one a plain van formerly operated by Harrow Urban District Council in Middlesex, the other a marginally more exotic so-called ‘six-light utility’. Mike Neale’s description of that model as a six-seater estate is rather hopefully optimistic, in terms both of interior space and of likely performance.
Even with say three average-weight people on board, I often had to drop down to bottom gear (in that three-speed box) to negotiate quite moderate gradients. However my Bradfords proved supremely reliable, living up to the company’s brochure slogan – ‘thrives on hard labour’.
A detail of the ice cream van variant in Mike Neale’s description which caught my eye was the higher positioning of the semaphore ‘trafficators’ rendering the offside one incapable of being given the persuasive thump often needed from inside by the driver’s fist to overcome what one might term the sluggish solenoid.
I might add that my Bradford ownership was ‘book ended’ by a 1934 Jowett Long Seven – my first car at age 17 – and subsequently by a 1949 Javelin saloon.
ALAN BUNTING